Social Security and the Construction of Labor Protection in Brazil

The protective function of social insurance has proved to be fundamental in stabilizing the expectations of the wage-earners as to the maintenance of the conditions of their social independence, constituting a property for the security of the collectivities strongly imbricated to the idea of ??collective belonging. Because it has such characteristics, social insurance has played an important role in societies structurally unequal and characterized by a certain rarefaction of collective organizations linked to work. This study demonstrates how the regulation of the Brazilian labor market, from its origin, depended on the benefits of social insurance to set the expectations of the worker around their enrollment in formal employment. The hypothesis to be put forward in this study is that Brazilian state elites, responsible for implementing social and labor policy in the 1930s and 1940s, have deliberately used these benefits as an institutional induction strategy to broaden the organization base of unions and expand the scope of social legislation.