Informality, gender, and racial relations: a confrontation with the labor law from cosmetics retailers

Abstract

This research sought to identify how the Brazilian Labor Law behaves in relation to the work model of cosmetics retailers, in the form of a consultant, in an intersectional perspective. Furthermore, it sought to analyze what are the ways to protect the old and new informalities and what are the ways to protect the female worker in the context of new forms of work management and control that are deepened by elements that make up the flexibilization of work and encourage indistinctions between work and consumption, bringing overlaps from the domestic space to the work space. For this, the research methodology of institutional document analysis was used, which permeated the collation of judgments of the Superior Labor Court (TST), the highest instance of the Labor Court, reaching the judgments handed down by the TST in 37 labor claims in which a cosmetics retail consultant claims recognition of employment relationship with the company. The court decisions evidenced the heterogeneous nature of the Judiciary as a space for disputes between the business discourse committed to capitalist management and reproduction, obligatory by neoliberal semantics, and the constitutional discourse of labor protection and guarantee of decent work for these workers. This discussion was marked, above all, by the discussion of the autonomy and subordination of the work of cosmetic resale consultants. Furthermore, the omission of the TST was identified in the results of the judgments of the Regional Labor Courts, which were mostly confirmed by the Superior Court due to the impossibility of discussing facts and evidence (Súmula 126 / TST), in an understanding that hides the collective on the subject. In this way, the sense of the contradictory nature of labor regulation within a capitalist context was possible, and that despite the hostile context, it is necessary to reinforce the dimension of protection of the Labor Law, which represents the guarantee of decent work and the social protection of work that the Federal Constitution of 1988 generated.