CAPITALIST CONTROL AND TECHNOLOGY: Mechanisms for the intensification of labor exploitation in telemarketing centers
Keywords: Work. Capital control. Technology. Precariousness. Telemarketing Center.
This thesis aims to understand how the relationship between capitalist control and technology constitutes mechanisms for intensifying the exploitation of work in Telemarketing Centers. The study and investigation process that we are presenting here took place through bibliographical and documentary research in official databases, through a theoretical-methodological analysis based on the historical-critical perspective. We carried out, from a methodological point of view, an immanent analysis of the works of authors Karl Marx, F. Engels, Istiván Mészáros, Thomas Gounet, David Harvey, among others, which made it possible to analyze the exploitation of labor in the capitalist mode of production, starting from the commodity as a product of human labor and its characteristics in order to understand, considering the production process, a special commodity: the workforce. The exploitation of the workforce has, in capitalism, its process initiated in the so-called primitive accumulation, through violent means of disciplining and controlling workers, expanding with the development of the capitalist mode of production, until the structural crisis of capital in the days current. This development implied the advance of the productive forces, which with the increase of technology, as well as the forms of capital control over labor, guaranteed the means of intensifying the exploitation of labor. These elements become present in some capitalist sectors, such as services, of which we highlight the Telemarketing Centers, which in recent years has shown significant expansion, under the logic of outsourcing and precarious work. In this field, we base ourselves mainly on the works of Ricardo Antunes, Ruy Braga, Albani Barros, Selma Venco, among others, who provided subsidies to apprehend the historical genesis and roots of this type of service provision. Thus, it is assumed that, at present, the articulation between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), Toyotist flexibility measures and the typically Taylorist forms of capital control over work appear as the basis for the intensification of exploitation of labor in Telemarketing Centers, with a view to increasing productivity and capital profitability in the service sector. This thesis shows that the process of exploitation of work in Telemarketing Centers is intensified through mechanisms that articulate coercive forms of control over work with new technologies, which from the perspective of modernization, demonstrate the coexistence of characteristics of typical capitalist control of the Taylorist-Fordist period and of productive restructuring.