This article analyses and compares the careers of a group of socialist militants who were active in several regions of Brazil in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It underscores their similarities and differences with a view to understanding the various ways of being a socialist in that context. This includes examining their wide-ranging activities, the main ideas they upheld, and their role in the development of Brazilian labour laws in the 1930s and 1940s.1

This article argues that World War II played a very important, and generally underestimated role in the rise of Brazilian populism. It starts with an overview of recent trends in the debates on the use of the concept of populism in Brazil, with particular attention to works that stress the years from 1941 to 1945 as a critical juncture. Secondly, it explores the connections between war effort, changes in labor regulations, and workers’ political participation in different contexts. Finally, it summarizes how the economic and social effects produced by the involvement of Brazil in the War led to profound and accelerated changes in the nature of the regime of Getúlio Vargas and in the role of workers in Brazilian politics.

This article aims to analyze residents’ associations organized around specific working-class neighborhoods in São Paulo between the end of World War II and the Brazilian Military coup in 1964. It examines, in particular, the connections between neighborhood associations and labor union struggles. Based on the strong social networks and informal relationships created by workers, organizations like the Neighborhood Friends Societies (Sociedades Amigos de Bairro) were fundamental to the construction of political communities that had a powerful impact on electoral processes and on the formation of the state at the local level. Likewise, this article will show how, during that period, identities at the neighborhood level frequently developed in dialogue with processes of class formation, staking claim to a language of rights associated with the condition of being a worker and, simultaneously, a citizen. Finally, the piece suggests how analyses with such a localized scope, like those focused on specific working-class neighborhoods can intervene in debates concerning Global Labor History.

Drawing from case file records generated in rural labour courts in Brazil’s north-eastern state of Pernambuco between 1965 and 1982, this paper demonstrates how these forums reified class-based exploitation, even as they purportedly protected workers’ rights. The paper focuses on two districts in the state’s sugarcane-growing region, both of which reveal a clear pattern of inferior treatment for rural as opposed to non-rural workers. Interpreting the evidence as a function of long-term patterns of social and economic relations in the region, the paper also sets this case in a larger context of rural labour history around the world.

This article analyzes the AFL-CIO’s anticommunist international policy in the period just before and after the overthrow of democratic regimes in Brazil (1964) and Argentina (1966–1976). It focuses on the activities of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a labor organization closely associated with US foreign policy interests. By highlighting similarities, differences, and direct connections between US labor activities in these two South American countries, I argue that Brazil’s 1964 coup and subsequent dictatorship were key experiences for US trade unionists as they formulated an AFL-CIO labor policy for Argentina and the rest of the Southern Cone.