This article presents an overview of principal shapes that the world of labor took on in Brazil during the nineties. We refer to this period as the "neo-liberal decade". We emphasize the development of a new complex of productive restructuring and its dominant moment (Toyotism), as well as the emergence of a new (and precarious) world of labor and the advent of the crisis of unionism, which we consider to be the contingent expression of the fragmentation of the working class. We come to the conclusion that today more than ever, at the start of the twenty first century, the greatest challenge that Brazilian unionism faces involves a break with its bureaucratic-corporative bias, as well as the organization and mobilization of a massive contingent of young workers and employees and even the precarious self-employed or workers subject to capitalist exploitation. We make critical use of empirical data from books and essays written by researchers from the fields of economics, sociology of work and industrial sociology in Brazil over the last decade
labor; unionism; Neo-liberalism; Toyotism; unemployment
