Resumo

HERNANDEZ ARIAS, Aymara. Flexibilización y organización del trabajo. Revista de Ciencias Sociales [online]. 2005, vol.11, n.2, pp.256-276. ISSN 1315-9518.

Labor flexibility, as a process, implies change in the manner of managing human resources and in the relationships between employees and employers. Some authors perceive it as a loss of favorable labor conditions achieved in the decades of growth, others perceive it as a solution to unemployment problems, or as a mechanism to reach optimum levels of management competitiveness, and as a way to increase the capacity of adaptation in changeable environmental conditions. It is through the re-accommodation of diverse aspects (legal framework, regulations, norms, and the roles of the different elements involved) that stability and the necessary harmony can be achieved, and competitiveness and productivity maintained, as well as continuous balanced and integrated growth. This research report is oriented towards the analysis of labor organization transformation, placing emphasis on opportunities and threats to the labor flexibility process. The paper is based on the premise of the existence of flexibilizing forms that can benefit the majority of the social elements involved, but that their implementation could represent serious threats to the processes themselves, since adequate mechanisms to confront them are lacking (political, economic, and cultural). Also the paper describes the situation in Venezuela in relation to tendencies in the area of labor flexibility.

Palavras-chave : Labor flexibility; labor organization; labor movement participants.