“Bare Labour”: The Growth of Civil Regulation over the Exploitation of Labour Power Rooted in Brazil
Relations of production; productive forces; legal form; social protection.
This research seeks to understand the relationship between law and the reduction of social protection in the exploitation of labour power in Brazil. It starts from the premise that law is not primarily constituted by legal norms, but rather by the material relations between the development of productive forces (DPF) and the development of relations of production (DRP). From this perspective, law emerges as a form of mediation between property-holding subjects who, under capitalism, possess a specific commodity: their own labour power. Based on this theoretical framework, the study questions interpretations that define formal and informal labour according to the presence or absence of state regulation, particularly the Brazilian Consolidation of Labour Laws (CLT). It argues that the exploitation of labour power through the legal form of the contract can occur regardless of the specific normative regime, encompassing labour relations such as statutory employment, CLT-based employment, outsourcing arrangements, the misclassification of workers as legal entities (“pejotização”), and even activities situated outside the legal order. Thus, the analytical focus shifts from normative criteria used to characterize labour relations to the material conditions that expand the contractual freedom of those who acquire labour power, enabling its exploitation with reduced social protection. The research therefore proposes to overcome normative approaches and argues that understanding the growing erosion of social protection in labour relations requires examining the transformations in relations of production that shape the actions of the Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary