Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: MARIA LUCILENE BARBOSA

THE PHENOMENON OF UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY BRAZILIAN REALITY: covid-19 pandemic and precarious work

Keywords: Unemployment. Work. Precariousness. Structural crisis of capital. Covid-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation, the result of bibliographical and documentary research, aims to analyze the phenomenon of unemployment in contemporary capitalism, highlighting how this phenomenon has been expressing itself in Brazilian particularities, given the outbreak and ongoing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. . To this end, it proposes a reflection on the foundations of unemployment based on the general law of capitalist accumulation, with the aim of analyzing the causal links that determined the genesis of the phenomenon, the way it interferes in the process of accumulation and in the control of capital over the economy. working class. It is worth highlighting, based on the transformations triggered by the advent of the industrial revolution, that capitalism is consolidated and fully developed, based on the contradiction between capital and labor, whose direct products of this antagonism are expressed in unemployment, pauperism and the industrial reserve army. When investigating the phenomenon of unemployment in contemporary society, major changes in the world of work are highlighted, mainly caused by the production and work management systems known as Taylorism-Fordism and Toyotism. It is clear from the research that contemporary capitalist production processes demonstrate an increasingly precarious and superfluous workforce, thus increasing unemployment levels. This arises from the transition period between the 1970s and 1980s, in which the capitalist mode of production engenders a very peculiar context, marked by a series of capital survival strategies in the face of its structural crisis. From this perspective, it is demonstrated that the fight against unemployment by capital today is manifested in strategies for controlling informality through encouraging entrepreneurship and uberization, components potentially highlighted in the pandemic situation, which reveal the immanent tendency to intensify forms exploitation and precariousness of work.