Comment on the papers by Carles Muntaner and Graça Druck

Abstract

Graça Druck and Carles Muntaner offer two different approaches to discussing the impact of outsourcing or contracting out and precariousness (terceirização and precarização in Portuguese) on worker health and safety, a topic that has been under-researched in Brazil and maybe worldwide. Druck is a labor sociologist who has a long trajectory studying outsourcing, particularly in the petrochemical industry in Bahia. She provides an important contribution to the debate on the relationship between outsourcing and workplace mortality by describing the current status of outsourcing in Brazil, and the legal and political struggle around Bill 4,330.Druck first situates the growth of outsourcing in Brazil as part of the flexible accumulation brought about by productive restructuring and neoliberal policies in the 1990s. She then summarizes the evidence available in the peerreviewed and gray literature in Brazil to argue that the weight of evidence indicates that there is a strong relationship between outsourcing and precariousness, which combined produce job insecurity, intensification of work, increased exploitation and segmentation of the workforce into first and second class workers, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and weakening of trade unions and labor power, among other impacts. These impacts were empirically demonstrated in the petrochemical, electrical, and construction sectors in Brazil through data that compared outsourced and permanent workers, which showed higher mortality rates in the former. Yet, she did not list any longitudinal (or even cross-sectional) epidemiological study that controls for confounding variables and compared workplace morbidity and mortality in different workplaces or sectors of the economy. Maybe such studies are still lacking in Brazil.Muntaner, a social epidemiologist with a long trajectory studying relationship between condi-