Nair Goulart is Brazilian. The President of Força Sindical do Estado da Bahia (Bahia State Trade Union Association), she was elected Deputy President of ITUC in June 2010, in Vancouver (Canada), and has extensive experience of Brazilian trade unionism.
Ms. Goulart was a member of the ILO Governing Body from 2005 to 2008. In Brazil, she was appointed an Advisor to CNDES (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social – Brazilian National Council for Social and Economic Development) in 2007, and is also a member of the Management Committee of the Agenda Bahia de Trabalho Decente (Decent Work Agenda of Bahia) and of the Conselho de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social da Bahia (Bahia Economic and Social Development Council).
She was also Director of CNTM-FS, Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores Metalúrgicos (Brazilian National Metalworkers’ Confederation) from 1993 to 2005, as well as President of COMUT-ORIT – Women Workers’ Committee of the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers, Vice-Chair of the ICFTU Women’s Committee and Vice-President of the IMF – International Metalworkers’ Federation.
She has been defending the rights of women workers since 1977. In 1985, she was an adviser to Brazil’s First National Council for the Rights of Women, and in 1991 was elected National Secretary for Women’s Policies at the founding congress of Força Sindical.
Nair Goulart was born in Dores do Indaiá (Minas Gerais) in 1951. The daughter of a stonemason and a laundress, she could, like thousands of poor girls, have become resigned to her destiny and remained in her native state. However, she decided not to let herself be defeated by adversity and started work in a textile factory at the age of 14. At the age of 20, she travelled to Rio de Janeiro in search of better opportunities and was hired by General Electric in 1973.
In the 1970s, Brazil was a military dictatorship, and she joined a metalworkers’ commission which was secretly organizing workers to take part in the elections of the Rio de Janeiro Metalworkers’ Union. She was harassed in 1977 and forced to take refuge in São Paulo. In 1978, as an employee of metalworking company DF Vasconcelos, she was a member of the organizing committee of the São Paulo metalworkers’ general strike against the wage squeeze and for better working conditions.
The strike was brutally suppressed by the military and several trade unionists were arrested. Nair Goulart was dismissed “on valid grounds”, a measure which jeopardized her chances of being hired elsewhere in the future. In 1979, she began to organize women metalworkers and was a member of the organizing committee of the First Women Metalworkers’ Congress in São Paulo. She was elected Director of the São Paulo Metalworkers’ Union in 1981 and remained in office until 1987.
