ANÁLISE DA RELAÇÃO ATIVIDADE-SAÚDE DE GESTORES DE BARES E RESTAURANTES FRENTE À PANDEMIA DO COVID-19

Abstract

On 26th February of 2020, in the city of São Paulo, the first coronavirus case in Brazil was confirmed. Due to the high rates of contagion and the vulnerability of worldwide health care systems, authorities from all around the world decided to impose social distancing through compulsory closing of public and private places, especially those with a large flow of people. That said, bars and restaurants of Brazil have closed their doors aiming to delay the propagation of the virus, which was considered necessary for the first months of pandemic due to lack of information about the new coronavirus. This, however, cause a significant negative impact on their economy, notably those which fits onto the category of small and micro-businesses. Thus, this study looks to analyse the relationship between the Work Activity and the health state of managers of bars and restaurants in face of the impacts of the new coronavirus pandemic. As the theoretical foundation, the Ergology perspective from Yves Schwartz (2011) and its Three Pole Device were used, allowing a deeper perception of objective and subjective aspects of the interviewees' words. For this research, ten managers of medium, small and micro restaurants were interviewed. The interviews were semi-structured in a space where the interviewees previously agreed to meet while following all the security protocols against covid-19, such as social distancing of at least one meter and the uninterrupted use of masks. The interview script, which was designed exclusively for this study, addresses the following topics: pre-pandemic work activity; activity and adaptation during the pandemic; impacts of the coronavirus on the management and health of the workplace during the pandemic. The data analysis was done through the thematic categorization technique (Gomes, 1994) defined by Laville & Diome (1999), a method which consists of manual selection of repeated parts and of similar relevance and its classification through semantic grouping themes. The results showed an excessive need from the managers to renormalize the activity because of the changes imposed by the pandemic situation, a factor which caused a lot of anguish and suffering, as well as low revenues, work overload and risk of dismissal of staff. Other results address the development of skills in crysis situations and the autonomous search for selfcare mechanisms in the face of the pandemic.