After the Pandemic

Abstract

Specters that take us back to the past frighten our daily lives - a deadly pandemic, the destruction of social and labor rights conquered with much struggle, the return of millions to misery, the expansion of national dependence and an irresponsible government.

The extreme radicalization of neoliberalism in the 1980s is occurring in the world and especially in Brazil. Worse still, the ultra-neoliberal right, which today commands this agenda, managed to destroy the State's ability to help society - where the government tries to face the pandemic, it is at the mercy of multinational pharmaceutical companies that set prices and deadlines or dictate the rules approval of vaccines.

As sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos says, ultra-neoliberals use the fiction of the permanent financial crisis to explain cuts in social policies and wage degradation, but their goals go much further - to legitimize the scandalous concentration of wealth and despoil the planet, regardless of gravity and the imminent ecological catastrophe.

Before the pandemic, Brazil was already sinking into unemployment and the political and economic crisis, driven by the coupists in the espionage, judicial, impeachment and legal-electoral fraud operations carried out between 2013 and 2018. At the same time, under the pretext of technological advancement, the economy of precariousness and uberization was promoted. Since the pandemic, this process has been intentionally accelerated.

We know that, despite the Brazilian government, the pandemic will also be won here, even if it costs hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been spared. But nothing was or will be normal. The crisis will continue and there will be a solution for most of the society only if the extreme right and ultra-freedom leave power.

But to have a future, much more is needed: build the country's democratization and change the development model, with valorization of work, sustainable development, massive investment in education, impulse to technology at the service of society and the reduction of working hours, renewable energies, protection family and ecological agriculture, reconstruction of social and labor agendas, minimum income, reduction of inequalities, etc.

In this edition, Laborare, edited by Instituto Trabalho Digno, brings together 12 articles that contribute a lot to the multidisciplinary knowledge of the world of work. Lawyers Diego Villalón and Paulo Yamamoto analyze how the “neoliberal pandemonium” acted during the pandemic in Chile and Brazil, and deal with solidarity paths taken by the Chilean people. Professors Alice Itani and Clarisse Castilhos, in turn, ask how the discourse of development, imposed on the countries of the South, has repercussions on life and work.

The Covid-19 is also present in the article by labor judge Xerxes Gusmão, from Espírito Santo, who questions the normative changes adopted in Brazil, since, contrary to what was necessary, health protection and workplace safety were relaxed. Labor inspector Rui Vidal, from Paraíba, addresses the characterization of the serious and imminent risk in the sanitary reality of the pandemic, assuming that many irregularities in the construction sites have come to mean excess risk to the health of workers, justifying the temporary stoppage work.

Professor Nilton Vasconcelos explores little-known aspects of associative experiences and the emergence of cooperatives in Bahia from the end of the 19th century. Professor Alessandra Bender, from the Federal Institute of Paraná (IFPR), addresses the relationship between the theme of work and professional education and highlights the training of workers as agents of social transformation.

Researcher and unionist Remígio Todeschini presents his research on the effects of shift work, demonstrating that in the case of the fifth group in the chemical industries of São Paulo, the more days off and additional financial income, there will be less physical and mental health problems, and improvement in social and family life. Mental Health researchers Amanda Azambuja and Liliana Guimarães assessed the psychosocial risk factors related to work in state civil servants in Mato Grosso do Sul, emphasizing the need for measures to protect and promote their health.

Fundacentro researcher Maria Engrácia Chaves and UFBA professor Estela Aquino address the issue of gender inequality in reintegrating into the job market after retirement, when women who want or need to return to work face much greater obstacles than those faced by men. The study of lawyers Anna Beatriz Reis, Daiane Silva, Marcela Andrade and Monique Basso, from São Paulo, is also about inequality in the labor market with focus on the barriers imposed on people with disabilities and the right to work as an important tool for emancipation.

Social ill of a past that does not pass, child labor is studied in two articles. Researcher Elisa Vergara, from São Paulo, seeks to uncover the reasons why the regulation of the exploitation of domestic child labor remains outside the legal protection system for children and adolescents. Academic Felipe Caetano da Cunha and professors Vanessa Sousa and Camilla Cavalcanti carried out in Ceará the case study of the explosion of a fireworks factory in Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, which killed sixty people, among them twenty children and adolescents who were exercising one of the worst forms of child labor, analyzing it in the light of the Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

As we said a year ago, we must continue to sow in the middle of the storm. We are all seeds of that future.

Good reading!

The Editors