The crisis and challenges faced by labor, including the trade unions and social movements have proportions not yet fully understood. The repercussions, owing to globalization, also reached Third World countries, especially intermediate countries that hold important industrial estates such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, etc. Brazil is part of an economic, social, political and cultural context which has universal traces of global capitalism, but also possesses singularities. During the last decades, Brazilian trade unions and social movements have either followed a different path. There was a widespread and highly significant strike movement (in the 1980s) with a notable expansion of trade unions organizing salaried sector (teachers, bank workers, public sector workers, etc.); there was also the rise of the Union Congresses such as the CUT-Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (Workers Central) and the advance of rural unionism and the Landless Workers' Movement (MST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra) and new urban social movements such as the Homeless Movement. By the end of these decades, we joined in a more significant way the challenges which were presented to the unionism and social movements. These challenges are discuss in this paper. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.324449458