Epidemiology and the area of Worker’s Health

Abstract

This essay addresses the conflicting relation between the theoretical and applied epidemiological health services instruments, including the difficulties in apprehending the social determination linked to the neoliberal model and workers’ subjectivities in their creative process of resisting the model of exploitation of their workforce that characterizes the current world of work. The role of Epidemiology in the following theoretical frameworks of the relations between health and work from the 1970s onward is described and discussed: Occupational Medicine, Occupational Health, and Worker’s Health. Despite the criticisms, studies from the beginning of the 2000s showed methodological advances when research turned to a more conservative set of instruments that insufficiently contextualized the social determinations of the work process. Even with legal support in Brazil, the operationalization of Epidemiology at the service of Workers’ Health in the Unified Health System still adopts approaches toward measuring risks. Such approaches lie far from the models that apprehend the reflexes of social organization proposed by researchers from Latin America, which are yet to be expressed in the studies and services of Worker’s Health in Brazil.