Collection of Articles Analyze New Forms of Unemployment
Desemprego: Trajetórias, Identidades, Mobilizações is the title of a collection of articles from the researchers from the Center for Metropolitan Studies and from other national and international research institutions, which has just been released by Editora Senac, in the Trabalho e Sociedade Series. The papers which make up the collection were presented and discussed at the seminar, Desemprego: Trajetórias, Biografias e Mobilização (Unemployment: Trajectories, Biographies and Mobilization) (USP/Cebrap, 2000), which explored how the changes in the labor market and the various ways in which work relations are becoming more flexible, have led to forms of unemployment, highly variable in nature between societies. The main strategy adopted in this book is to compare contexts and paths (sectorally, regionally or internationally) in order to open new possibilities for in depth analyses of the subject. For this reason, the publication is organized in two parts: the first presents results from studies on Brazil; the second presents findings from studies on France, Japan and Italy, the three other societies on which the seminar focused. In the introductory chapter, Didier Demazière engages with the central theme of the collection—unemployment—emphasizing that it is a phenomenon with changeable contours, socially and subjectively constructed. For this reason— in order to better understand unemployment – is not enough to look at the social position of those who experience unemployment but also the situation in which they appear and the social contexts in which people live and act. The first part of the work, Trajetórias inter-setoriais e mobilidade no mercado de trabalho: comparações intra-nacionais (Inter-sectoral Trajectories and Labor Market Mobility: Intra-National Comparisons) brings together three Brazilian case studies which reflect comparatively on the changes in the structure of the labor market and their effects on the occupational trajectories of individuals. In the first of them, Nadya Araujo Guimarães, Adalberto Cardoso e Alvaro Comin analyze the forms of industrial restructuring occurring in the first half of the 1990’s in the country and its varying impact on the trajectories of the workers who were fired. From there they compare two of the main Brazilian industrial complexes: automobiles and chemicals. In the second case study, Sandra Brandão, Margareth Watanabe, Sinesio Ferreira and Paula Montagner study the movement between working, unemployment and economic inactivity in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area in the 1990’s. They conclude that the movement appears to be extremely varied and that variation can be better understood if we take into account the individual differences relative to professional experience, schooling, sex and age of the individuals. In the third study, Valeria Pero focuses the case of the labor market in Rio de Janeiro, raising questions as to whether different types of workers’ trajectories influence their chances of professional growth, in terms of occupational mobility and salaries. The second part of the volume, Trajetórias, formas identitárias e mobilização: comparações internacionais (Trajectories, Identity Forms and Mobilization: International Comparisons) expands the discussion towards a new thematic axis, by associate the changes in the labor market and the new patterns of trajectories to the reconstruction of “identity forms” and the possibilities of mobilization and collective action. Case studies conducted in other countries are brought to the fore and make the comparisons even richer when they document the existence of variable international configurations for those phenomena. Claude Dubar and Didier Demazière begin this section by reflecting on the constant process of recreation of identities in the French case. From there they coin the term “identity forms”. They point to the multiplicity and growing individualization of that process, contrary to the idea of the ‘massification’ of workers’ identities, which is the common characterization of the literature on the Fordist period. It is clear that, for those who think of these phenomena in terms of Brazil’s reality, the instability of the market has been perceptible for a long time, given that salaried, protected and long-term work-relations never became the norm. For those whose analysis starts with from the experience of European countries, for example, the process of flexibilization of work-relations is a relatively new experience, that causes discomfort and uncertainties, which is experienced across all segments in the world of labor. In France, to take one of these cases, since the 1970’s occupational transitions have been intensifying as structural and long-term unemployment has increased. This has compromised the regularity and linearity that makes occupational trajectories of individuals of what is known as the “thirty glorious years” that followed the Second World War and marked capitalist development in the second half of the 20th century. Old mechanisms of regulations have come, since the 1980’s, to be increasingly questioned. The researchers, not by chance, are called upon to develop methodologies to characterize the novelty of this situation. This is illustrated by Maria-Teresa Pignoni’s chapter on the French experience of longitudinal studies seeking to accompany this phenomenon of increasing transitions, a challenge for public policies in the “welfare states.” In Japan, the path to flexibilization, as well as the forms of unemployment, were marked by the experience of ridding themselves of another norm, also strongly rooted in the post-war period, called “system of life-ling work”. That rupture was made highly visible during the 1990’s. There also, as documented in detail by Kurumi Sugita, unemployment reached workers in an unequal way, falling most strongly on women and the youngest. Another paradigm was being broken with the intense development of new unemployment labor forms referred to as “atypical” , to challenge a case that is argued in classical labor studies as stability in the way of including the workers. But these processes also modify the conditions in which mechanisms of labor rights are demanded. The book asks about the place given to the unemployed in these societies, seen as falling between the change in the structure of labor markets and the forms of expression of collective interest. Maria-Teresa Pignoni takes two European realities rich in organizing experiences of unemployed workers—those in France and Italy—to reflect on the initiatives of institutionalization of collective action, trying to understand their genesis and the challenges that they place. This brings the author to ask at the same time about the place given to the unemployed in their societies and about the transformations of unemployment and of work. Desemprego: Trajetórias, Identidades, Mobilizações is, in this way, a book that looks to confront challenges that spur not only researchers, but everyone immersed in the recent context of durable and recurring unemployment that devastate the most different countries. As Nadya Araújo Guimarães explains, “the authors of the collection are conscious that in order to confront these challenges, they have to take on as much the need of conceptual renovation as well as innovative ways of surveying and researching. And they use the resource of comparison with conviction--in its varied nature and in its different levels-- as a tool of the best kind to elucidate specificities, to challenge our comprehension, our forms of collective action and the public policies”. In this sense, the volume becomes a record of a moment of many arising questions, provoked by profound transformations that at the same time challenge and nourish analytic intelligence in the field of labor studies. It also becomes an important instrument for understanding social inequalities created and/or amplified by unemployment, truly a social phenomenon, not only due to the amplitude with which it affects individuals in our societies, but also for the force it makes itself present in their imagination as one of the key issues for quality of life. Read the introduction of the book, written by Nadya Araújo Guimarães, researcher at CEM, and by Helena Hirata, researcher at CNRS, editors of Desemprego: Trajetórias, Identidades, Mobilizações (Unemployment: Trajectories, Identities, Mobilizations) (requests should be made to Editora do SENAC, SP, and quality bookstores) - in Portuguese
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