Teletrabalho, temporalidades e espacialidades: produção de subjetividades dos teletrabalhadores

Abstract

Telecommuting emerged as a work modality in the 1970s, in the USA, with Information Technology - IT professionals and became encompassing for other countries and professional categories mainly from the COVID-19 pandemic. Work activities that use Information and Communication Technologies and that are carried out remotely in relation to organizational physical spaces are configured as telework. Despite the neoliberal discourse of existing modernization, in the flexibility and autonomy guaranteed by this modality, there are processes of precarious work experienced by these professionals, who are made invisible by the advantages described in telecommuting. In addition, issues such as time and social space suffer mutations due to the social, economic and political context in which telework is inserted, causing changes in the experiences of temporality-spatiality of teleworkers. Thus, this work aimed to understand how the effects of the transformations of time and space experienced in the neoliberal context have repercussions on the work activity of teleworkers. This is a qualitative research that used in-depth interviews with 9 teleworkers, immersion in the field based on participant observation and the use of a field diary as data collection methods. For data analysis, the Sociological Discourse Analysis (ASD) was chosen, which consists of contextualizing the place of speech production of the participants, considering the social, economic and political scenario in which they are inserted. The theoretical framework undertaken was obtained from critical perspectives arising from social and work psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, human geography and law, as well as references that supported positive narratives of telework, such as administration, booklets on telework, information disseminated socially in associations, blogs, etc. It was obtained as a result that telework, in the way it occurs today, promotes precariousness of the rights and guarantees of teleworkers, because a) by making social time and space more flexible, it ends up having repercussions on other private activities, leisure or rest; b) transforms personal values ​​into subsuming them under neoliberalism, especially with regard to self-entrepreneurship, flexibility and autonomy; c) isolates and weakens social relations at work, promoting psychic suffering and weakening efforts to improve working conditions; d) hides the difficulties arising from this modality, in view of the ideals of modernization and job security, mainly in the expansion that occurred during/after the pandemic period. From the results obtained, it is considered that telework is presented to society and teleworkers as a process of work modernization, gain of flexibility and autonomy, but that it carries a series of precariousness that is not clearly contemplated and answered, reverberating in the experiences of temporality-spatiality of teleworkers. These precarious conditions are configured as a new labor metamorphosis, maintaining similarities with other precarious processes mobilized by a flexible neoliberal logic.