Background
on Brazil’s economy
…and the labour market
Historically, employers in Brazil have run things in highly authoritarian
and paternalistic ways. As industrialisation expanded in the 1950s
and 1960s they began changing the way work is designed, narrowing
task definitions and lowering skill requirements. That made it easy
to substitute workers, promoted high labour turnover and made working
lives more precarious.
Today, as firms must gratify financial markets and shareholders,
they demand higher output and lowered costs. Their loyalty to employees
and communities may be reduced to the minimum, but firms nevertheless
face imperatives to lower turnover of workers. Especially in large
enterprises and the public sector, employers are trying to re-engineer
labour processes through outsourcing of tasks that were once internal,
implying increased resort to short-term (precarious) contracts,
and rising competitive pressures. New incentive and supervision
systems exchange some improvements in workplace conditions for greater
worker loyalty to the firm, usually coupled with tighter supervision
and individual rather than collective responsibilities.
Combined with an outwardly-oriented macroeconomic policy and precarity
in labour markets, employers’ re-engineering of work processes
reinforces the following problems:
- high levels of stress, substance abuse, accidents and illness,
of which stress related disorders and repetitive strain injuries/work-related
musculoskeletal disorders form a large and increasing category,
at significant cost to workers;
- “atomisation” of working life, competition among
co-workers, and increased feelings of isolation and powerlessness;
- vulnerability to bullying by supervisors;
- denial of respect, including denial of respect for own knowledge
and skills;
- material consumption (needs created under a daily bombardment
of images on television) as more than ever the basis for self-realisation
and self-esteem.
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