Laços frágeis e identidades fragmentadas: interações, discriminações e conflitos entre trabalhadores da Refinaria Landulfo Alves - 1990-2006.

Abstract

The object of this research is the interactions between the directly-hired and seconded workers at the R.L.A.M. - Oil-Refinery Landulfo Alves, State Company. It is hereby studied, more specifically, the splitting-out among workmen as a group, the ways of interaction, the conflicts and discriminations between workers having a different legal status in their labour contracts. This workmen conflicts were intensified with the increasing number of seconded worker in the above mentioned State Company, during these past 16 years. It was searched to reconstitute how the seconded and directly-hired workers interpred/experience the conflicts, distinctions and stigmatizations resulting from interactions all over the factory-ground with repercussions towards factory outside life. This oil-refinery is sited in the city "São Francisco do Conde" - State of Bahia. I poured the hypothesis that the strengthening in the secondment process made fragile the social net between directly-hired and seconded workers in that State company both in-doors and out-door work environments. In these terms, this situation has reinforced objective and subjective distinctions among workers. In order to reveal this reality, I investigate the interactions and conceptions of these workers on the deterioration/fragmentation of this social net in and out-side the factory, having the secondmentig process as reference. The employed are the ones directly hired by the State company; the seconded ones work for companies which provide services to the oil company. The general thesis poured at this present essay considers that the wide-up in the secondmentig process - one of the main structural changes of the labour world in these last 20 years - has caused, among workers with different labour contract status, a objective and subjective splitting-out. These segmentations express themselves in the core of the workers' relations as follows: in the identity ressignification as a single social category, in the precarious work day-by-day life, and in the ways of socialization which produce a "deterioration, fragilization, unbelonging" process. To achieve these studies targets, I carried out qualitative interviews, reports analysis, participative observation, surveys and analysis of second sources - news papers, reports, advertisements, landscape photos, songs lyrics, among others seeking for reviling the split habitus and the social representations that the observed workers have about this reality.