ANDThis is the theme of the exhibition “Unidos Venceremos! Protest, Strikes and Unions in Marcelismo (1968-1974)”, divided between Lisbon and Barreiro, in Setúbal, which opens its doors this Sunday, May 1st, Labor Day, and is organized by the Commemorative Committee of the 50th anniversary of April 25, 1974 and by Ephemera – Associação Cultural.
“What we are portraying in this exhibition, both here and in Barreiro, is an enormous change prior to the end of the dictatorship, but which in reality condemned the dictatorship in definitive terms”, said José Pacheco Pereira, historian and scientific commissioner of the initiative, at the Lisbon premises.
In September 1968, Marcelo Caetano took office as head of government and defended, in his speech, that he was succeeding a “man of genius”. That man was António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator known to the country as president of the Council of Ministers from 1932 until then.
“Whether you like it or not, the mental death and then the physical death of Salazar had to have an enormous impact. And that impact is reflected in two ways. It is reflected in hopes, hopes that this was going to change, that it was going to there should be more freedom”, stressed Pacheco Pereira, adding that this “environment of hope and illusions all ended in 1970-71”, a moment from which “nobody has illusions and nobody has hope”.
The exhibition, mostly made up of material from the Ephemera archive and which took about a year to prepare, portrays “the political, social and cultural environment” before the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, in a poor, backward country, with high infant mortality and that in the aspects in which it grew it was “at the cost of the colonial war, of illiteracy” and “in which a significant number of people lived practically in poverty”.
“There was no union freedom, so these unions were uprooted by force, they were pulled out with strikes, they were pulled out with arrests, they were pulled out with dismissals. And what were they fighting for? For things that people think are absolutely acquired. So acquired that we don’t even think about them anymore”, pointed out the historian.
From the survey carried out by the organisation, between 1968 and 1974, 310 strikes were recorded in the country, said the official Rita Almeida de Carvalho, stressing the importance of these movements to explain how the population subsequently joined the 25th of April.
But before the Carnation Revolution, one of the first decisions of the Estado Novo dictatorship was to end the union movement of the 1st Republic, replacing unions with revolutionary influence by corporate unions, which were “an arm of the regime”.
“What we are going to witness in this period is the struggle of workers, bank workers, trade, office, textile, metallurgist workers against corporate unions”, detailed the historian, a struggle that is evident in the exposed documentation.
Despite the fact that the country was still living under a dictatorship, with the inauguration of Marcelo Caetano there was an initial period of hope in which some relevant legislative changes were made, such as the end of the ratification of union lists by the Ministry of Corporations, which paved the way for a strong mobilization of workers for the election of these bodies, “very courageous” people who “questioned their freedom, their family and their job”.
One of these people was Joaquim Matos, a union activist for bank workers before April 25, 1974 and one of those responsible for the research shown in the exhibition — along with Carlos Nuno, Rita Almeida de Carvalho and João Francisco Pereira, with the collaboration of Maria Inácia Rezola , Executive Commissioner of the Mission Structure for the Commemorations of the 50th Anniversary of the 25th of April Revolution.
The role of progressive Catholics in the labor movement, as well as the connection of the PCP to union struggles, are also portrayed in the exhibition, which shows how instruments of repression such as the PIDE, the PSP, the GNR, the Portuguese Legion and even the employers, tried to prevent workers’ struggles.
Another of the dimensions explored in the exhibition is the struggle of women at work: workers or peasants, who earned less than men and who, for this reason, were preferred by factories, dealing with phenomena such as harassment or sexual violence.
The exhibition has free admission and is at the Hub Criativo do Beato, in Lisbon, and at the CP Workshops, in Barreiro, until June 30th.
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