Saúde mental e subjetividade de trabalhadores-estudantes, membros de empresa júnior, durante a pandemia da Covid-19 no Brasil

Abstract

Work is a relevant social indicator in the characterization of university students and in the formation of their subjectivity. Being a student-worker means facing multiple political, economic and socio-environmental challenges. These student workers strive to neutralize their deficits, their unequal conditions of existence and opportunities. The university is seen by these individuals as an opportunity for professional training in the expectation of increasing their chances of competition in the labor market and improving their living conditions. Within the university context, Junior Companies emerge, non-profit organizations that aim to provide students with the opportunity to apply and improve the theoretical knowledge acquired during their course, which are extremely attractive because they are perceived by university students as differentials for their professional career. All these dynamics become unique due to the unique phenomenon that appears in the year 2020: the Covid-19 pandemic that imposed health measures of distancing and social isolation that suddenly changed the functioning of universities and their work activities. Within this context, student workers who participate in junior companies commit themselves to fulfilling these different roles in the name of professional success to be reaped in the future and accept the overload as normal for the situation in which they live, sacrificing many things in favor of this objective. But what is the effect of this type of dynamic on the formation of their subjectivity and the impacts on their mental health? Thus, the objective of the study is to characterize the processes that constitute the subjectivity and mental health of university student workers, members of the Junior Company, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. For this, a descriptive cross-sectional investigation was carried out, with a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 13 participants through an online platform where the respondents were from the north, northeast, midwest and southeast regions of the country, all university students from Public Universities. For data analysis, the IRAMUTEQUE Software was used. The results showed that Junior Enterprises are satisfactory for the development of technical and behavioral skills, which favors the entry of these university students into the labor market in their area of activity, including being an important differential in some selection processes, it is also seen as an important trainer of the subjective processes of these university students to the fact that they occupy a very prominent place in their views and contribute substantially to their worldview. Another relevant factor is how much the new dynamics triggered by the pandemic ended up generating a new way of distributing time that is now more flexible, due to remote activities, which are sometimes seen as positive, sometimes are perceived as difficult to manage. It is concluded that the suffering factors of the students surveyed have a great relationship with the new dynamics that the pandemic brought, such as social distancing, the need for significant changes in routines and the development of student and work activities, which generated exhausting workloads and the excessive activity, but this suffering is seen by the participants as a necessary sacrifice that needs to be overcome in order to obtain professional success, however it has a substantial impact on the mental health of these student workers.