Corporatism, regulated citizenship and the ‘phantom of the absent class’: historiographical notes around of the Brazilian sanitary reform

Abstract

The late 1970s and 1980s were a key moment of emergence of a thriving labour movement in Brazil, known as New Syndicalism, which would play an important role in the redemocratization process. During this same period, the so-called Health Reform emerged, laying the foundations for a vigorous transformation of the health system in Brazil, establishing the recognition of health as a universal right, with free and equal public access – consolidating itself by the establishment of the SUS in the 1988 Constitution. However, the literature in the health field has quite consensually pointed to the incipient and fragile basis of support for the health reform movement and the SUS among labour unions, which would have largely mobilized themselves to obtain private health plans and insurance. In this article, we seek to reflect on this issues in the light of the most recent literature on the world of work, which has proposed significant re-readings of the consecrated interpretations of corporatist unionism, as well as of social arrangements configured as segmented and regulated, and therefore contrary to propositions of a more universalist content.