Neodesenvolvimento e divisão sociossexual do trabalho: mulheres e trabalho no contexto do Governo Lula (2007-2010)

Abstract

Labor is a basic category for understanding the processes of production and reproduction of social life. The work done by women in different historical contexts and their modes of production and corresponding sociability is a fundamental theme for studies about the transformations that the world of work goes through. Not only from the women's and feminism movement, the categories of gender analysis and, in particular, the socio-sexual division of labor are fundamental for investigations to understand social relations without losing their historical character. The new configurations that the capitalist mode of production has undergone in the 20th and 21st centuries implied the deepening of the socio-sexual, racial and ethnic division of labor. The Brazilian peculiarity, with its passive revolution, constituted a dependent capitalist country and a counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, with slave and conservative traits, which prioritized a minimal state culture to act in the eradication of inequalities and maximum to strengthen the tripod of articulation between State, national capitalism and international capitalism, in order to guarantee the general conditions of capitalist accumulation, through the overexploitation of work. The productive restructuring, as a response to the current structural crisis in capital, meant significant changes to work, now in a new morphology, and brought with it the expansion of the precariousness of labor relations and questions about society with a formal salary base, which was vertiginously deepened with the advent of neo-liberalism, with special repercussions for women Neo-developmentalism, a program of the Lula government within the framework of neo-liberalism, sought to articulate these two fronts, the dependent bourgeoisie and the class that lives off work, in the name of a governability that it intended promote accumulation for capital and distribution of income and labor for the lower classes. The objective of this research was to analyze the repercussions of neodevelopmentism for the socio-sexual division of labor and the (re) configuration of women's work in Brazil (2007-2010). To this end, we seek to theoretically reconstitute the dimension of women's work in the labor market, contextually and historically contextualizing the constitution of neo-developmentalism in Brazil and its main repercussions with regard to the world of work, with special attention to the impacts on the socio-sexual division of labor. The methodology used favored the use of the critical dialectical method, aiming to observe the object of our study in the present historical moment, however mediated by the relation universality x particularity, making use of the praxis categories, totality, historicity, mediation and contradiction. As an instrumental methodological resource, we opted for a bibliographic and documentary research. The research revealed that neodevelopmentism caused a significant increase in the number of formal jobs for the whole working class. At the same time, it ensured a set of policies for activating the labor market and professional qualification - which provided access to labor and social security protection policies - and the implementation of guidelines that historically had a close relationship with the quality of life and work of women, such as policies to combat violence against women and the expansion of the number of daycare centers. However, this government proved to be contradictory, since together with these measures a government policy was maintained that did not break with neoliberalism, which implied a cyclical reconfiguration of the policies, not acting on the structural causes of gender asymmetries.