The provisional government creates a Ministry of Labor

On the night of 22 November 1910, sailors seized major warships in Guanabara Bay and demanded an end to corporal punishment, improved conditions, and amnesty. João Cândido Felisberto became a...

About 400 workers at the Cotonifício Crespi textile works in São Paulo stopped work in a dispute over wages, working time, and wartime conditions. Women were central to textile labor and to organizing...

During a confrontation near the Mariângela factory in Brás, police shot and killed young shoemaker José I. Martinez. His death intensified an already developing labor conflict. It should be understood...

Two days after Martinez was killed, a crowd gathered outside his home and carried his body across São Paulo toward the Araçá cemetery. Historian Joel Wolfe reports that about 2,000 people, mostly...

The strike movement broadened across workplaces and neighborhoods in São Paulo in mid-July. Contemporary labor organization, neighborhood associations, and anarchist newspapers helped circulate...

Decree 19,482 required certain employers and public contractors to show that at least two-thirds of their employees were Brazilian-born. The measure responded to unemployment and shaped the balance...

Decree 19,770 defined how workers’ and employers’ associations could defend interests through the Ministry of Labor. It conditioned recognition on rules that included limits on foreign participation...

Founded in São Paulo on 16 September 1931, the Frente Negra Brasileira built a wide network of Black social and political organizing, with branches in several states. It offered education, community...

The 1934 Constitution set out labor protections and capped immigration from each country at two percent of nationals of that country who had settled in Brazil over the previous fifty years. It also...

Decree-Law 25 established federal heritage listing (tombamento), defining national heritage through historical, archaeological, ethnographic, bibliographic, and artistic value. In practice, early...