Embratel em greve, 1987: a família que derrotou a Globo, o Bradesco e o governo

Abstract

1987, October 22. About three thousand Embratel workers, gathered in an assembly in front of the company's headquarters in downtown Rio de Janeiro, paralyze President Vargas Avenue and decide to go on a national strike. Since May 1978 Brazil had once again experienced thousands of strikes. But this one was extremely original and different in its characteristics from the others. Embratel, then a mixed economy company linked to the Ministry of Communications (MCom), legally held the monopoly of all long-distance and international telecommunications services. This strike, which became known as the VICOM Strike and was baptized by Veja magazine, contrary to the strikers, as the Embratel Soviet, had no demands for salary, employment, or working conditions. No labor or union demands were at stake. The strikers, coordinated by the union, federation and employees' associations, demanded the cancellation of a contract recently signed between Embratel's management and the company VICOM Communications, in which bank Bradesco and System Globo de Comunicações had a stake. The contract allowed VICOM to provide satellite data communication services using Embratel's newly launched satellites. The contract violated Embratel's legal monopoly on these services. The strike was victorious, canceling the contract. However, the Minister of Communications, Antonio Carlos Magalhães, retaliated strongly: He immediately fired practically the entire board of directors of the company, except one. And, in less than two months, during the salary campaign, he fired dozens of workers from Embratel, TELERJ and other companies of the Telebrás System. It also fired workers from the Post Office. This work seeks, based on research of oral memory, with former Embratel workers, and based on concepts dear to Social Psychology, such as social memory and social identification, to raise how the workers of a company established during the authoritarian regime (1964-1965) and with very little union tradition managed to strike in such an original way, with national characteristics. Subsidiarily, it also seeks to raise how such a remarkable event, abundantly registered by the press, can be ignored in all the records that point, in detail, the history of Embratel and the Telebrás System.