Sociedade limitada : a política de terceirização no setor público brasileiro

Abstract

This work discusses the role of the Brazilian State in introduction and legitimating the subcontracting model of the labor force known as 'outsourcing'. Based on the empirical observation of its huge growth in the last decades, the analysis of this phenomenon in the Brazilian public sector starts from the assumption that the purely economic motivations involved in the process do not guarantee a satisfactory sociological explanation. If, in private sector, the productive efficiency involved in the allocation of outsourced services as a cost cutting mechanism is a plausible justification in the light of the business cycle, in public sector, the intended efficiency gain assumes distinct historical meanings by force of political components that structure it. In a broader sense, it is the boundaries of the Welfare State, as developed in the second postwar, that are called into question in the rise of the outsourcing model in public sector. In a narrowly sense, the understanding of the mechanisms of incorporation and legitimating of outsourcing in the public sector must focus on the political components involved in our social formation. Thus, once its adoption by ideologically distant governments points to the same pattern of incorporation with growth bias – an effective policy of state –, one must ally the analysis of the political demands that accommodate the outsourcing in the state bureaucracy with the historical elements of social reproduction capable of influencing the Brazilian labor market. Therefore, the hypothesis developed here claims that outsourcing in the Brazilian public sector should be understood in the light of the making of a middle class established in the shadow of the State. In other words, in the absence of an economically complex society, the Brazilian State acted to absorb the professional elements formed by an educational system of privilege, which guaranteed the maintenance of order by ideological homogeneity. This trait of our history is strongly associated with the remnants of the slave system, which disqualifies manual and unskilled activities, while making it difficult to consolidate a society based on the free market. The social consequences of this model of incorporation of outsourcing by the Brazilian State are more representative when observed the difficulty of constitution of a public sense of political action given the level of class demobilization and alienation of the public space in which this portion of the labor force is thrown.