Abstract

BERNARDO, Marcia Hespanhol; VERDE, Fábio Frazatto  and  PINZON, Johanna Garrido. Experiences of workers with different employment relationships in a public laboratory. Cad. psicol. soc. trab. [online]. 2013, vol.16, n.1, pp. 119-133. ISSN 1516-3717.

This research aimed at analyzing the experience of professionals with different employment contracts in the same public health service, assuming that the public sector – similarly to the private sector – has also been affected by changes in the current capitalist context. The focus of the investigation was a public clinical laboratory, which was co-managed by the government and a non-profit organization. There were workers that, despite performing similar functions, had different types of employment contracts. The interviews, conducted in 2011, with two professionals of a laboratory of clinical analysis will be discussed comparatively. The interviewees were a public servant, hired through official examination, who had been employed for more than twenty years, which was an activist for the Unified Health System (SUS), and the other a contract worker, accepted three years prior to the research, who had only worked in the private sector. According to observations, the working experiences of both technicians were permeated by typical features of capitalist enterprises, which are translated into objective precariousness (low salaries and unstable employment), in the case of the contract worker, and subjective precariousness (discontentment in relation to work), in the case of the public servant. Despite these differences, the two workers, each in his/her own manner, were not happy with the situation imposed by the neoliberal ideology that seeks to outsource the public health service.

Keywords : Mental health related to work; Worker's health; Public health; Work precarization; Mental wear down at work.

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