Photo: Reproduction: Social Networks
New work relationships, consolidated and accelerated especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the relaxation of recent labor laws, have caused significant impacts on workers’ health. The analysis is carried out by doctor in Public Health and physician René Mendes, who coordinates the Study Group on the Impacts of New Morphologies of Work on the Life and Health of the Working Class.
The group was created in March this year, precisely with the aim of studying and giving visibility to these new problems that threaten the lives and health of the working class. One of them is the false promise of autonomy, offered by the work formats that have increased since 2021, as is the case with app delivery people and individual transport drivers.
“It’s a false entrepreneurship, a lack of autonomy that, in fact, causes people to work more and more and earn less and less, all without social protection”, he adds.
Mendes highlights the need to regulate new work relationships, to guarantee social protection and guarantee workers’ rights, in order to mitigate the impacts on the health of this group. Check out the full interview below!
You are the coordinator of a study group that focuses on changes at work and their impact on workers’ health. What have you observed throughout your career, to date, that motivated the creation of the group?
There has been growing concern in society about new work formats, especially those that became more visible during the pandemic. When we all started using, for example, delivery apps, the phenomenon of growth in the population of workers who use app platforms as a form of work became evident. Delivery drivers are an example. The working class is increasingly sick because of this type of work.
This is what we call new morphologies of work. I proposed that the University of São Paulo include these impacts on the lives and health of workers. The complexity of these impacts requires or requires a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, interprofessional approach. This flourishing of this model led us to create this project. So, it’s a kind of flag, a stake, a landmark to draw attention to a serious current problem.
One of the main changes we see today is the flexibilization of labor relations and rights, since the emergence of service applications, such as Uber, iFood, among others. How do you analyze this moment?
These new work relationships, as I said, were consolidated during the pandemic, but they remained and advanced with the labor reform. The reform, by making labor rights more flexible, made casual workers isolated. So, they ended up fooled by a proposal called entrepreneurship: everyone is autonomous and entrepreneurial. This discourse found at that time a very favorable environment to mischaracterize work relationships.
The 2017 labor reform still seeks to dismantle, so to speak, the solidarity and unity of workers. It also dismantled the unions, the classes, the categories that organize the working class. In this case, this dispersion made each worker independent, making them work increasingly harder and earn, in fact, very little, without social protection.
I’ll give just one example: when you place three orders to be delivered on the same route and only pay one for it to the delivery person, but the company receives the three amounts it charges, this clearly sets up perverse equations.
It is a false entrepreneurship, a lack of autonomy that, in fact, causes people to work more and more and earn less and less, all without social protection.
Is it possible to maintain the current work structure without causing so much damage to the health of professionals?
There are initiatives in other countries, and we are also at the beginning here in Brazil, with some cooperative models or the development of control algorithms by the workers themselves. For example, so that they can have more control over the hours they are available, which are the unpaid hours.
Another initiative is the regulation, for example, of having support points, support posts on the routes they take. This allows them to go to the bathroom or eat something, in short, to rest, instead of always being marginalized on the sidewalks or in places where they remain temporarily, sometimes in the open. There should also be controls, for example, regarding the duration of the journey.
What pathologies do you identify as those that most affect workers?
Today, in general, the illness profile of the working class could be summarized into two large blocks. The first block are the so-called pathologies or diseases of wear and tear or high performance, of work intensification, where burnout and fatigue come into play.
The second block are those related to mental exhaustion and the intensification of work, called illnesses of loneliness. These are the diseases that are affecting work patterns today where bonds of solidarity, belonging and collectiveness have been intentionally dismantled and disrupted. There is an individualization of tasks, including in disguised ways, such as remote work.
These illnesses of loneliness, therefore, are essentially depressive illnesses. In other words, mental disorders of a depressive nature, such as severe or mild depression, which culminate in suicide.
What contributes to this picture? Could it be new work relationships?
The intensification of work is today one of the most typical and perverse characteristics of workers’ illness. It’s working more and earning less, that is, working more to be able to earn a minimum survival. This is characterized by these new work relationships that I mentioned.
Then, working on the street, in open environments, subject to all weather conditions, subject to accidents, subject to assaults, to expressions of violence, is added to a scheme that demands higher speeds and a greater number of deliveries per time, in relationships such as those of food deliveries or those of ‘uberization’. These characteristics present in these work relationships encourage this illness.
In these new work relationships, demands are made, humiliating strategies are used and impossible goals are demanded. These people can’t handle it. So, this combination of new formats, whether apparently more visible, as I mentioned, food delivery drivers, or today’s models of work organization based on remote management, both are ways of demanding work, goals, productivity, production, achievement of certain notes in apps. The required productivity causes people to be decompensated and fall ill, if not commit suicide. All this without social protection.
In practice, there are fewer workers, more work overload, more demands, dismissals, replacement of three people with one, for example, disqualification of workers. This is what we have today in these new relationships and what makes workers sick.
How do you evaluate the federal government’s performance on the topic? In your assessment, what measures should the government adopt?
There was a lot of expectation, now reaching the Lula government, a lot of expectation of a reversal, for example, of the labor reform, the pension reform and other attacks that were made to withdraw social rights, specifically in the field of work and social security. The problem is that most of these setbacks that have occurred in recent years have occurred in the legislative house, in Congress, and also in the Judiciary. There is little margin for the Executive.
The short and medium term prognosis is very bleak. The question is: will it change? There is little room for change, but the strength of the changes would be, let’s say, in society. We are betting that more people, more social movements become aware of the importance of workers and their rights, their health, their security in terms of employment and security also in the physical sense, and who are the workers.
According to the WHO, depression and anxiety affect more and more workers. What contributes to this picture?
This is driven by this model of new relationships that devalues work and workers, and generates austerity policies, policies to reduce social investments and the generation of productive jobs, to the extent that you are increasingly valuing outsourcing, precariousness, mechanization and robotization. So, this threat of job loss, threat of job loss… In fact, there is precariousness and, with that, also an increase in a range not only in explicit unemployment, which continues to be high throughout the world and increasing, as well as, this limbo of rights and survival in a context in which people still live, that is, the working class.
Source: Redação Terra
