Novas formas de regulação neoliberal do trabalho: um estudo com trabalhadores de postos de combustíveis

Abstract

The world of labor is an extremely dynamic and challenging dimension of social life in relation to our possibilities of study sociology of work. Since approximately the mid-1970s, the world of labor has been taking on new forms of organization and workers have begun to occupy positions different from those they once occupied in the world of labor, positions that are compatible with the new forms of exploitation of human labor in the midst of the process of productive restructuring and its necessary condition, flexible accumulation. In this sense, we will take gas station workers as an empirical dimension to, through data extracted using direct observation as a method, demonstrate how these workers position themselves in this new (and precarious) world of labor, together with the pertinent labor laws that reveal the way of being of the new forms of neoliberal labor regulation, with the fundamental purpose of demonstrating how labor regulation works today. Thus, the present investigation led us to the result that the new forms of neoliberal labor regulation operate on a tripartite division: deregulation, direct withdrawal of labor rights/regulations; “negative regulation”, forms of regulation that make work and workers less protected; and the elimination of jobs, the very struggle for existence, these forms of regulation being concrete effects of the process of productive restructuring and reorganization of the world of work.