Work at the software industry: flexibility a standard in forms of employment

This study analyzes the flexibility of the forms of employing the workforce of the software developers from the city of Curitiba and its surroundings. It is the result of an empirical research in which we interviewed workers and employers from that sector. We found a predominance of workers being contracted as a legal entity, as “CLT Flex” or through a worker co-operative. Beyond a clear attempt by the companies of getting rid of charges on worker relations, the proliferation of flexible forms of contracting seems related, in that sector, to the way the productive process is structured, organized in projects, and to the discourse that justifies the current forms of management, which have in its center the notion of employability. These findings indicate that labor involving high technology is also organized as a typically capitalist wage work, whose logic does not differ from the one that governs the relations between capital and work in other sectors of the economy.