Jaques Wagner was born in Rio de Janeiro on March 16th of 1951.

His political activity started back in 1968 when he joined the university student militancy and was elected president of the College of Engineering Student Union of the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC).  In 1973, persecuted by the military regime, he had to abandon his engineering undergraduate studies, although he was very close to graduating. Then, in 1974, he arrived in Salvador, the state capital of Bahia. Ever since then, Wagner has been living in Bahia, where he began his professional and political career. Therefore, Jaques Wagner is Bahian* by choice.

As soon as he got in Bahia, he started working as a maintenance technician in the recently created Petrochemical Pole of Camaçari. Then, he became militant in the Petrochemical Industry Workers Union (Sindiquímica), playing an outstanding role in the workers’ fight for their rights. Next, he met President Lula in a petroleum workers conference and, in 1980, joined the Workers Party (known in Brazil simply as PT or Partido dos Trabalhadores).  On that occasion, he was one of the founders of PT and of the Workers Headquarters (known in Brazil simply as CUT or Central Única dos Trabalhadores) in the State of Bahia.

In addition, in 1981, he became a member of the board of directors of Sindiquímica-BA and implemented some democratic management methods, whereby he defended the extinction of its position of president in favor of an elected board, one of the first ones of the kind in Brazil. He then started a process of merging with other employee unions of the same sort.

Wagner was one of the founders of the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, along with President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, and was the first President of the party (at the state level) in Bahia. Next, for the first time, in 1990, he was elected congressman. He was then reelected for the next three mandates in a row. In addition, he was the leader of the Workers Party’s workbench in the parliament in 1995 and vice-leader both in 1993 and 1998.

Next, in 2002, Wagner ran for Governor of the State of Bahia. Then, in a brilliant campaign, facing that which many thought of as something impossible to be faced, he rose up from solely 2% of the voting intentions and ended up reaching a surprising mark over 38% of the valid votes, which was the equivalent to over 2 million votes, including a stunning victory in the state capital with more than 220 thousand votes ahead of his opponent.

On a later date, he made Minister of Labor and Employment, within the mandate of President Lula, and during that time he began the reformulating of all labor, employment, and income policies, which were responsible for the generation of millions of formal jobs in the last 3 and a half years. While it was under Wagner’s management, the Ministry broke all records in terms of taking actions toward fighting slave work, which gave Brazil the recognition by the International Labor Organization (ILO) as an example of this type of action. Wagner’s job as a Minister of Labor and Employment also outstands due to the implementation the First Job Program, which serviced about 1.6 million youth with emphasis on the fight against child labor.

Then, in 2004, he became the head of the Special Secretariat for the Social and Economical Development Council of the Presidency of the Republic, wherein he promoted a huge dialogue with the economic, social, and common people agents and wound up elaborating the National Development Agency.

In addition, in July of 2005, responding to a call made by President Lula, in the peak of the political crisis, Wagner became Minister of Institutional Relations, thereby becoming in charge of the Political Coordination of the Government. In that office, he gained national recognition as the political and social spokesman for Lula’s government. Due to his acknowledged dialoguing ability, Minister (at the time) Jaques Wagner, decisively contributed for the solving of that crisis.

At last, in 2006, he ran again for Governor of Bahia and was elected with 52.89% of all valid votes to remain in that office between 2007 and 2011. With this victory, he comes into the State Government as the first leftist Governor in the past 16 years, having his negotiating and dialoguing capabilities as his main characteristics, in terms of political activity.

Jaques Wagner is married to Maria de Fátima Carneiro de Mendonça and has three children and one stepson.

(*) Bahian (Eng.) = baiano (Port.), one who is born within the State of Bahia, Brazil.