Hello, in the previous class, we discussed the concept of work, what it is, and how it relates, in general terms, to the constitution of subjectivity, health, and the social experience of work. In this class, we will discuss more about the relationships between work and production in the contemporary world, the world as it is. Why are we studying "work" and not simply its effects on people's health in this course?
Because it is essential to understand the relationships work has in human life and how it determines and shapes people’s lives and how things are. We will look at multiple aspects of "work" that profoundly affect people’s lives and society as a whole. There are social dimensions such as geographical and temporal issues, the distribution of people within the social strata, and the production of subjectivities, i.
e. , what each person is. Being a worker nowadays is different from being a worker 100 years ago and will probably be very different 100 years from now, as well as the processes of illness and health within society.
The illness processes of a society are closely linked to how it organizes itself in terms of production. How people get sick is related to how they live and work. And how this occurs is what we will discuss in this class.
There are many ways in which work relates, as I said, to the world and social life in general. The first one is how work impacts subordinate relationships. We cannot imagine that people who are hired by others, even if through exchange agreements, that these exchanges are equivalent.
People who sell their labor, that is, employ themselves to someone else, are likely to be in a subordinate relationship with the hiring party. The hiring party chooses the hours, salary, and role they want those hired to fit into. There is an unequal relationship of subordination.
This has enormous effects on privileges and on how people are distributed socially. Society is also organized around the world of work. It is not by chance that, for example, the richest tend to be those who hire people, and the poorest, are those who sell their labor.
This even impacts the organization of space itself. People who are wealthier and have better positions or are business owners tend to live in a certain type of space, while those who sell their labor, especially those who sell it for a lower price, tend to live in a different type of space. Work has a direct impact even in this sense of distribution.
This is not a contemporary phenomenon, history is marked by this. The passage from a feudal type of labor to slave labor to industrial and contemporary forms of work and services mediated by the world of Information Technologies is not just a transformation of the world without labor or labor without the world. It is a relation of co-effect, where one causes the other, which causes the other.
Contractual, political, and economic relationships are co-producers, and one thing influences the other. This has immense effects, but which have, in the scope of work, the experience of concrete realization. By observing daily work we can verify how this has occurred throughout history.
Besides the fact that all of society is related to the world of work and the distribution of people in social strata, etc. , the historical transformation itself is directly related to how work occurs, insofar as all the wealth of a people is created through work and every historical shift also involves the attempt to modify and expand how this social wealth can be produced, it is through the experience of work that these transformations can be observed. Historically over time, we have moved through the dynamics of feudal and slave labor to reach the industrial and contemporary forms of work done through mediatic mechanisms, and we can now observe that these shifts occur not only because of changes in technical equipment but also because of how changes in work processes have taken place.
So, work is made up of this intense transformation dynamic of history. And social wealth itself is the result of collective work. We cannot imagine that these tools that are part of our daily life were created by one person, inventor, group, or company.
It is an accumulation of human work that allows the world to materialize as it is. We should understand that this complexity is part of this production process and speaks of a world related to work. Every aspect of life is affected by someone's work.
In addition to these material dimensions, social, ethical, and racial divisions of society, the world of relationships is also directly related to the world of work. Let me give you a quick example. What people have in terms of exchange is not only the characteristics of their abstract work but also relationships that are almost an identity given to them based on what they are.
For example, women are attributed with a kind of knowledge and characteristics considered “feminine. ” When we see a woman selling her labor, a perception of what is typically feminine within a given society is projected on her. So, for example, it’s much more common to see women performing cleaning tasks in offices and other environments because, socially and historically, this is understood to be an attribute of women.
Interestingly, these so-called “feminine” attributes are related to how women are raised from childhood. Unlike boys, girls are often given a play house to take care of and are told early on that they will be mothers who will take care of household chores like cooking. And when women enter the job market, they take courses that intensify these characteristics.
