PT was launched under a democratic socialism trend. After the 1964 coup d'état, Brazil's main federation of labor unions, the General Command of Workers ("Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores" – CGT), which since its formation gathered leaders approved by the Ministry of Labour, a practice tied to the fact that since Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship, unions had become quasi-state organs, was dissolved while unions themselves suffered intervention of the military regime. The resurgence of an organized labour movement, evidenced by strikes in the ABC Region on the late 1970s led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, enabled the reorganization of the labour movement without the direct interference of the state. The movement originally sought to act exclusively in union politics, but the survival of a conservative unionism under the domination of the state (evidenced in the refoundation of CGT) and the influence exercised over the trade union movement by leaders of traditional left-wing parties, such as the Brazilian Communist Party ("Partido Comunista Brasileiro –" PCB), forced the unionist movement of ABC, encouraged by anti-Stalinist leaders, to organize its own party in a strategy similar to that held by the Solidarność union movement in Poland.