“Se eu pudesse trabalharia só oito horas”: As condições de trabalho dos mototaxistas e vendedores ambulantes de Palmas/TO

Abstract

We are currently living in a scenario in which the increase of unemployment rates, the worsening of working conditions and setbacks in the scope of social rights have been amplifying the poverty as well as increasing the number of workers looking for alternative means to guarantee income and survival. The activities carried out by the poor population are escalating in Brazilian cities in number and variety and it is intensifying the divisions of labor, assumed in this research, as a starting point to understand the theory of the circuits of the urban economy. We intend to analyze the working conditions present in the lower circuit of Palmas, from two niches of activities: the motorcycle taxi service and the street commerce. For this study we chose documentary and bibliographic research and, in the field work, we conducted interviews with 65 workers enrolled in the investigated activities. The results indicated that the lower circuit in Palmas follows a national trend, that means it is in the midst of an expansion process, having the current crisis of employment and the expansion of the entrepreneurship and self-employment discourse as drivers, these factors have been used by capital and supported by a neoliberal state as strategies to expand the forms of domination of the working class. On top of that, it also reinforces that unemployment and precariousness are inherent to the capitalist mode of production. In addition to that, the research indicates the deterioration of the living conditions most of the workers interviewed suffer, given the precarious and unprotected ways in which they work. The activities of the lower circuit in the capital city of Tocantins have become an exile for a contingent of unemployed people, rather than the solution to the serious problem the productive world is currently experiencing. Thus, the motorcycle taxi people and street vendors experience the process of precariousness not only at work, but also of their lives.