Pollyanna Labeta Iack

WORK IN SOCIO-EDUCATION POLICY: BETWEEN TENSIONS, CONFLICTS AND POTENTIALITIES

Pollyanna Labeta Iack

Introduction

It is in this context of necrocapitalism, structural unemployment, deregulation of rights, a drastic reduction in funding and the precariousness of public and social policies, an increase in violence, the criminalization of poverty and the militarization of public policies that a mass of workers experience grievances in mental health (MIRANDA, 2021; ABRAMIDES, 2021).

In times of a covid-19 pandemic, reality has become more complex. The fear of contracting the disease and transmitting it to family members, co-workers and users is a torment. Data from the Coronavirus1 Panel, updated on 12/07/2021, indicate that in Brazil 616,018 thousand people died as a result of the disease. According to information from the Bulletin of Conjuncture n. 29 – June/July 2021 of the Inter-union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (Dieese), the pandemic has deepened social inequality, increasing the number of people in extreme poverty, which is equivalent to the entry of 1.2 million people in this category (9% increase); the number of less educated employed persons decreased by 10.4%, equivalent to less than 7.5 million people; inflation is

1. Available at: < https://covid.saude.gov.br/>. Access in: Dec. 2021.

higher for low-income people (8.9%), while for high-income people it was 6.3%. Inflation has hit hard the price of basic food basket, cooking gas and fuel, among others. (DIEESE, 2021). Therefore, it is necessary to fight and create survival strategies.

In view of the above, health organizations warn: mental health is at risk! Data from the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020) reveal that depression is the leading cause of work disability worldwide. In Brazil, about 5.8% of the population suffers from depression, which corresponds to 11.5 million people. As for treatment, the WHO warns that despite the existence of effective actions, less than half of the affected people receive them (LABOISSIÈRE, 2017).

The 2017 Sinase Annual Survey warns about the need for qualified listening, the work of producing mental health with the teams responsible for care, as well as attention to aspects of the institutional dynamics that are producers of mental illness. (BRAZIL, 2019, p. 23). Given the relevance and urgency of reflection on the subject, we will seek to reflect the reality of social workers’ job in socio-educational policy.

To this end, we will divide this essay into two sections. The first will address the legal basis for inserting these professionals into politics, as well as the ethical and political foundations of the profession. The second will be dedicated to contextualizing the professional practice at the Instituto de Atendimento Socioeducativo do Espírito Santo – Iases (Institute for Socio-Educational Assistance of Espírito Santo), an institution responsible for managing the socio-educational policy aimed at adolescents who are attributed the authorship of legal offences, bringing to the fore the tensions, challenges and the need to improve the collective struggle as a mediation to overcome the processes of moral harassment and illness of workers.

The legal, ethical and political bases for the professional exercise of the social worker

Social Work is a profession born from the clash between capital and work, being called to act in the face of the social question.

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(IAMAMOTO, 2005). From its genesis with conservative and clientelistic perspectives, the profession underwent a movement of renewal and reconceptualization, which started in 1965, with the objective of building a more critical professional profile, for a better orientation and resizing of the professional exercise of Social Work. (NETTO, 2005).

Netto (2005, p. 131) understands by renewal:

[...] the set of new characteristics, which, within the framework of the constrictions of the bourgeois autocracy, the Social Service articulated, based on the rearrangement of its traditions (...), seeking to invest itself as an institution of a professional nature endowed with practical legitimation, through responses to social demands and their systematization, and of theoretical valorization, through the reference to theories and social disciplines.

Thus, social work, inserted in the socio-technical division of work, is regulated by Law 8.662 of March 13, 1993, having as a standardizing document for professional practice the Code of Ethics that materializes the Ethical-Political Project of Social Work, defining fundamental principles, rights, duties and prohibitions for social workers. (BRAZIL, 1993).

Having among the fundamental principles the commitment to the recognition of freedom as a central ethical value and the political demands inherent to it – autonomy, emancipation and full expansion of social individuals and the uncompromising defense of human rights and refusal of arbitrariness and authoritarianism is no small feat. It is the rejection of the old “ethics of neutrality” and the affirmation of a theoretically, technically and politically competent professional profile, affirming the commitment to the subjects served.

Often these principles will clash with the institutional culture. However, it is not the ethical principles that should be reviewed, but the institutional culture, inherited from the Minors’ Code, where children and adolescents were treated as mere objects of State

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intervention. The Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA), established by Law 8.069/90 came to break through this logic, recognizing them as subjects of rights. (LABETA-IACK, 2020).

