A report on an independent mid-term review of TIE-Netherland’s Vida Viva Project in Brazil. Powerful and poorly-controlled currents of change are putting lives of working people in Brazil under increasing pressure. Tightening labour markets and the re-design of work are generating more precarity, stress and illness. At the same time, many laws and other institutions that are supposed to protect workers, traditions of resistance by organised labour and other social movements, are generating opportunities to be seized and allies to be mobilised. Stronger trade unionism responsive to such challenges and opportunities -- and to rank-and-file workers themselves –- is a precondition for decisive changes for the better.