This article aims to discuss the reaction of Brazilian unions to the process of labor outsourcing, from when the process took on greater importance in the last decade of the last century, until its extension to all economic activities, in 2017. The text takes into account especially the action of trade union centrals in relation to business practices, while discussing the changes in legislation promoted since the 1990s. Upon recovering union activities, the analysis focuses on the vigorous clash between unions and businessmen in the period 2003-2016, in which the unions staged a fierce struggle against the business project of expanding outsourcing to all economic activities, and concludes that the intervention capacity of the union movement was one of the factors that led the ruling classes to promote the impeachment of 2016. The text is based on a discussion of the bibliography and on research results that I have been developing the last few decades.
Internal outsourcing; External outsourcing; Unrestricted outsourcing; Unionism; Union protagonism