This article aims to analyze the work of the community agents of health linked to two government programs: the Program of Community Agents of Health and the Program Health of the Family. The agents integrate workers' teams and their function are to transmit information about hygiene and health in the communities where they act, to lift data on incidence of diseases in the population and to direct the patients for service in the Unit of Health of the Family. For that they should be residents of the community, to do the link between community and the team. They are constituted in an atypical worker, be for the characteristics of the labor agreements (temporary, outsourcing, informal), be for the ownership of a social capital like demanded competence. In other words, a relational characteristic as condition to exercise the occupation. The work of the agents reflects the new forms of implementation of social policies decentralized by the State and the new forms of manpower use, out of the picture of the traditional civil servants. The research consisted from survey applied to 53 Community Agents of Health in twelve teams in João Pessoa, Campina Grande, Casserengue and Cacimba de Dentro; interviews with syndical leaderships, nurses, practitioners and state health managers.
social control; social capital; nonstandard labor; Community Agents of Health