Ideologia e significado do trabalho: o caso dos trabalhadores por conta própria

Abstract

After production restructuring, the heterogeneity of labour has increased and, consequently, the rates of informal labour (salaried without formal registration and self-employed). The allocation of workers in that context is mediated by ideology, which corresponds to the ideas that act upon the individuals’ social praxis towards conflict resolution, which in turn reach individual consciences through the meanings. This research aims to analyse the characteristics of ideology within informal labour context through the meanings attributed by self-employed workers. Twelve (12) semistructured interviews were performed with market workers from the street small Businesses Shopping Mall from Alecrim (locally known as “camelódromo”), a neighbourhood in Natal, Brazil, and the number of participants was determined by theoretical saturation. The meanings of labour have been analysed based on the biographical contexts of the participants, their relationship with social context and the ideological function they perform. It was identified that the participants who worked during childhood, motivated by their families’ subsistence, had been through more than four different professional experiences, including a previous experience as informal market workers and precarious formal labour. They establish contradicting relations of competition and cooperation towards other market workers and do not plan to interrupt their current work in the foreseeable future. They attribute meanings to work as a source of income as well as a form of time occupation, the salaried work as a place of humiliation and the self-employment as a way to satisfy their own demands. These meanings all agree with the conditions to which those individuals have been subjected and with how work is conceived within capitalism (labour as a monetary source and the center of social relations). They perform three ideological functions: fixing the workers under the mentioned work conditions, preventing the development of class conscience and the critics to wage labour. It is necessary that the organisms of workers’ representation become aware of the potentialities self-employed workers can create by taking part in the broader struggles of the working class.