SAO BERNARDO DO CAMPO, Brazil: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched his final reelection campaign on Sunday from a storied stadium where he stood on a table to address some 60,000 striking metalworkers in 1979 without a sound system.
The homecoming in the “May 1” stadium in Sao Bernardo do Campo, a once-thriving factory city on Sao Paulo’s industrial outskirts, is a tribute to the labor movement that eventually propelled Lula from factory worker to Brazil’s first working-class president.
“I thank the working men and women of this country who, at one point, believed that someone like them could do more for them than someone different from them,” Lula told a crowd of around 20,000 supporters, many wearing the red associated with his Workers Party (PT), on Sunday.
Five decades later, however, Lula is grappling with how to rally a new generation of digital app-based gig workers with little connection to the unions and factory floors that once formed the backbone of PT.
“There has been a substantial change in the world of work,” Lula said after his government suffered losses in major city elections in 2024. “We need to adapt our message to the world of work that is not limited to formal, registered employment.”
Ahead of October’s vote, the PT is trying to do that by backing a shorter work week and proposing new protections for app-based workers, including regulations covering pay, working conditions, social security benefits and platform algorithms.
Resistance from companies has mostly sunk efforts so far, and millions of mostly young, male app workers seem skeptical of government intervention — a constituency Lula’s main right-wing rival, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, stands ready to court.
At the heart of Lula’s dilemma is a surge in jobs outside Brazil’s system of formal employment, which provides workers with a raft of labor rights and social-security benefits.
The share of workers who held formal jobs fell to 38.2 per cent in December from 46.7 per cent at the end of 2010, even as unemployment ended 2025 at a record-low 5.1 per cent.
“What kind of future do you want if you do not invest in jobs?” Lula asked his supporters on Sunday. “We have created 10.1 million formal jobs over the past three and a half years.
That is what it means to think about the future.” Darlan Almeida, 27, had a formal job but now makes more delivering for apps on his motorcycle in Sao Bernardo do Campo, where his Lula-supporting father worked in a factory. Almeida, however, identifies as apolitical and says the government’s efforts misunderstand what workers like him need.
“They don’t know what we need or how we work. They should spend a day with us on the streets,” Almeida said.