A very interesting study about female workers in Japan found, for example, that in typically female jobs, Ikebana courses, which are believed to improve “feminine” skills were offered. And the women who took these courses were the ones who got the jobs that required these specific skills. It is a cyclical process between the characteristics expected of a social group and the characteristics of the work expected from them.
The same goes for men. It’s no wonder, for example, that from an early age, boys are expected to be braver and more aggressively face the world and its challenges. Therefore, jobs that offer risk and a need for greater physical strength and mobility will typically be offered and assigned to them.
It is more likely to see men working in jobs such as food delivery, where workers are more exposed to risk, which is considered an inherently “male” characteristic, than women. There is a historical production in how men are raised to be more exposed to risk. There is a closely related process between people's race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.
, and the type of work that is socially expected from that group. There is a strong relationship between the type of work performed and the type of illnesses workers are subject to. It is not by chance that there is a greater incidence of “Repetitive Strain Injury” in certain social groups than in others, who might be more susceptible to mental disorders or accidents, for example.
There is a strong relationship between people's characteristics and the characteristics of the work they are related to. And these characteristics are not random and don’t depend on individual gifts or abilities inherited from somewhere or how a person was raised. Social distribution allows certain groups of people, depending on their characteristics, to access certain services and not others.
This is related to both the productive world, i. e. , work, and the reproductive world, i.
e. , how people are; white women, black women, white men, black men, heterosexuals, homosexuals, etc. How these people develop throughout this reproductive process is also related to how they will be directed to certain types of work that are socially, racially, or sexually distributed within the social environment of a given society.
Besides that, there is a relationship between these aspects and geographic aspects. Work distributes people in space. Structural changes in society are trespassed by changes in the organization of the production process itself, for example.
100 or 70 years ago, industries were more grouped. Therefore, there was a flow from people's homes to job sites and vice versa. Today, industries are fragmented, and the production process occurs throughout the cities.
No wonder there is a higher circulation of people on the streets and roads, and not only because there are more cars, although this also explains it. The productive world is complex and not limited to large concentrated groups. Society has a greater flow of people in cities because production is more horizontal and spread out in cities, and this distribution is unequal depending on people’s characteristics.
A black man is subjected to a particular type of housing and geographic context based on his color and education. And certain types of work are generally offered to this type of group. So, these social traits are related to his work and vice versa.
There is a strong relationship between these processes and illness processes as well. So, this black man, who is subjected to a type of social context, is much more vulnerable to certain forms of violence than a white, middle-class man with a higher-paying job, having been raised differently, with a different type of education, and to whom other types of work are offered. Therefore, geography is not only related to where people live but also to the trajectory that culminates in the type of work delegated and socially distributed to these different groups.
So, the privileges these groups have are very distinct. It is in this sense, then, that work organizes society as a whole and organizes the territory and also the use of time within that territory. Space is reconfigured both socially and economically in terms of work interests.
Finalizing today's class, science is also crossed by this dimension of work. The development of personal computers, such as this one, wasn’t meant to be an industrial work tool. Computers were developed for the world of work, but not PCs.
However, as the need arose and the benefits became evident, PCs became popular by allowing anyone to access a computer. But could it be that if they hadn’t been incorporated into the world of work, they would have had the same type of repercussion and social investment allowing their proliferation? In general, scientific knowledge follows this parameter.
Useful tools in the work world are used and developed more. This impacts training, education, social networking, and how workers are. Nowadays, certain sets of knowledge and requirements are produced to transform educational processes.
Educational transformations come from transformations in the areas of work, science, and economy in a continuous cycle that impacts how each one of us is. In this class, we discussed the relationships between work and the organization of people in space, society, and social privileges. In the following classes, we will further discuss the characteristics of contemporary work and their effects on contractual relations, personality traits, what is expected of a worker to do their job appropriately, and how this is related to the types of illnesses we observe today.
We look forward to seeing you in the next class.
