The trade union tax tunga – 08/22/2023 – Elio Gaspari

It was a sung stone and reporters Geralda Doca and Victoria Abel showed the recipe. The Minister of Labor, Luiz Marinho, is preparing a project to reinstate the union tax, extinct in 2017, during the government of Michel Temer. This tax charged every year one day’s work to all wage earners to finance the machinery of unions and federations.

To give the tunga a touch of modernity, it will come under another name and will be called Contribution. Under the current format, it will be equivalent to 1% of the worker’s annual income, unionized or not. According to the accounts of Professor José Pastore, a citizen with a salary of R$ 3,000 a month, paid R$ 100 each year. In this new system, considering the 13th salary, he will pay R$ 390. Almost four times more.

Minister Marinho maintains that “a democracy needs to have a strong union”. According to him: “What is under debate is to create a negotiable contribution. If the union is providing a service, allowing a salary increase, it is fair that the non-unionized worker pays the contribution. If he does not accept paying the fee, just go to the assembly and vote against”.

In parlage, it makes perfect sense. Taking into account that most workers are not unionized and most union members do not go to meetings, the chatter only serves to sweeten a tunga. The worker can vote against, but if he loses, he must pay.

Professor José Márcio Camargo, who, like Pastore, knows the economy of work and the world of unions, did not like the idea: “I think it’s terrible because it forces workers to pay for what they didn’t choose. It increases the cost of work, especially for less qualified professionals. To have a contribution of this type, it is fundamental to end union unity”.

Bingo. The name of the problem is the union uniqueness, legacy of the Estado Novo. If a union fights for its members and reaches a benign agreement negotiating with the bosses, it deserves to be remunerated. Most Brazilian unions provide poor services and negotiate little. As each category can only have one union, the worker has nowhere to run and ends up bitten. With the legacy of uniqueness broken, unions will be forced to compete for members. When Lula was a union leader, he defended the liberation of workers, but this Lula is a thing of the last century.

It’s possible that the 1% bite on workers’ annual income is a goat. If it is reduced to 0.5% of annual income, it will still be equivalent to twice the amount of the extinct tax in 2017.

The end of the old union tax dried up the guild coffers. It is estimated that the compulsory collection yielded BRL 3.6 billion. Made voluntary, it dropped to R$ 68 million. This is the figure that reflects the willingness of workers to finance their unions.

Marinho says that a democracy needs “a strong union”. Perhaps it is better to rephrase it: a democracy needs several strong unions in each category. A government that is proud of the modernizing aspect of its Tax Reform sung like wine cooks a tunga that favors a cartorial and monopolistic system of union organization.

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