The organizational restructuring of the ports, the technological dynamics and a framework of increasing privatization, since the 1990s, created a new benchmark for work, changing technical and social relations of historical categories, such as stevedores and ushers (wharfage). The 'official' deregulation port work in Brazil set to the implantation of the electronic scale system. With intermittent work activity and inconsistent contractual conditions, the situation of precarization of detached port workers precedes neoliberal political reformulations and instigates the proposition of a precariousness job theory.
work; detached port workers; ports modernization; job precarization; work precariousness