PRECARIZATION OF PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY OF DOMESTIC EMPLOYEES IN NATAL (RN) – BRAZIL
Housework; precariousness of work; race; genre; class.
The work aimed to understand how sex/gender relations, social class and race are reproduced in monthly housekeepers’ professional activity from Natal/RN, in order to contribute to discussions about precariousness and precarious work, in Work Psychology area. Considering the idea that production in the context of material life is a reference for the social relations analysis, combined to materialist feminism analysis, we investigated the work activity of the domestic worker taking into account the recent political and social interference upon this professional group, as well as the social, historical and cultural context from which the profession emerges in Brazil. To this end, a descriptive-exploratory and qualitative research was conducted, which aimed to describe the group profile of professionals approached through the Union of Domestic Servants of Rio Grande do Norte. Demographic, professional and biographical information were collected in order to explore the participants trajectory in both life and professional histories. The results obtained indicate two main profiles of domestic workers that differ mainly according to sex / gender and age. Biographical reports indicate life trajectories with commonalities such as child labor and domestic violence. From an occupational point of view, it was observed that there is a strong naturalization of domestic service as a woman's work and that results from the complexity of the characterization of the professional gender of the monthly housekeeper, since it is difficult to define what qualifies the professional and non-professional activity. and that the. In addition, it was noted that Union acts as manager of the Collective Work at the symbolic level through legal practice. The discussion developed thereafter reiterates the importance of studying the category from the intersectional perspective to understand the network of power relations that compose it and configure the precariousness of the work in progress.