Law and justice are studied in this book from the perspective of social and global history. The
main focus of Workers Before the Tribunal is to overcome traditional binary oppositions between
corporativist and contratualist models of labor relations the former representing a view in
which the working class would have more autonomy in struggling for better labor conditions the
latter meaning the protagonism of the State in promoting labor rights. Teixeira da Silva
presents three main arguments. First he shows that the Brazilian labor justice system created
during the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship (1930-1945) although inspired by Mussolini's legal
order in Italy is very different from the Fascist Magistratura del Lavoro. Second in his
comparative analysis with other national cases such as the United States France Germany and
Australia the author argues that there was a large circulation of ideas and practices
resulting in a more complex dynamic of appropriation of international ideas on labor rights and
institutions in Brazil. Third Teixeira da Silva demonstrates that litigation in labor courts
was one strategy of the working-class movement in Brazil together with strikes and other means
of confrontation. Therefore he questions historiographical and political approaches that see
labor justice as a weak substitute for class action. The jurisdictionalization of labor
relations became a constitutive element in the making of the Brazilian working class. The book
is anchored in the research of hundreds of labor litigation cases during the dramatic months
preceding the 1964 civil-military coup d'état that inaugurated a quarter century of dictatorial
rule in Brazil.