The Role of Social Work in Socio-education

In Espírito Santo, the policy manager is the Instituto de Atendimento Socioeducativo do Espírito Santo (Iases), an autarchy with a legal personality governed by internal public law, with administrative and financial autonomy, linked to the Secretariat of Human Rights (SEDH), through the Supplementary Law No. 830 of July 6, 2016 (ESPÍRITO SANTO, 2020).

In the entire history of the institute, only one public competitive exam was held, regulated by Public Notice 001/2010, which established 36 roles for social workers. According to the competition, the duties of the position are:

Participate in the elaboration and execution of the political pedagogical project of assistance to adolescents, in the construction and execution of the Individual Assistance Plan (PIA) and in socioeducational intervention projects. Carry out reception and initial assessment of the adolescent and the family. Develop methods and techniques of assistance. Carry out individual and group activities. Conduct case studies. Issue opinions, reports, periodic reports, social diagnoses, individual and group interventions. Participate in community mobilization and organization processes. Carry out home visits, data collection and socioeconomic studies. Accompany assisted visits involving family members and/or personal references of adolescents. Promote family and community integration activities. Promote the social inclusion of adolescents. Articulate with the System of Guarantees of Rights the promotion of social inclusion of adolescents and their families. To act from the perspective of the intersectoriality of public policies. Assist in the construction of institutional programs and projects. Carry out studies, research, technical notes and publications within the scope of its activities.

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Develop and implement instruments for planning, execution, monitoring and evaluation. Work in the context of institutional intervention with planning, organization, implementation and execution of routines. Develop fundraising projects, according to organizational policy. Act in the planning, execution, monitoring and evaluation of institutional plans, programs and projects. Liaise public and/or private organizations in order to encourage and develop partnerships. Develop and carry out activities related to human resources management. Provide social service to the civil servants. Participate in continuing education processes (ESPÍRITO SANTO, 2010, p. 41).

Thus, the attributions of social workers range from providing direct care to adolescents and young people in compliance with socio-educational measures and their families to managing the policy, either by acting in transversal sectors (planning, training, psychosocial care aimed at the civil servant, health, education, sport, culture, leisure, professionalization etc.) or in the exercise of commissioned positions or remunerated occupations.

The entry of the public service candidates only took place after the filing of a writ of mandamus by the Sindipúblicos union, given that the Iases continued to hire workers on a temporary assignment basis instead of giving tenure to the candidates. Thus, the arrival at the body took place in a tense way, some made it very clear that we were not welcome and that the exam was only given by judicial determination. Little by little, we got to know the institution, the people, the power relations, seeking the necessary mediations to carry out the attributions announced to us by Public Notice n. 001/2010.

The institutional history of Iases is marked by contradictions. It is worth noting that Brazil has been responding at the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS) for human rights violations against adolescents since 2009. (OLIVEIRA, 2021). The Court imposed numerous measures on the State to stop the violations and guarantee the physical and psychological integrity of adolescents and young people, as

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well as workers. (JUSTIÇA GLOBAL, 2021). In these ten years, the Institution has experienced small advances and numerous setbacks. In 2012, it experienced “Operation Pixote2”, a police action that culminated in the arrest of thirteen people for fraud and embezzlement of public money. (NOSSA, 2012).

The State Plan for Socio-Educational Assistance of the State of Espírito Santo (2014), an important instrument for planning and agreement with the other actors of the rights guarantee system for the period (2015-2024) brings in its Axis 01 the Management of State Policy of the Socio-educational System. It is established in objective 08 “to value the servants considering that human resources are the main and most strategic resource for achieving the goals of socio-education.” Among the actions listed are, among others:

1. Increase the number of tenured Iases servants, according to Sinase parameters. 6. Implement the Iases People Management Policy, ensuring actions in workers’ health. 7. Expand psychosocial care to Iases employees, according to demand. 8. Carry out studies aimed at reducing the workload of Iases’ technicians. 9. Establish bonuses to civil servants according to distance, dangerousness, insalubrity and flexibility in working hours. 10. Regulate vertical promotion at Iases. 11. Conduct public competitive exams for all positions involved in socio-education (ESPÍRITO SANTO, 2014, p. 76-77).

However, none of the goals of this axis were achieved. They walked the opposite direction. In the period 2019-2021, following the national movement, we have experienced the dismantling of politics with a marked process of militarization, among them we

2. See more at: <http://g1.globo.com/espirito-santo/noticia/2012/08/operacao-queinvestiga-fraudes-no-iases-leva-13-pessoas-prisao.html>. Access in: Oct. 2021.

