Transformações no mundo do trabalho e impactos nas relações produtivas na zona canavieira alagoana

Abstract

Transformations in the social world have significantly altered work relations, employability, income and well-being, among others. Some authors believe that this set of changes affecting multiple dimensions of life implies a post-industrial society. According to the creator of this concept, Domenico De Masi (1999), this archetype of society is characterized by elements intrinsic to know-how, such as productive knowledge. From this perspective, labor relations today are increasingly based on the development of science and technology, demanding more intellectual knowledge from workers than physical effort. However, when we look at the profile of the fastest-growing occupations in the country, we see many contradictions between the rhetoric of post-industrialism and social reality, since most of the jobs created today require little qualification and a lot of effort. There is no doubt that major transformations have been taking place in the world of work as a result of processes such as the productive restructuring of capital. But these are far from resulting in occupations that are less degrading to workers' physical and mental health. In the case of Brazil's agrarian space, the productive restructuring of capital has contributed to the expansion of agribusiness, resulting in the deepening of social ills, such as temporary and informal work. At the heart of this discussion, work is undergoing a process of reconfiguration, anchored in a neoliberal logic that makes political and socioeconomic conditions very unfavorable for workers, especially those who already had less access to rights, such as rural workers. Faced with these new forms of productive organization, the consolidation of critical and collective thinking, based on historical and dialectical materialism, is necessary in order to understand the dynamics of capital and seek answers to a question that requires constant analysis: where is work heading? In the Brazilian countryside, the history of the process of modernizing agriculture has resulted in major changes in labour relations that have already been widely analysed by authors from different fields of knowledge (GRAZIANO SILVA, 1982; DELGADO, 1985; MÜLLER, 1989; OLIVEIRA, 2010; 2016). However, the back and forth of the uneven and combined development of capital (SMITH, 1988) has produced significant reconfigurations in production processes, which continually demand analysis of the prevailing trends. In this sense, the general aim of this dissertation is to analyze recent transformations in the world of work, especially their repercussions in the Brazilian countryside in general and in the sugarcane zone in Alagoas in particular. In terms of methodological procedures, this study is based on bibliographical research, descriptive statistics and fieldwork, with a qualitative approach, in which interviews were conducted with some workers in the sugarcane zone of Alagoas. Through the interviews, it is possible to see how the changes taking place in the agrarian space cause illness, labor mobility and poverty, as well as a lack of understanding of the processes that engender these labor activities, driven by the dependence of the Alagoas economy on the sugar-alcohol sector.