BACK TO THE FUTURE? CONTEMPORARY SLAVERY AND PRECARIZATION OF LABOR RELATIONS

Abstract

Throughout the history of civilizations, social life in freedom has been shared with various forms of slavery over peoples. The contemporary worker may be in a kind of prison, a conditionthat goes against the perspective of free labor. At the same time, this relationship of submission and oppression causes distances of interests and coexistence. Despite the presupposition of the abolition of slavery, in the context of organizational studies, modern forms of slavery are discussed, more or less subtle practices, in which the deprivation of freedom can be based on the precariousness of labor relations. This research aimed to analyze the concept of contemporary slavery from the precariousness of technologized labor relations and life in society observed in film language. The methodology of this study is characterized by a qualitative approach, where an observational study was developed from the perspective of a non-participant viewer to a film narrative. As an object of reflective investigation, we use an episode of the Black Mirror series, which presents today's social situations from the social impacts of technology. Specifically, a theoretical-analytical framework of the contemporary concept of slavery was organized from recent studies on the precariousness of labor relations; The relationship between the precariousness of work and the concept of contemporary slavery is described from the analytical observation of a film narrative. The main results are that contemporary slavery is influenced by the technologization of labor. These relationships become precarious, not only because of their fragility in the financial sphere, but also in relation to the social. It was observed that the context of the episode of Black Mirror, resembles what is currently experienced in other empirical contexts addressed in academic texts cited in the study, as many workers are forced to surrender to a work system, often, hard and poorly paid.