About
Project: Neoliberalism and the devaluation of labour. Labour experiences of restaurant workers in Porto.
Reference: 2024.01640.BD
Scientific area: Sociology
Supervisor: João Teixeira Lopes (IS-UP); Co-supervisor: Renato Miguel Emídio do Carmo (CIES-IUL)
Cronograma: november 2024 - november 2027
Abstract: This project aims to understand the impacts of neoliberalism and the generalization of precariousness on the daily life and work experiences of restaurant workers in Porto. In a period marked by an intense process of commodification and devaluation of labor, which constitutes a generalized crisis of the social order, this research takes a critical perspective, highlighting the impacts of productive restructuring, labor flexibilization, and precariousness in various spheres that constitute daily life and work, without reducing their effects to salary and contractual conditions. Therefore, it seeks to uncover the impacts of precariousness in the existential, relational, and socioeconomic spheres, as well as in the configuration of spaces of sociability, including the family, educational, cultural, and political lives of workers. The project also aims to explore how these workers attribute meaning to life and daily routines, how they (re)signify the precarization of work and daily life into new forms of sociability, and how they dynamize new political practices and attitudes, as well as new cultural and leisure activities. Through ethnographic work, statistical information, semi-structured interviews, and sociological portraits, we seek to reveal the everyday, subjective, structural, and relational dimensions of this reality.
Beneficiaries/ Target population: Academic community, trade union movement, civil society.
