WORK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Abstract

With the theme "The Functioning of Contemporary Society," this undergraduate scientific research project, conducted between September 2024 and August 2025 at the State University of Paraná (Universidade Estadual do Paraná – UNESPAR), Paranavaí campus, and funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), aimed to reflect on the functioning of contemporary society by taking labor relations within the capitalist system as its central analytical framework. The general objective was to contribute to the understanding of how current social dynamics are organized, using the historical development of capitalism as the starting point for analysis. The research was essentially bibliographic, based on books, articles published in academic journals, and searches conducted on specialized websites. The findings made it possible to relate labor to the functioning of capitalist society, which violates the human and social rights of the working class. Furthermore, technological advances and the phenomenon of globalization have intensified labor precarization, characterized by outsourcing, machinofacture (machine-based production), and platform-based work (uberization), exposing workers to increasingly arbitrary and complex working conditions.