THE SHOEMAKER’S CRAFT AND ITS RESISTANCE TO THE METAMORPHOSES OF THE WORLD OF WORK
Shoemaker’s craft; Footwear production; World of work.
This work aims to study the shoemaker’s craft, an activity that has been losing ground to the footwear industry, in addition to being directly impacted by recent technological changes. Based on this perspective, the research is directed to remnants of the shoemakers’ craft in order to trace the trajectories of such professionals who have remained in this activity, as well as identifying the elements that have kept the ateliers resistant to the transformations of the world of work. Thus, the researcher's curiosity aims at answering the following question: how has the shoemaker's work, considered a craft activity, resisted the metamorphoses processed in the scope of labor in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century? The sustained hypothesis is that shoemakers have resisted labor changes because their craft is guaranteed by local traditions, which contemplates the demands of specific groups of customers that seek for the service, the sustainability of family business, and also the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation. Furthermore, the economic issue is taken into account, either for the cost-benefit ratio that brings advantages to those who choose to repair shoes instead of buying new ones, or for guaranteeing the activity as subsistence given the difficulty in getting other jobs. As for the main objective, the study proposes to analyze the shoemaker's work and its permanence as a craft activity in the context of the metamorphoses of the world of work and the health crisis from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, in the cities of Parnamirim and Macaíba, which are part of the Metropolitan Region of the city of Natal, RN. For the development of the research, the methodological resource used as a means of obtaining primary data was the life history, which allowed greater autonomy to the interviewee to make the account of their own experience. An interview script was prepared to guide the collection of information from the subjects collaborating in the investigation: five shoemakers who have their ateliers in the urban centers of Parnamirim (RN) and Macaíba (RN), cities that represent the empirical focus of the investigation. In addition to the primary data, the following secondary sources were also used to support this study: a theoretical framework on the subject in evidence, articles, and research. Therefore, the research concluded that the shoemaking craft remains a service segment, despite its decline in recent decades. In spite of the problems related to this work, there are still ways to ensure means of subsistence, once the professionals make use of different strategies to reach customers, which allows the activity to subsist in various ways, occupying open spaces left by the footwear industry, and indicating that, at least in a short term, there is no tendency for the activity to disappear.