Da origem à queda da indústria da madeira no município de União da Vitória PR: para onde foram os/as trabalhadores/as?

Abstract

Several factors can be pointed out about the labor crisis in the last twenty years, among them: the exclusionary technological development as a fundamental element of the neoliberal project, taken as the philosophy of the process of internationalization of the economy and the global economic crisis that began in Northern countries of America and Europe at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, extending to all continents. At the peripheral level, the economic crisis in some Brazilian regions such as União da Vitória, in the south of Paraná, would have been aggravated by other factors such as: the change in the means of rail transport for the region’s products and the scarcity of native wood. These factors may have contributed to the decline of the wood industries, leaving workers without their jobs. Therefore, the objective of this research was to understand, through Oral History, the history of workers who experienced the closure of activities in the timber industries, located in União da Vitória, in the State of Paraná, from 1990 to 2010 To analyze this phenomenon, a qualitative research was carried out in a dialectical historical materialist perspective, using oral history as a methodological approach. The methodology used was the bibliographical research on the Railroad, Guerra do Contestado, Madeireiras; Work and Technology. For data collection, interviews were conducted with five workers from two of the loggers that ended their activities. The collected data respected phases 1, 2, 3 and four of the Oral History, which correspond to the recording, transcription and textualization of the interviews. Data treatment was performed through a descriptiveinterpretive analysis. The main conclusions are that: the workers’ stories, even though loaded with singularities, presented elements common to other workers, such as the experience of a period of destabilization of their jobs, as well as the difficulties to stabilize in others. For them, the main reasons for the closure of the activities of the logging companies were: bad administration; companies belonging to family groups; lack of investments in technologies; the 1983 flood; the devaluation of the dollar and the difficulty in extracting native wood. Regarding technology, the interviewees did not present the artifacts as allies, but as conflicts in relation to obsolescence, the reduction of jobs and the choices in which they did not participate. In general, the layoffs caused serious difficulties in resuming work, as well as negatively impacting the city’s economy. They are stories of men and women, of families that fed on the production of their hands and that, at a given moment, saw their social structures shake and their stories change course.