In any case, employment is not people’s sole preoccupation. The work itself and its quality is important, a result no doubt of a long period of unsteady growth intermingled with the experience of working in the informal economy. Moreover, women’s access to the labour market (40% of the active population) and the increasing equality between the sexes make the private sphere and the domestic group a space where the relation with work is rethought, in the sense of a distancing (a trick that economic crisis has turned: work was first taken away by the employers, later on work available is taken up by employees – but only on their terms).
The situation seen in São Paulo raises the question as to whether or not it exists elsewhere, in the cities of other countries which have recently undergone industrialization and urbanization. Analysts very often discard this aspect of globalization from their deliberations, stressing rather the severe changes imposed by financial factors, in trade and in production.
The book therefore focuses on the social changes accompanying these developments, by dint of biographical accounts concerning 33 families. The author has stayed in Brazil for long periods over many years and he has conducted many studies on the sociology of work in the industrial context. He gathered the family reports between 1986 and 1994, a pivotal time for the country’s economy.
The families studies were categorized according to the type of activity they were involved in within society. These included political, trade-union or associative action, on a national or local scale, varied social activity on the upper or lower edges of the working class, unobtrusive or zealous action for a “domestic civilization”, social inactivity guided by a passive humility or by the concern for consuming. Each one is the subject of a presentation which reports the major chronological sequence of events, whether individual or involving wider society –and highlights the diversity of social practices.
The book is completed by three appendices. The first deals with the important role played by the biographical approach in the social sciences. It emphasizes that the complex mix of refusal, resignation and hope which is found in the analysis all individuals make in relation with themselves and their society suggest certain changes are needed to the questions research sets itself. The second appendix reports the story of a family in Brazil and observes one of its outcomes in the form of the present-day working domestic group. The third is a history of trade-unionism in Brazil. It sets out the issues that movement is confronted with today.