They clean the garbage from the streets and sidewalks every day, carrying out one of society’s dirtiest and least valued jobs. And yet despite their bright orange uniforms, Rio’s ‘garis’, as the street cleaners and garbage collectors are best known, are all but invisible to most people. They work up to twelve hours a day for a monthly salary of 800 reais (US$340), hurrying through the streets as they work, unfailingly polite. They live in favelas and are, for the most part, black. The union they belong to, run by the same political party for decades, negotiates their salaries in crooked deals struck behind closed doors with their employers and with City Hall, and donates money to some of the very political campaigns that label strikers as vandals and delinquents.

They are part of an immense new, working-class precariat that in recent years, despite all its difficulties, has carved out a unique space for itself within Brazilian society. With a growing level of inclusion thanks to the policies of Brazil’s socially progressive popular government, the poorest of the poor have come to enjoy greater opportunities, and greater satisfaction than merely having food on their plates. They use the internet and buy cheap cell phones, tablets and laptops. They have found a space in which they can connect and organize without being overseen by workers’ unions and the state, or by capital and the mass media.

They’ve samba-ed their way from online networks onto the streets, and started a strike right in the midst of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival. This is the story of Rio’s garbage workers — the garis

On the street

Rio de Janeiro is Brazil’s most famous picture postcard — a city of exquisite beauty, as well as of some of the country’s most striking contradictions and inequalities. Rio’s slums, its famous favelas, are located right alongside its wealthiest neighborhoods and beside the beach and the streets, where the city’s diverse population mixes daily in a blur of multicultural complexity.

Rio is also known as the city of samba, and is the international symbol of Brazil’s largest and most popular celebration: Carnival. Rio has also been the main arena of Brazilian activism following the major protests of June 2013.

No respite in Rio. Teachers, black blocs, the independent media and social movements kept up the fervor on the streets even when the rest of Brazil had cooled down, with massive mobilizations, symbolic acts and direct action. For that reason, Rio became the city in which social movements suffered most from political violence and from a process of criminalization set into action by conservative forces and Brazil’s large media corporations.

The death of the journalist Santiago Ilídio Andrade at the beginning of February 2014 — the TV cameraman was accidentally hit by a large firecracker alleged to have been fired by protestors — triggered condemnation not only of the two men who set light to the explosive, but of all and any form of popular protest. The shadow of death fell onto the streets, and with it, the rhetorical and ideological idea that violence might threaten democracy.

In a contradictory way, but with clear interests on the part of hegemonic sectors, the street transformed itself, as much for the Right as for the more traditional Left, into a danger zone, ripe for dictatorial daydreams. In the name of protection from a greater evil, other evils were deemed necessary, and an anti-terrorism law found its way to Brazil’s Congress.

Social movements became the subject of direct threats, and a climate of uncertainty and insecurity now characterizes much of the country’s political mood, making the context of an election year and the upcoming World Cup ever more complex. With the pivotal role that the new movements and political tactics have played in the recent story of Brazilian democracy now under threat.

It was time to let the Carnival parade commence.

The adversaries

March 1st, a Saturday, marked the official start of Brazil’s Carnival. Following an initial concentration online, on the community and personal pages of the garis, the workers of Rio’s Companhia Municipal de Limpeza Urbana — the Municipal Urban Cleaning Company, better known as ‘Comlurb’ — called a strike, demanding an increase in their minimum monthly salary to R$1,200 (US$510), additional payments of 40% for unsanitary working conditions, and a rise in their lunch vouchers, from R$12 to R$20. The strike couldn’t have come at a better time. During Carnival, the city’s streets are completely taken over, and the garbage workers’ work is an essential element in keeping the non-stop party looking good. Besides that, the iconic sight of orange-clothed garis making their way along the city’s world-famous Marquês do Sapucaí — the Sambadrome — behind the samba school parades is part and parcel of the imaginary of Brazilian Carnival.

But the garbage workers stopped work, and nobody saw it coming.

Controlled by the same group for years, the union the Comlurb workers belong to, the Sindicato dos Empregados das Empresas de Asseio e Conservação do Município do Rio de Janeiro, has long settled salaries in negotiation processes that are far from transparent. Longstanding political relations between union leaders and the government have thrown a pall of distrust over the real interests the union exists to defend.

“We don’t want to see the city dirty. We’re garbage men. But on this salary, what are we going to eat? Trash?” — Marcelo Américo, 34,
Gari from Guadalupe.

That sense of distrust was one of the main factors behind the first stirrings of the garis on their social media networks.

Real democracy

Garis gather outside Rio’s Municipal City Council to take decisions following a day of demonstrations and marches through the city center.

From the outset, the position of Rio’s City Hall and its mayor Eduardo Paes has been to deny and discredit the strike movement, in connivance with the union. In public statements, the mayor called the strikers a “minority of vandals”, accusing them of staging a mutiny.

“I wouldn’t call this a strike. It’s a mutiny by a group of people who are intimidating those who wish to work. Strikes are called by unions.”
— Eduardo Paes

The discomfort caused by the sight of mountains of uncollected trash at a moment of such public visibility as Carnival was manipulated in highly moralistic and emotional ways: how dare they strike at a time like this? What would Rio’s thousands of tourists make of a city full of garbage on the eve of the World Cup? How could the garbage workers be so irresponsible?

In a brutal inversion of values, the irresponsibility of city mismanagement was transferred to the already over-burdened shoulders of the working class, now demanding their rights instead of being co-opted by the state and its elected representatives.

The union, showing its distance from its members, agrees on an insignificant salary increase of 9%, declaring an end to the strike in a well-rehearsed move in tandem with City Hall and the mainstream media.

The labor tribunal deems the strike illegal. Comlurb, the workers’ employer, resorts to a policy of overt intimidation, sending out letters, telegrams and even individual SMS text messages announcing the mass dismissal of striking garbage workers.

Military Police and armed escorts are put on the streets to guarantee the return to work, and a smear campaign against the strike is orchestrated.

With the help of the media, rumors are spread to try to discredit the movement, adding to the overt policy of intimidation and sackings.

Meanwhile, the main channels of communication, predominantly the Globo network, assume the role of official press agents for City Hall, launching a defamatory torrent aimed at dismantling the movement. Lengthy reports in the newspaper O Globo and on Jornal Nacional news programs focus on the legal arguments, on the number of workers involved and on the union’s refusal to recognize the strike, in an attempt to turn public opinion against the garbage workers.

The trash mounts up on the streets and on the beaches and the stench, more characteristic of some of the city’s poorer regions, wafts into the city center and into Rio’s high-class Zona Sul district.

At the same time, deeper wounds in Brazil’s political reality are exposed by the movement, reinforcing a sense of injustice and of the detached nature of Eduardo Paes’s government from reality — and consequently from the majority of the Brazilian political class. It also becomes evident that much-touted investments in the Marvelous City, as Rio is affectionately known, don’t reach down to the roots, and that the union model is suffering the same crisis of representation as governments, political parties and the press.

The mountains of corporate plastic trash strewn through Rio’s streets reveal even more than that. The Política Nacional de Resíduos Sólidos (National Policy for Solid Waste), approved in 2010 following more than 20 years of delays, remains far from being implemented, and thus we are living the consequences of an obsolete model for waste management at a high cost to the environment and public health, and all financed with money from our taxes. Those who continue to profit are businesses such as Ambev, the immense beer and beverages corporation, with its aggressive branding strategies, ever present amidst the trash on the street, but free from responsibility for the collection and recycling of the packaging of its products. Just as with the World Cup, economic interests that shape public policies are exposed, like the rubbish that lines the city streets.

An all-fronts offensive aims to sweep the garbage workers from the streets. But it’s all in vain. It’s the garis who clean up instead.

New political parables

From the very first moment, the garbage workers’ strike proved itself a very different movement. In simultaneously taking on both City Hall and their own union, which in theory ought to be defending their interests, the garbage workers had an immense challenge ahead. How would this thus far “oppressed” group find the means to build an autonomous political process and fight such powerful opponents?

The response was overwhelming. A spark of political consciousness ignited a flame that took hold of the city, garnering national and international support, and in its humility, representing reinvigorated elements in Brazil’s democratic process. Through a political stance that challenged the structure of mediation, constructed through direct participation and with an aesthetic soaked in the kind of roots samba you find in Brazil’s immense periphery, the garbage workers launched a counter-attack, organizing their very own political parade up and down the avenues of Rio de Janeiro.

Attacks on the garis and their cause met with organized responses and with the establishment of processes involving the real participation of the garbage workers themselves. Popular organization and political awareness were in constant evidence; and daily events and meetings, always involving open dialogs and a clear belief in the need for a representative union, brought power and consistency to the movement. As the days went by, popular support for the garis became more and more apparent.

In refusing to give in to dismissals and threats, and by intensifying their resistance by organizing daily events, the garbage workers developed an atmosphere of trust, making the fight for their rights a key ingredient in the creation of a social pact. The atmosphere of union solidarity and capacity for dialog led, on Ash Wednesday (March 5th), to the movement’s winning the support of a highly emblematic figure.

