FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT IN BRAZIL

Voters in Brazil, the biggest nation in South America, have elected their first woman president. Dilma Rousseff of the ruling Workers’ Party will, in January 2011, succeed Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has served nearly eight years in office. Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country in area, possesses an abundance of natural resources, and has a population of about 200 million.

When Brazil was under military rule, Rousseff joined an anti-government organization and later served three years in prison. She served at many government posts at the provincial and federal levels, but never ran in an election or took a party post.

Dilma Rousseff is the daughter of an immigrant, and has been a guerrilla, a torture victim, an economist, an energy minister and the president’s chief of staff. Rousseff was born in 1947. Her mother was a schoolteacher from a ranching family. Her father, Pedro Rousseff, was a political exile from Bulgaria, where he had been a member of the Communist party in the 1920s. In Brazil he became a successful businessman.

Dilma’s early education was at a boarding school run by nuns. Her political awakening began after she transferred to a public high school. At high school Rousseff was influenced by the writings of French political theorist Régis Debray and by a teacher and future comrade who taught her Marxism.

The school was a centre of student activism against the dictatorship in Brazil. In 1967 Rousseff joined a radical faction of the Brazilian Socialist Party. She also met Claudio Galeno Linhares, a journalist and fellow activist, whom she married in 1968.

ARMED STRUGGLE

Their political faction, known by the acronym Polop in Portuguese, split and they became part of a faction that favoured armed struggle against the dictatorship. It soon joined with other militant groups to form Colina (National Liberation Command).

Rousseff and Galeno fled to Rio de Janeiro. Galeno later went into hiding in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil while Rousseff remained in Rio, where she met Carlos Araujo, a lawyer and leftist militant. Araujo said that for him it was “love at first sight,” as Rousseff was beautiful, intelligent and “devoted to political struggle.”

Rousseff and her comrades went through more mergers and divisions of their small militant groups, with Rousseff ending up in Sao Paulo.

ARRESTED AND TORTURED

That’s where she was arrested in 1970. Rousseff endured 22 days of torture, including electric shock and a special device of the Brazilian military known as the pau de arara, designed to cause severe joint and muscle pain. Her sentence was six years of imprisonment and 18 years without political rights. The sentence was later shortened to three years, and she was released in 1973.

A CHILD, A DEGREE, A RETURN TO POLITICS

Soon after her release she moved to Porto Alegre. Rousseff returned to studying economics, graduating in 1977. In 1976 she gave birth to Paula Rousseff Araujo, her only child (now a lawyer).

Rousseff lost her first job because of her subversive past and returned to university to pursue a master’s degree.

In the early 1980s Rousseff and Araujo became active in the PDT (Democratic Labour Party).

The PDT won elections, and Rousseff held a series of jobs as an adviser and bureaucrat at the local and state level. In 1993 the state governor of Rio Grande do Sul appointed her secretary of energy.

Without having completed her master’s degree, Rousseff enrolled in a PhD program but that too was interrupted. In 1999 she was appointed to her old job, as Secretary of Mines, Energy and Communications.

In 2001, Rousseff left the PDT and joined the Workers’ Party, led by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, best known by his nickname, Lula.

Rousseff left government in 2002 to work on Lula’s successful campaign for president. Once in office, he named her minister of mines and energy.

CHIEF OF STAFF

In 2005 Lula appointed Rousseff as his chief of staff. . A few years later speculation began that Rousseff would be Lula’s choice to succeed him as president.

Then in 2009 Rousseff was diagnosed with lymphoma, which was treated with chemotherapy. After tests in August, cancer specialists in Sao Paulo pronounced her “cured of the lymphoma.”

In February, she began her first run for elected office. Her campaign presented her as the one to continue Lula’s largely market-friendly policies and social welfare programs. She told voters that she was “going to follow Lula’s path.” Lula’s immense popularity and campaign for her helped Rousseff to win the election.

OUT SOURCING – THE JAPANESE WAY

One of the ways found out by the International investors and MNCs in the service sector was the BPOs: These BPOs and call centres, mainly located in third world countries, utilize the services of cheap labour. India has become one of the major countries, where these call centers are located, to cater to the needs of various corporates who operate in English speaking countries. It is also a fact now, that though these are part of the so called ‘free trade’, recently some countries including U.S, have been putting restrictions or even bans on these outsourcing businesses.

These call centres and BPOs are utilized by these corporations mainly to cut costs. The claims of countries like India were that these call centres and BPOs are new employment opportunities for our young people who had the vocal power to satisfy customers queries from the country of origin.

The following news item, from the New York Times News Service gives a new dimension to the exploitation that takes place in the name of outsourcing.

THE JAPANESE WAY

Under fierce pressure to cut costs, large Japanese companies are increasingly outsourcing and sending white-collar operations to China and Southeast Asia, where doing business costs less than in Japan.

But while many American companies have been content to transfer work to, say, an Indian outsourcing company staffed with English-speaking Indians, Japanese companies are taking a different tack. Japanese outsourcing firms were hiring Japanese workers to do the jobs overseas – and paying them considerably less than if they were working in Japan.

Companies like Transcosmos and Masterpiece have set up call centres, data-entry offices and technical support operations staffed by Japanese workers in cities like Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei, Taiwan.

Transcosmos pays a call centre operator in Thailand a starting salary of about 30,000 baht a month, or $930 – less than half of the 220,000 yen, or $2,500, the same employee would get in Tokyo. That means a saving of 30 per cent to 40 per cent for customers..

Such outposts cater to Japanese employers who say they cannot do without Japanese workers for reasons of language and culture. Even foreign citizens with a good command of the Japanese language, they say, may not be equipped with a nuanced understanding of the manners and politesse that Japanese customers often demand.

CULTURE FACTOR

“If you used Japanese-speaking Chinese, for example, the service quality does not match up with the expectations of the end customers,” said Tatsuhito Muramatsu, managing director, Transcosmos Thailand, a unit of Transcosmos, which is based in Tokyo.

Statistics on exactly how many Japanese have taken jobs outside the country at lower wages are hard to come by, but the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said that there was a net outflow of 100,000 Japanese in the year that ended in September 2008, the most recent for which statistics were available. It was the highest number in the last 20 years.

What explanation will be given by anybody for this export of workers from Japan to Thailand to answer phone calls from customers in Japan! It is surely the advance of science and technology, and also the modernization of exploitation!

Source: www.citucentre.org/