Precarious Work, Informality and Gender Relations in Brazil

Precarious Work, Informality and Gender Relations in Brazil by Ângela Maria Carneiro Araújo, UNICAMP, São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

Movements of expansion of the flexible production fostered increasing precarious, outsourced, informal, temporary or part-time employment worldwide. Also, old employment modalities were recreated, such as working from home, which appears both on the top and on the bottom of value chains through piece-based work and the ‘work cooperatives’.

This reconfiguration of work took place not only by keeping, but also by deepening gender and race inequalities in the labour market, to the extent that more flexible working corresponded to increased informality of production and work relations.

Moreover, the increased feminization of the labour market occurred, mainly, through the participation of women, and in higher degree of black women, in outsourced enterprises and in different forms of informal and precarious work. Recent data from sources such as IBGE, PNAD and IWO show that, if the masculine presence in the informal market has increased, women are still the majority in both traditional forms of informality (autonomous work or self-employment, domestic work etc) and new modalities of informal employment in the industry, small enterprises, and in the outsourcing work cooperatives.

The objectives of the paper are:

• to examine how the relationships between organized/formal segments of economy and the informal activities are reconfigured in the context of economic restructuring;
• how this reconfiguration affects the insertion, the income, and the work conditions of women.

Furthermore, the paper discusses what is new in informality, its increasing heterogeneity and its intricate relationships with processes of outsourcing, based on the concept of the new informality.

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