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highlight: the rise of some militarized socio-educational agents to management positions, including roles that are intended for the technical area; implementation of the use of less lethal technologies; equalization of agents to criminal police officers; agents’ uniforms; insertion of socio-educational agents in the Integrated Operational Center for Social Defense (Ciodes); as well as the prioritization of courses and resources for the security area. (SANTO, 2020). In the words of Batista (2007), the ideopolitical call is for the hardening of the Penal State and subjective adherence to barbarism.

Strategic sectors responsible for planning, training and psychosocial care for civil servants, and which had social workers on their staff, were dismantled, impacting the quality of the service provided to adolescents/young people and their families, in the articulation and direction of policy, as well as in the process of sickening of civil servants linked to mental health problems. For Dejours (1949, p. 11) “man’s confrontation with his task puts his mental life at risk”.

Inversely to the management model instituted by Sinase, which is democratic management, Iases has authoritarianism as its basis for action, and institutional moral harassment3 as a management instrument. This instrument has had a direct impact on the removal of workers from the institution due to illness.

Moral harassment is characterized by repeated inappropriate conduct that has the objective or effect of degrading physical and mental health, violating the rights, dignity and professional future of a worker (GRENIER-PEZÉ, 2017).

Work conditions and organization are poor, a process facilitated by the rotation of directors, managers and servants. For Dejours (1949), in working conditions, it is the body that receives the impact, while in the organization of work the target is mental functioning.

This context brings us closer to the concept coined by Sawaia:

3. Available at: <http://www.cress-es.org.br/cress-es-participa-de-assembleia-geral-dosindipublicos-com-servidorases-do-iases/>. Access in: July 2021.

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[...] ethical-political suffering encompasses the multiple affections of the body and soul that mutilate life in different ways. It is qualified by the way I am treated and I treat the other in intersubjectivity, face to face or anonymously, whose dynamics, content and quality are determined by social organization. Therefore, ethical-political suffering portrays the daily experience of dominant social issues in each historical period, especially the pain that arises from the social situation of being treated as inferior, subordinate, worthless, a useless appendage of society (SAWAIA, 2001, p. 105).

Among the causes of suffering in the practice of social work in socio-education is that generated by moving away from an assignment with significant content to develop roles in a situation of underemployment of their abilities. This fact is increasingly commonplace at Iases and is used as a way of inflicting pain on workers.

Another cause of suffering is knowing that the care offered to the subjects of the policy, the adolescents and young people who are attributed the authorship of legal offences, occurs far from what determines the ECA, Sinase, the National Policy for Full Health Care of Law-breaking Adolescents (Pnaisari) and the State Plan for Socio-educational Assistance. Legal and political orders are summarily neglected. And those who dare to contest such violations will be objects of harassment, which day by day kills subjectivity and takes away the meaning of work.

Dejours (1949) alludes that the depressive experience concentrates the feelings of unworthiness, uselessness and disqualification, enhancing them. This depression, dominated by tiredness, mainly the result of the state of “Taylorized workers”.

Iases conceals civil servant’s illness data. But, in everyday life, it has become more and more recurrent to hear that co-workers were on leave due to depression, stress, anxiety and other disorders and mental health problems. The refusal to provide data has been an instrument that makes it difficult for the workers to fight.

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Faced with the publicization of the violence culture that uses moral harassment as a management instrument, the State Board for the Defense of Women’s Rights of Espírito Santo (Cedimes) created the Special Temporary Commission on the Iases’ Case4, established through Resolution n. 2/2020, which aims to investigate the various complaints of institutional harassment, mainly directed at women. However, there is no information on the completion of the work and the measures adopted.

In a meeting held on March 6, 2020, by the Civil Servants’ Union of the State of Espírito Santo (Sindipúblicas), Professional Category Boards – Regional Board of Social Service (CRESS), Regional Board of Psychology (CRP), Regional Board of Administration of Espírito Santo (CRA/ES), Union of Psychologists in the State of Espírito Santo (Sindpsi/ES), Boards of Rights (CEDH and Cedimes), Iases and SEDH, having among the agendas the institutional moral harassment, there were reports of “suicide and suicide attempt, panic or burnout syndromes” by a civil servant as a result of the violence suffered in the institution (p. 55).

Even though the essence of the violence perpetrated against the workers at Iases was revealed, after 2 years, no effective action was taken. The harassers remain in the same places, with the same practices.

