Brazilian Health Care reform and trade unionism in health: what perspectives are there in the current context?

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze the dilemmas in the relationship between the construction of the Unified Health System (SUS) and the trade union movement in order to point out perspectives of struggles in the context of freezing public spending (provided for in Constitutional Amendment 95, approved in 2016) that impact on the SUS, and the recent labor reform approved by Michel Temer’s government in 2017. Therefore, we revisit the academic literature on Brazilian trade unionism and the Brazilian Health Reform Movement (MRSB), using analyses involving the fields of collective health, occupational health, and sociology of work in order to deepen the discussions on the transformations in the world of work and unionism in the national scenario, correlating it with the reality of health workers in the SUS. Thus, it points to some possibilities of articulation and organization of union action that involves the various social actors of the MRSB and health
workers unions in the SUS, going from the conception of ‘new social unionism’ to the organization in the workplace, and even the need to build struggles beyond the health sector in order to face the challenges in this current conjuncture unfavorable to the ‘working-class’.