The Brazilian teachers' unionism has its roots in older movements around the Public Education System building. Since the pioneering movement, passing through LDB - the Education Brazilian Law from 1946, and through debates around the Education Chapter in the Federal Constitutional Assembly in 1988 and the Education Law from 1996; the teachers' claims of corporate foundation were structurally linked with fights about public education offering conditions and their incidence on education quality. With the new institutional framework, resulted from the Federal Constitution of 1988, which legalized the teachers' union representation and, in the participative perspective, opened the wide range of councils which became new spaces to syndical action, the need of comparative studies on local cases is justified. In this article, from the empirical data of interviews with education union leaders from Curitiba, Fazenda Rio Grande, Araucaria and Piraquara, that are municipalities in Parana State, and from Dourados, in Mato Grosso do Sul State, the teachers' union action in the last 15 years was analyzed, explaining how the corporate-labor interests are articulated to educational policies, in the view of Unions.
educational policies; teachers' unionism; corporatism
