Relações de trabalho de mulheres em João Pessoa – PB sob a ótica das reclamações trabalhistas ajuizadas durante o Estado Novo (1941-1945)

Abstract

The understanding of women's work relations depends mainly on the interweaving of gender and class. We understand that the situation of working women has peculiarities that need to be analyzed contextually, given the multiple and articulated forms of social oppression, which should not be analyzed in isolation, because they impact all women, but in different ways and intensities. Our proposal is to understand the work relations of women who sought the intervention of the Labor Justice in Paraíba in search of their rights, from 1941 to 1945. In view of this, we will contextualize the Estado Novo period, establishing its correlation with the 1930s; we will analyze the historiographical reflection about the Labor Justice; we will contextualize the working woman in history; and we will constitute a picture of the working conditions of women, seeking to observe the specificities and particularities of women's work in João Pessoa-PB. We will rely on 40 complaints filed by women in the defined period, researched in the collection of labor cases of the Memorial da Justiça do Trabalho na Paraíba - an organ subordinated to the Service of Documentation and Archive of the Regional Labor Court of the 13th Region, located in the capital of Paraíba. This number does not refer to all the lawsuits filed by women during the Estado Novo period, but to what is left from that period, according to the conservation practice of the Memorial, which, according to its criteria, has selected some for conservation and sent others for disposal. The closed cases from the Labor Court occupy a relevant space in this work: quantitatively, it allows us to determine the number of labor claims filed in the Labor Court in the selected period; to identify which rights were recurrently claimed by the workers; the approximate value of their salaries; the other forms of compensation for the work performed; the organizations that offered protection mechanisms to the workers, among other aspects. Qualitatively, we can obtain information about how the work was performed, workday controls and conditions of the work environment, the ways in which the fulfillment of court decisions favorable to the worker was carried out, among other aspects.