Sorriso (‘Smile’) the gari symbolic of Rio’s Carnival, who is known Brazilwide thanks to images broadcast by Rede Globo — the same network condemning the strike in defence of City Hall — backed the strike, taking to the streets to join the movement in the pouring rain. Photos of Sorriso, borne on the shoulders of his striking colleagues, spread through the social networks and became news in the same way that his dancing in the Sambadrome has enchanted millions of Brazilians for years.

A symbolic, original and unexpected counter attack was underway. The movement took to the streets not with classic ideological tactics, but instead presenting its demands with joy.

Making the most of the Carnival atmosphere, the protesters exchanged traditional strike slogans for samba footwork and good-natured, albeit provocative songs and chants.

They brought an irreverent, carefree mood to the struggle, and the ‘carnavalization’ of politics — the process much celebrated by an intellectualized, festive strain of Left politics — found a popular and authentic expression in the garbage workers’ struggle, infecting not only the garis themselves, already mobilized around their own cause, but the broader public too.

At the same time, the strenuous working routine to which the garis are submitted on a day-to-day basis prepared them for the physical challenges of their marathon protest, which lasted for eight consecutive days. Bringing together political awareness, resistance and celebration, they made it very clear that it would not be easy to pass them by.

The internet, central in the process of articulating the strike in the first place, was yet again an ally, serving as the garis’ main channel for spreading counter-information. Live streaming from the protests and broad coverage using photographs, videos and stories unveiled the mass media’s efforts to delegitimize the movement, clearly showing what was at stake in the dispute. Messages of support and posts by other Brazilian and international movements flooded the internet, and a powerful sense of solidarity began to take shape.

Satirical cartoons lampooning the mayor and Rio’s mounting garbage went viral, while support from the general population, coupled with the presence of independent media organizations covering the dispute, were key in building alternative spaces in which the iconic struggle could flourish.

The garbage and its stench were still on the streets, but they were no longer only the gari’s problem.

Two major events took place on March 6th and 7th, following Ash Wednesday, which marks the end of Carnival. In this period, City Hall’s attempt to portray the strikers as a mutinous minority was proven to be an obvious fallacy.

The original 300 striking workers had become a multitude, with clear support class-wide and a capacity for resistance that the garis presented with a disconcertingly carnivalesque lightness.

Saturday March 8th dawned rainy, following several days of marches under the scorching Rio sun. The march that became the final act in the saga started out from Central do Brasil railway station, with the morning’s persistent rain failing to affect the massive turnout of garbage workers. By this point, recognition of the legitimacy of the strikers as a political movement had become a fact, both for the mayor and for society at large.

The striker’s negotiation committee, which had been ignored by the mayor up to that point, officially became party to the negotiations between Comlurb, the union, and Rio City Hall. In a final attempt to manipulate the proceedings, the mayor, Eduardo Paes, told Rio’s local TV news, Jornal RJTV, part of the Globo network, that a meeting to be held that afternoon at the Regional Labor Tribunal (Tribunal Regional do Trabalho) would decide the fate of the strike. Taken by surprise by the news, since no official communication had been made, the strikers’ march changed direction, heading straight for the Tribunal in order to take part in the decisive meeting.

The popular pressure of the previous days had weakened City Hall and the union’s previously inflexible positions regarding negotiations with the strikers. Rio’s characteristic March rains would soon begin to inundate the city with the huge amount of garbage that had accumulated in the streets and around the storm drains. And with less than 100 days to go before the World Cup, the importance attached to Rio’s international image also played a fundamental part in the gari’s ability to exert pressure.

In the first round of negotiations, City Hall pushed for a level of wage increase well below that demanded by the striking workers, who, united in an assembly, rejected the offer, inflicting a blow on the political arrogance of both the union and City Hall’s spokespersons. City Hall capitulated, and the mayor, Eduardo Paes, was forced to agree to the proposal made by the strikers’ committee.

The garis’ minimum wage was raised from R$804 to R$1100 — a rise of 37% — plus an additional payment of 40% in recognition of hazardous work. The daily lunch allowance rose from R$12 to R$20, a 66% increase; and the inclusion of a dental plan was also secured, along with various other rights. Lastly, the 1100 workers who had been dismissed for taking part in the strike, as announced by City Hall, were reinstated.

Victory of the garis

Workers celebrate after 8 days’ strike and a day spent in the rain in the center of Rio de Janeiro