Prometheus aged: the experience of the older people who works (Brazil and Spain)

• Grant number: 17/26611-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: September 01, 2018
• End date: January 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Giovanni Antonio Pinto Alves
• Grantee: Giovanni Antonio Pinto Alves
• Host Investigator: Alberto Sanz-Gimeno
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Spain

Abstract

According to current demographic trends, by 2050, the world population reached 9, 200 billion individuals. The majority of the world's population should be elderly people. The increase in life expectancy, a product of advances in medicine, food and preventive health care, should be accompanied by the dramatic decrease in fertility rate in developed and developing capitalist countries (as is the case today with Spain and then with Brazil ). The result of this disproportion is that an increasing number of working youths are expected to economically support an increasing population of older people. Because of this demographic trend of global capitalism, governments have been pushing Social Security Reforms that seek to extend the time of life dedicated to labor activity, constituting a social group of people who work over 65 years. Our general objective is to investigate the experience of the elderly people who work in Brazil and Spain in order to understand their personal life and work narratives, the meanings of work in old age, the social morphology and the labor sociometabolism in which they are inserted; and the impacts of the new wage precariousness on the health and quality of life of the old workers. We will be dealing with older workers from the non-manual and higher education occupations who continue to work in old age. Thus, our objective is to elaborate an ethnography of the work and life of the gerontariado, a concept that we use to characterize the social stratum of the highly educated old proletariat that continues inserted in the daily work. (AU)