“Sem trabalho não, você não é nada”: Adoecimento pela aposentadoria como produto do sentido do trabalho alienado

Abstract

This thesis deals with illness due to retirement as a product of the meaning of alienated labor. The increase of life expectancy of the Brazil’s population, combined with access to formal employment and social security by a portion of workers, has extended the time spent in retirement. However, living longer does not mean living better. There, material and subjective questions arise. Theoretical foundation was sought in the Marxist tradition to unveil the determinations of illness in retirement, guided by the hypothesis that the same paradigm that imposes on the worker the meaning of work as suffering, contradictorily prohibits his pleasure in retirement and is expressed in theform of illness of the worker. In other words, that the meaning of work (understood as a labor force in movement submitted to others to produce goods and services), locatedat work, and taken as a measure of man's value “vis-à-vis” society, is a sickening factorwhen in absence of these conditions. It started with an experience of the Retirement Preparation Program, from the perspective of worker's health, where retirement and illness were intertwined, favoring the emergence of the hypothesis. For the investigation of this thesis, a qualitative research was carried out, with retirees from different branches of production, selected from the free choice of their unions, using a semi-structured interview, through virtual means, due to the pandemic of Covid-19. For the purpose of this study, the retirement process was considered, between the moment when it appears as a concrete option, the formal procedure and the post-retirement period. Likewise, illness was used to designate the suffering that persists in the worker's subjective record, whether or not it coincides with the medical classification. The script and analysis of the interviews focused on three basic axes: if the retirement process caused discomfort, illness or some suffering, what is the meaning of the work expressed by the interviewees and how the worker explains this suffering. We opted for a method of exposing the results that prioritizes the protagonism of retired workers, in line with the principle of worker health of “non-delegation”. Their findings indicate the relevance of the hypothesis, although the nature of the study does not allow them to be considered conclusive. It is intended that their contributions favor other studies and intervention methodologies in the various sectors that have the field of work as a subject, in particular unions as a collective subject of defense of workers' class interests, and worker's health, which has restricted attention to potential harm to the active workforce, with a view to political-pedagogical and strategic actions to unveil the meanings of work along with the workers.