Reestruturação produtiva, privatização e movimento sindical na siderurgia mundial

Abstract

The capitalist economy has undergone a major process of industrial restructuring over the past three decades. From the crisis of the 1970s, with the end of the fixed exchange rate system and the two oil price shocks, intercapitalist competition has intensified, culminating in a reduction in the profitability of companies, whose capital appreciation needs led to significant changes in production patterns, and this process was led by large corporations. Among the main changes, the following stand out: a) the search for greater productive flexibility, capable of offering faster responses to market variations; b) a new productive paradigm based on microelectronics, by some called toyotismo; and c) the relative decline of the industrial sector as an absorber of jobs in the economy. Along with this process of productive restructuring, the orientation of economic policy was changed, privileging the neo-liberal principles of market economy; commercial opening; deregulation and less intervention by States (through, among others, privatization). These processes imply transformations in the “World of Work”, which, as a result of the productive restructuring and neo-liberal policies, has undergone both quantitative and qualitative changes, mainly due to the growth of unemployment and informality. Such changes affect labor relations within the productive sphere, configuring a problematization for the union movement, which currently has gone through a period of crisis, characterized by: a) a fall in unionization rates; b) a retraction in the number of strikes; c) a loss of representation before employers, workers and the government; and d) a difficulty in collective action, given the growing individualization of relations of job. Thus, there is an increasing precariousness of the labor market, and workers are increasingly weakened by these changes. However, this process should not be seen in a deterministic way, that is, that the introduction of new technologies and new organizational methods, in a context of neo-liberal policies, necessarily leads to the same intensity of changes in labor relations. In fact, this is the result of a set of factors of a political, economic, cultural and institutional nature, which naturally present themselves in different ways between different countries and sectors. Thus, labor relations are inserted in different “environments” and the transformations that the labor market is undergoing are, therefore, differentiated between the various countries. Furthermore, the workers, in experiencing the transformations underway, interact with them in a constitutive and formative way, with technology conceived as an expression of power relations, dependent on the performance of the social groups involved and disputes within the productive organizations. . Therefore, it is necessary to relativize the effects of technology, as they are partially dependent on the working relationship itself, which is, at the same time, formative and shaped by the process of precarious work. labor market. In this sense, the objective of this dissertation is to analyze the impacts of the process of productive restructuring and privatization on labor relations, more specifically on the union movement in an important branch of the manufacturing industry, the steel industry. From a typology, the specificities of each type of employment relationship are analyzed for some of the main steel producing countries. The analyzed experiences are from Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada as representatives of developed countries, and Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, as well as Latin American countries. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 presents the main transformations in the productive sphere now underway in the current phase of capitalism, highlighting the new technological paradigms and their impacts on the “World of Work” and emphasizing the union movement, which has been losing its bargaining power against capital . It is also intended to analyze how these transformations presented themselves in the Brazilian economy, showing that these changes, although restricted to countries of central capitalism, in the 1980s, were also disseminated, throughout the 1990s, to developing countries, such as the Brazil. Chapter 2 aims to show what were the impacts of the productive restructuring process on the global steel industry on direct workers; labor relations and the union movement. In this chapter, a typology that differentiates two types of work relationships in the global steel industry is recovered: “Cooperatives” and “Adversaries”. In the light of these, the productive restructuring and its effects on the main crude steel producing countries in the capitalist world (Germany, Japan, United States, "United Kingdom and Canada) are examined. Chapter 3 adds an important category to the taxonomy, presented in the previous chapter, when incorporating the impacts of restructuring in Latin American countries (Mexico, Argentina and Brazil) into the analysis. Despite the similarities with the others, it is postulated that this category, called “Capital / Hegemonic”, presented a productive restructuring inserted in a working relationship different from those presented in developed countries. The last, chapter summarizes and systematizes the main conclusions raised throughout text.