Trade Union fragmentation

Brazil has a large number of labor unions. A union survey made by IBGE in 2001 resulted in 13.203 unions, of which 9.186 were certified by the Labor and Employment Ministry. Eleven years later, in 2012, the same Ministry registers 9.954 institutions with active certificate, an increase of approximately 8% in eleven years. What does it mean this union growth in Brazil? Is it the effect of a healthy process of organization of new union bases or does it represent fragmentation of forces? The paper discusses those questions and shows that the union structure is composed heterogeneously what demands a large number of organizations due to the complex practices adopted by law. The hypothesis is that a great part of the organizational division that operates inside labor unions corresponds to a process of fragmentation by struggles for better political spaces, for access to union contributions, territorial division and sheer corporativism, factors that do not contribute to strengthen the struggling capacity of workers. The first part of the paper analyses the introduction of the principle of freedom in union organizations by the 1988 Constitutional Act. The second provides a deeper study on unionism about the educational sector, specially higher education. The fast growth in number of union central associations after 2000 provides a forceful argument in favor of growing fragmentation of labor unions.