The geography of labour under construction: theoretical challenges and research praxis

• Antonio Thomaz Junior ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidade Estadual Paulista/Presidente Prudente
• Localización: Brazilian geography: in theory and in the streets / Rubén Camilo Lois González (ed. lit.), Marco Antonio Mitidiero Junior (ed. lit.), 2022, ISBN 9789811937033, págs. 319-345
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • An already bad situation, with the added effects of COVID-19, has unveiled an explosive and cruel reality for workers, society and the environment in general. What has now become a reality, after being reshaped for the past 70 years, especially in Brazil, has revealed the simultaneous coexistence of regressive and ghostly forms (based on technological advances), associated with more rigid practices of labour control. As such, based on Taylorist-Fordist-Toyotist foundations, and under the auspices of technological development and information technology (IT), and now in the second decade of the twenty-first century of digital platforms, the brand of what we call systemic labour degradation is being imposed. The proliferation of outsourcing and platforms are imposing the dismantling of protection rights orchestrated by the State and other bodies linked to the interests of capital and the bourgeoisie. In the course of our research, the forms of (de)realisation, exploitation, subordination, etc., have allowed us to capture the contradictions and territorial dynamics of class conflicts, revealed through the existing plasticity, whether they are peasants, workers, employees in general, Quilombolas, men, women, formal employees or informal, temporary, self-employed, subordinate freelancers, etc. It gives us no pleasure to envisage that within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of unemployed workers could rise by 30 or 40% by the end of 2020, totalling 40 million unemployed and disillusioned, and the situation could be even more explosive in the post-pandemic era. The Geography of Labour produced under the CEGeT has been applied to studies and critical analyses in order to understand the objectified mechanisms of the complex process guided by the extraction/appropriation of the surplus manpower by capital on a global scale, in times of structural and systemic crisis. Nevertheless, only research will allow for an understanding and argumentation based on a dialectical praxis of the denial/affirmation of labour and its transcendence, based on experiences and learning which arise from the territorial movement of labour, and from the historical practices based on precepts of solidarity, registered around the world.