Homeless Workers' Movement
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The Homeless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST)) is an urban social movement that fights for low-income housing rights that originally branched off from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) ('Landless Rural Workers' Movement')in 1997. It is the biggest organisation in the larger 'movimento dos sem-teto' (Movement of the roofless).
Through a combination of direct confrontation and negotiation with government, it struggles to address Brazil's deficit of roughly 8 million housing units by staging squatters' occupations in the abandoned government buildings that litter Brazilian cities,resisting the often violent attempts by local governments to evict them and negotiating for their conversion into low-income housing. According to the MTST, there are over 5 million housing units available in abandoned buildings in Brazilian cities. MTST emerged originally emerged as a faction within the MST focused on urban, as opposed to rural land rights. Although fully autonomous, it has a strategic alliance with the MST and also works closely with other Brazilian urban social movements such as the União Nacional de Moradaria Popular (National Low-income Housing Union) and the Centro das Movimentos Populares (Center of Popular Social Movements).
The movement in a proper sense is politically heterogeneous, since there are both organisations which resemble a Leninist political party in terms of structure and hierarchy, on the one side, and organisations which are clearly committed to goals such as 'horizontality' and self-management, on the other; there is even an organisation (in São Paulo) which works very much as an 'arm' of a specific political party.
The 'sem-teto' movement is the most important social movement in Brazilian cities, since the favela movement became weaker and weaker since the 1980s (its role was decisive in the 1960s and 1970s: resistance against evictions etc.), due to factors such as political clientelism, the influence of drug traffickers, and so on. The 'sem-teto' also try (here and there) to co-operate with other emerging social movements, such as 'insurgent' hip-hop groups and, in the case of MTST, of course MST (which is in fact only one of the organisations of the 'sem-terra' [= landless rural workers'] movement).
The best known land occupations under taken by the MTST are:
- João Cândido - Itapecerica da Serra - (2007-)
- Carlos Lamarca - Osasco - (2002-)
- Chico Mendes - Taboão da Serra - (2005 - 2006)
- Santo Dias/"Ocupação da Volks" - São Bernardo do Campo (2003)
- Rosa Luxemburgo - São Paulo /Osasco - (2004
- Anita Garibaldi - Guarulhos - (2001-)
