Sowing amid the storm

Abstract

Brazil is going through what is perhaps the most serious moment in its history, as it faces a global health crisis amid a tragic, economic, and political crisis.

Since the juridical-parliamentary coup of 2016, there has been a significant deepening of the disrespect for the most elementary rights of workers. These rights have been plundered by agents of an ultra-neoliberal project, implemented by a far-right government, which violates all existing constitutional guarantees.

The fallacy that labor and welfare "reforms", unlimited outsourcing, budget cuts in social spending, the policy of privileges to banks, among others, would lead to economic recovery, reverberated since before the pandemic, is revealed through increased unemployment and the expansion of inequality.

The COVID 19 pandemic found even more fragile workers and the broader impoverished portions of the Brazilian population. The Bolsonaro government has shown that it has no commitment to the Brazilian people and the working class. It had already closed the doors of the Ministry of Labor and now we even do not have a Minister of Health. There is no demonstration of interest or competence in protecting the Brazilian population in the face of the overwhelming spread of the virus - and there are already many tens of thousands of deaths and millions of infected.

The Instituto Trabalho Digno, which has a new board of directors since May 2020, continues its purpose of defending the protection of work and has joined its voice with the chorus of those who repudiate the destruction of workers' rights. Likewise, Laborare, now counting on Judge and Professor Valdete Souto Severo as co-editor, continues to stimulate reflections on the reconstruction of rights and the defense of decent work.

In this edition, Professor Ricardo Antunes queries about the Future of Work in the Digital Age and the need for the flowering of authentic and emancipated subjectivity, giving a new meaning to work and humanity.

The researcher Leo Liberato, from Fundacentro, reflects on the paradigm or model of risk conception and prevention in Occupational Safety and Health, confronting the campaigns of workers' unions with those sponsored by business entities.

Claudio Jannotti da Rocha addresses whether contemporary work can free itself and what are the necessary conditions to ensure the genuine exercise of the fundamental right to decent work.

In addressing the supervision of administrative contracts in outsourced contracts in the public sector, Tom Lima Vasconcelos points to the responsibility of all entities involved, even more in a scenario of a resurgence of neoliberal rationality.

The UFBA law students Bianca Silva Matos, Gabriel Trajano Azevedo Moreira dos Santos, and Tâmara Brito de França, joined Professor Renata Queiroz Dutra, now a professor at the University of Brasília, to review the bibliography related to the fundamental law to decent work, analyzing the intermittent contract of work in the light of the Constitution.

By presenting this edition of our magazine, we reaffirm our commitment to the serious and critical academic discussion about the world of work and the issues involving the health and safety of people living from work in our country.

The many challenges that call us in these weird times only reinforce our spirit of study and exchange. We go our way believing that it is possible to build a World of Decent Work.

We will continue to sow amid the storm because we believe that our country has the potential to be, really, a fraternal and solidary society, without so much inequality and with the guarantee of material conditions of existence, which means the effective possibility of exercising social rights and freedom.

The Editors