The crisis of labor and new forms of job and income generation: distinct faces of cooperative labor, workers and the gender question

Abstract

This project focuses on the main characteristics of the current labor crisis, emphasizing especially the diffusion of the recent forms of precarious jobs associated with cost reduction, such as homework, work without contract or fixed term contract, used for costs reduction. It also aims to analyze the use of work carried out in cooperatives in their contradictory duality. On the one hand as a form of cost reduction and job precariousness, where autonomy exists in a merely formal sense, and on the other hand as an alternative means for generating employment and income in self managed enterprises. Here we aim to discuss to what extent these new forms of job configuration, which are understood in Brazil as experiences of a "Solidary economy", can be seen as viable alternatives of employment and income generation. (AU)