Disciplining the Workforce: Controlling Workers in the Restructuring of Production

In: Latin American perspectives, Band 33, Heft 3, S. 89-110

Abstract

Production restructuring in Brazil has brought changes in the way workers are controlled within the factory, and this has influenced the effects on them of adverse conditions in the labor market. An analysis of these effects based upon research conducted between 1980 and 2000 in six sectors of Brazilian industry—automotive, domestic electrical appliance manufacture, chemical and petrochemical, textile, footwear, and telecommunication equipment—points to increasing heterogeneity in the workforce and a clear loss of the power that unions acquired in the 1980s.