A assim chamada “reforma” trabalhista brasileira e as dinâmicas de justificação jurídica de um processo social expropriatório

Abstract

The dissertation aims to investigate the contours of the legal justification of the so-called Brazilian labor “reform”, understanding it as an expropriatory social process that neither begins nor ends in 2017. More specifically, I tried to analyze if and how these legal discourses of justification handle and correlate, on the one hand, attempts to build social consensus through the logic of conflict abstraction, and, on the other, ways of signifying a material dynamic of exacerbation of inequalities. As a central research problem, therefore, I set out to investigate the following question: how have the proposals surrounding the so-called Brazilian labor counter-reform been officially justified (taking as a basis the expositions of reasons to legal norms and justifications of paradigmatic decisions within the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court)? Regarding normative justifications, I have outlined three key moments for the consolidation of the “reformist” logic: Law No. 13,429/2017 [Bill No. 4,302/1998], Law No. 13,467/2017 [Bill No. 6,787/2016], Provisional Measure No. 905/2019. Other complementary questions are allied, throughout the investigation, to this central research problem: (i) if and in what way these discourses produce senses on the issue of inequality; (ii) how the dynamics of conflict abstraction in labor relations require, in certain socio-historical contexts, the conjugation and central performance of expropriatory social processes; (iii) what the analysis of the institutional justification of the Brazilian labor counter-reform points to about the production of social consensus around the explicitness of inequalities inherent to an expropriatory dynamic. In addition to the bibliographical research based on the sociology of work and other works of critical social thought, I made use of empirical research based on the analysis of justification documents that I considered central to the deliberation, approval, and application of the main landmarks of the counter-reform (reports of legislative houses, justifications of bills, explanatory statements to legal norms, pronouncements of public agents, and justifications of judicial decisions in the Brazilian Supreme Court). In the first chapter, I proposed a reflection on the meanings of key terms in the research, understanding them in their sociological amplitude. They are: labor/work, law and violence. In the second chapter, I dialogued with the theme of expropriations as the foundation of capitalist expansion, passing through reflections on the Marxian formulations about the so-called primitive accumulation, as well as the theoretical productions that address the current relevance of this debate. In the third chapter, I analyzed the socio-historical trajectory of the Brazilian counter-reform, going through its main landmarks and the dynamics of its normative justification. In the fourth chapter, I analyzed the role of the Supreme Federal Court in the construction and consolidation of the justification of the labor counter-reform through the rationales of decisions that I considered paradigmatic. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I drew a more direct relationship between the contribution of the empirical material and the theoretical reflections proposed, in order to think about interpretations of the role of legal discourse in the justification of the labor counter-reform