Reivindicando e negociando direitos: as trabalhadoras de Manaus na Justiça do Trabalho (1988-1999)

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the demands and negotiation strategies of women workers from Manaus who brought labor lawsuits in the Conciliation and Judgment Boards of Labor Justice, during the period between 1989 and 1999. In a context marked by structural unemployment and the sociopolitical changes caused by neoliberalism, whose immediate effect was the expansion of informal and unregulated forms of labor. For women workers of Manaus, the consequence was the exponential increase in the precariousness of labor forms, expressed in the permanence and expansion of the presence of these women in the service sector. Keeping the fact that resistance is na inherent aspect of women workers lives in Manaus, these women saw in the Labor Court a field of resistance where their claims could be validated and negotiated. Therefore, we studied, through individual labor agreements, periodicals, statistical reports, amongst other documents, aspects of the daily work of these women. In the same sense, we investigated in the interstices of labor prosecutions and intricacies of the laws, how the Labor Court resolved the conflicts carried out by these women workers, in order to understand how the culture of resistance was markedly experienced by them.