Da saúde dos trabalhadores à singularidade docente: precarização e adoecimento nas universidades públicas brasileiras

Abstract

The analyses developed in this research take as their starting point the centrality of the category of work, through the Marxist tradition, in order to understand its relationship with health from the perspective of capital, revealing that its destructive character is also expressed in the degradation of workers' health. Thus, the evidence of work-related health problems, condensed in the current situation, reflects on the uniqueness of teaching workers who are faced with flexible and precarious working conditions, combined with high productivity demands, causing overload and making them more susceptible to illness. The aim of this study is to analyze the health-disease process of teaching staff, which involves job insecurity, academic productivism and illness at federal public universities in Brazil. From a methodological point of view, this research was guided by historical-dialectical materialism and, in procedural terms, a bibliographical survey and empirical investigation of secondary data were carried out. Having said that, we start by criticizing the concept of work, in its particular form in the capitalist mode of production, which makes it possible to understand the issue of workers' health and to problematize the constitution of the field of workers' health. This investigative path is necessary in order to deepen the discussion on the transformations that have taken place in labor relations in the face of the structural crisis of capital and its consequences (productive restructuring, neoliberalism and financialization) in Brazil, which have reflected on the historical processes of building workers' health care, as well as on the singularity of teachers' health, given the management models implemented in the Federal Institutions of Higher Education (IFES), through commercialized logics, which imply the working conditions of the teachers who work in them. The analyses reveal that teachers are subjected to a variety of workloads that require them to intensify their work activities in order to meet productivity targets and demands, which has caused a great deal of wear and tear on their mental health, which can evolve into more serious conditions such as anxiety, depression, burnout etc. In view of this, it can be seen that the working conditions of teachers at federal public universities are stressful and have an impact on the illness of these workers, in which degradation occurs not only in the body, but also in the mind.