A inserção no mundo do trabalho e a proteção jurídica do microempreendedor individual: um estudo no município de Curitiba/PR.

Abstract

This thesis is about the insertion on the labor market and the legal protection of the Individual Microentrepreneur (MEI, in Portuguese). The main goal was to analyze the legal figure of the MEI in the context of the changes happening in Brazil's world of work, characterized by informality, unemployment and decrease in wage earnings and, thus, to understand the labor world beyond wages and the labor market. The research investigated the individual microentrepreneurship and its legal nature, seeking to understand the existence, or not, of legal protection to MEI workers. An assumption was made that the legislation, by equating the individual microentrepreneur to the businessman, shifts the worker protection from the labor law to the common law, changing the paradigm from protection of the worker to the rationality of the market.Due to the specificities of the object of research, such as the crisis of wage earning and the expansion of the entrepreneur speech, a choice was made for a theoretical framework that understands the relationship between capital and work as conflicting. For the research, the dialectical method was used, with the categories of work, totality and contradiction, under the prism of interdisciplinarity. The historical materialism was chosen for the methodological perspective.The data collection was made in the city of Curitiba/PR, due to the fact that it belongs to a great metropolitan area, which passed through an industrialization process, followed by a later relocation of the industry. The sample consisted of 248 individual microentrepreneurs. From the analysis of the results, four findings stand out: a) scholarity did not reflect on higher income; b) the majority of the subjects exercise their activities in the service sector, following a global tendency; c) the reasons for choosing individual entrepreneurship as a modality of formalization included the presence of the entrepreneur speech and of the idea of flexibility in the labor relationships; d) the existence of labor devaluation for the majority of the sample, which declared being employed before its formalization as MEI. It can be concluded, therefore, that the social and social security inclusion, proposed by the policy of individual microentrepreneurship has been achieved by a small fraction of workers. For the majority of the interviewed workers, the formalization as MEI has been used as another way of devaluation of wage labor, characterizing a shift in this worker's protection from the field of laboral law to the field of common law. Thus, it can be inferred that the individual microentrepreneurship consists of another mechanism for flexibilization and devaluation of labor in favor of the accumulation of capital for the owners of the means of production.