Outsourcing and resistance to it in Brazil: Bill No. 4,330/04 and the actions of collective actors

Abstract

One can clearly identify a process of increasing flexibility in labour relations occurring in Brazil, especially as from the 1990s onwards. A myriad of atypical hiring modalities have emerged, with the outsourcing of productive activities of particular interest to this present article. In the past, this was largely restricted to relatively few alternatives: subcontracting and the hiring of security services and temporary workers, all within a much more limited scope than we see provisioned for today. It wasn't until the early 1990s that the Supreme Labour Court (TST), through its Formal Declaration No.331, finally set down a provision for the outsourcing of core activities. Shortly afterwards, in 1998, a new Bill of Law was proposed, namely Bill No.4,302/98 (PL n. 4.302/98), whose provision for extending outsourcing to core activities was subsequently, in 2004, incorporated into Bill No. 4,330/04 (PL n.4.330/04). With these changes in mind, this article means to discuss, albeit on a preliminary basis, the institution of outsourcing in Brazil, focusing on its historical dimension, and especially on its status from a legal standpoint. The idea is to put the current situation into context. The debate has been raging over the potential impact of Bill No. 4,330/04 with particular force since April 2015, when the subject first emerged in the mass media. The bibliographic review that was carried out for this article produced a definition of a secondary objective. This involved identifying and critically analysing the participation of collective actors, including those entities that represent both employers and workers, as well as professional law associations, in the debate over the potential social and labour implications that might result from the passing of Bill No. 4,330/04 into law. The activities of these different actors were assumed as being representative of the forces that express trends and countertrends and, therefore, diverging interests in relation to the subject of outsourcing.

Keywords:
Outsourcing; Precarious Work; Resistance; Bill; Collective Actors.