NIn the opinion of sociologist Moysés Moreira Santos, the unions that represent road freight transport workers in Brazil should play a more active role in discussions of interest to truck drivers, including safety, overnight stays, working hours and working conditions. Santos observes that the segment is currently marked by the dispute between entities that take on the role of workers' representatives.

Activities passed through
transformation in the 90s

“The alarming number of road accidents involving cargo transporters indicates that the situation needs to be reviewed. It is necessary to promote unified campaigns so that results begin to appear. The sector needs to mobilize nationally”, he argues.

In the city of São Paulo, for example, Santos identified four different unions that claim to represent transporters, which makes it difficult to promote joint campaigns. According to the sociologist, history repeats itself in other large urban centers. “Each union discusses the problems of its region and does not debate the most urgent issues for workers. The working day situation is one of them. Many drivers spend more than 16 hours behind the wheel. Overcome by fatigue, they end up causing terrible accidents,” he declares. Moysés Santos presented his master's thesis on the topic at the Institute of Economics (IE), being supervised by professor Paulo Eduardo de Andrade Baltar. In his work, the sociologist analyzes the transformations that occurred in road freight transport in the country in the 1990s, a period in which important changes occurred in the Brazilian economy. In Brazil, road transport is the most important means of transporting all types of products and materials. According to calculations made by Santos, 68% of cargo transport is carried out on highways.

According to the sociologist, in the 1990s the sector underwent restructuring. “The period coincides with the implementation of regulatory agencies and a decentralized institutional model. There was a fragmentation of activities,” he explains. The concept of multimodality, that is, the integration between means of transport, became part of the agenda of large companies. “With the crisis in several sectors, new ideas began to emerge.”

Large companies opted to rationalize work and invested heavily in IT and logistics to improve processes throughout the chain, from loading to receipt of the cargo by the recipient. “They adapted to the new scenario, ensuring a model consistent with their needs.”

On the other hand, notes the author of the research, self-employed workers were unable to keep up with these transformations. “At the same time that companies invested in technology, they ended up opting to hire freelancers instead of maintaining a large fleet.” With this, Santos concludes that employers managed to adapt to the transformations, while the self-employed and employees continued to work in precarious conditions. At this point, the sociologist attributes the category's difficulties to the proliferation of specific unions.