Nas linhas da degradação do trabalho: “telemarketing”, difundindo a precarização no Brasil

Abstract

The growth of the service sector and the retraction of the industrial sector have proven to be very consistent in the context of productive restructuring, which has led to flexibilization, precariousness and fragmentation of the working class, through the adequacy of the use and control of the workforce. With special emphasis here we place the telemarketing sector, which, by combining 21st century technologies with 19th and 20th century working conditions, mixes Toyotized flexibility with Taylorist control techniques. Therefore, the scope of the research is to analyze, in the “lines” of work degradation, telemarketing as a form of work that diffuses the precariousness of work in Brazil. To this end, we guided the analysis by the theoretical methodological framework of historical-dialectical materialism, with the aim of establishing an organic connection between theoretical knowledge and objective historical reality. In procedural terms, we carried out a bibliographical review and documentary analysis. That said, we start from the ontological foundations of work and the peculiar contours of its execution in capitalist society, going through crucial aspects of the dynamics of the structural crisis and its impact on the scope of work. Investigative path necessary to understand the new morphology of work, highlighting here the peculiar contours of Brazilian peripheral capitalism, which determines the superexploitation of the workforce in the country. Therefore, we consider the telemarketing sector to be the result of a harmful combination: outsourcing, privatization and the intensive use of information technologies. There is a sector whose work organization is clearly Taylorized based on constant vigilance, strategic management hierarchization, intensification, reduction of “dead time” in the journey, prescribed work and focus on goals. Characteristics that trigger a series of indicators of precarious work, ranging from the predominant profile of the professional category with a clear cut of gender, generation and race; remuneration, already below the worker's needs and linked to productivity, which has similarities with the “piece wage”; the turnover marked by the fact that the sector is a “transit place” for young people in their first job, attracted by the flexible working hours, which allow them to combine work with other activities and by the incipient possibility of professional advancement; fragility of resistance due to the difficulty in forming collective identity and, even with moments of resistance, weakening the organizational capacity of unions; and, consequently, the illness potential of the sector, which makes operators a commodity with a short shelf life, as, in a short period of time, they begin to develop pathologies, due to the intense and stressful pace of work, as well as harassing behaviors. Given this scenario, it is clear that telemarketing in Brazil re-updates precarious working conditions, as well as placing the superexploitation of work on a new basis, generating the premature wear and tear of young women recently inserted into the job market and subjugated to peripheral capitalism, by having its workforce consumed exponentially. Here is telemarketing slaughtering, slashing, exploiting and making workers sick, like a true “people grinding machine”.