For Marilena Chaui (2000):

Conserving the marks of colonial slavery society, or what some scholars call “manorial culture”, Brazilian society is marked by the hierarchical structure of the social space that determines the form of a strongly vertical society in all its aspects: in it, social and intersubjective relationships are always carried out as a relationship between a superior, who commands, and an inferior, who obeys. Differences and symmetries are always transformed into inequalities that reinforce the command-obedience relationship. The other

4. Available at: <https://www.seculodiario.com.br/sindicato/estado-cria-comissao-docaso-iases-para-investigar-assedio-institucional>. Access in July 2021.

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is never recognized as a subject or as a subject of rights, is never recognized as subjectivity or otherness. [...] Finally, when inequality is very marked, the social relationship takes the naked form of physical and/or psychic oppression. The social division of classes is naturalized by a set of practices that hide the historical or material determination of exploitation, discrimination and domination, and that, imaginatively, structure society under the sign of the one and undivided nation, superimposed as a protective mantle that covers the real divisions that constitute it. (p. 55)

The relationship of command and obedience is conveniently preserved by having within the frameworks employees according to these types of bonds: 1,311 employees hired by temporary assignment (DT), 67 remunerated employees, seven are subject to RJU5 and 3146 are permanent. The precariousness of the employment relationship is interesting to the “maintenance of the established order”. Temporary civil servants have much more difficulty in confronting institutional orders, given the vulnerability of their employment contract.

Of the 36 social workers approved in the exam, five asked to be dismissed. Of the 31 that remained, nine are assigned to other state agencies. Going to another agency/secretariat is used as a survival strategy, and the possibility of ending the suffering arising from the lack of recognition for the work performed and the institutional moral harassment.

Social workers assigned to other agencies report improving physical and mental health and finding the recognition they deserve.

According to Grenier-Pezé,

Recognition of the quality of the work performed is the answer to the subjective expectations that we carry. When we obtain this recognition, the doubts, difficulties, fatigue disappear in the face of

5. Single Legal Regime. 6. Data from the Transparency Portal. Available at: <https://dados.es.gov.br/ dataset/4c3ef6d6-6a55-4c54-958b-87678d2b4d4e/resource/c46efbdc-ecf5-44a2-8c6a-c7176864b0f0/download/cargosfuncoes.csv>. Access in: July 2021.

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the feeling of having contributed to the collective construction and of seeing the place they built among others validated (GRENIERPEZÉ, 2017, p. 90).

The socio-educational policy loses, the care provided to adolescents loses quality, the workers who stay lose when these qualified social workers leave. Who wins? Those who do not have an ethical commitment to defending the subjects of this policy?

Does anyone ask: How are the workers? Are they having access to adequate health care? What are the consequences of institutional moral harassment in their lives? Has the violence stopped? What strategies did you use to get out of the harassed condition? The suffering perpetrated by the State to the servants does not seem to cause any effective action in the inspection and control bodies. Until when?

However, history shows us that there is nothing that is immutable and no evil that lasts forever! To paraphrase Freire, there are transformations of all sizes. My goal is social change, but I work to bring about the possible transformations within the space where I work. (FREIRE, 2013, p. 46).

In this sense, having the collective struggle of workers with the professional and rights boards is a potential that can be used so that social workers in the socio-educational policy can enjoy the right to exercise social work without being discriminated against for their ethical and political position.

Final Remarks

This study sought to reflect on the determinations of social workers’ job in the socio-educational policy of Espírito Santo, highlighting institutional moral harassment as a management instrument that has caused psychic illness of many workers. Ethicalpolitical suffering has permeated the lives of workers. May it become fuel for the strengthening of the fight against all forms of violence and oppression.

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The dismantling of the socio-educational policy was also highlighted, with an accentuated process of militarization, which is incompatible with the doctrine of integral protection established by the Statute of Children and Adolescents. May the inspection and defense bodies act in order to strengthen the workers’ struggle in the uncompromising defense of human rights, as well as the professional boards make efforts so that social workers exercise their professions with freedom, materializing to the ethical-political project.

We do not intend here to exhaust the theme, nor to take this reality as immutable. On the contrary, praxis allows us to create mediations to alter reality. In this context, we have the collective struggle as the main element to enhance the construction of the political struggle for decent work not only for social workers, but for all workers. We also believe that research and the production of knowledge can reveal the contradictions of the system, revealing its essence.

I also take this opportunity to pay tribute to the brave workers of the Espírito Santo socio-educational policy, who have been fighting tirelessly for a decade for the uncompromising defense of human rights to which adolescents attributed the authorship of legal offences are also subjects. We know the value of what we do, so let’s keep working for better days!

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