Sintigrace Ceará

Sintigrace 80 years: typing a history of struggle!

symbol of graphicsThe Union of Workers of the Graphic Industry, Graphic Communication and Graphic Services of the State of Ceará was born on February 9, 1930, with the name of Union of Graphic Workers. The Union is the result of the struggle of the various associations of typographers that emerged in the capital of the state of Ceará, from the second half of the seventeenth century, among them the: Associação Tipoográfica (1878), União Tipográfica Cearense (1911), Associação Gráfica do Ceará ( 1920).

The transformation of the Association into a Union was a historic pioneer. In 1930 there was no trade union legislation in Brazil. However, the precarious conditions of life and work of the workers at the time impelled the workers to create organs of class resistance. In this scenario, graphics were the first to create a union in Ceará, pushing other categories to create their own entities.

On April 13, 1942, the Union is recognized by the Ministry of State for Labor Affairs and Social Security and receives the name SINDICATO DOS WORKERS NAS INDÚSTRIAS GRÁFICAS DE FORTALEZA, a representative body of the professional categories of workers in the graphic industries. In 1991, the Union carried out an extension of the representative territorial base and was renamed UNION OF WORKERS IN THE GRAPHIC INDUSTRIES IN THE STATE OF CEARÁ. However, the Ministry of Labor and Employment only came to recognize this base extension and also its statutory reform and the new union framework on January 22, 2010, after a huge struggle by the current board that started in 2006 and which, in order to achieve success, relied on with the collaboration of various social actors. As of this date, the Union officially uses its current name and represents all workers in the graphic industry segment in our State, including modern forms of graphic arts, regardless of the companies' purpose activities.

Throughout its history, several were the conquests of graphic workers. However, it is in the printing sector of newspapers and magazines that the greatest advances are currently registered in terms of social conquests, with salary floor, transportation, day-care assistance, printing day and life insurance being the most important conquests. However, the other segments of the graphic sector still suffer from more advanced social conquests.
The current board of the Graphics Union, imbued with the historical fighting spirit of its ancestors, seeks to mobilize graphic workers to improve their living and working conditions, denouncing, in the same way as in its birth, the precarious living and working conditions of graphic workers in Ceará. And, alongside the different categories of workers in Brazil, it fights, since its beginnings, for the emancipation of the working class.