The Commodification of Job Vacancies. Market Practices of Fee Employment Agencies in Rio de Janeiro (1950-1975)

Léa Lima (1, 2)

1 LISE - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire pour la sociologie économique
2 CEET - Centre d'études de l'emploi et du travail

"Labor is not a commodity" : One of the earliest understandings of this maxim concerns the intermediation of employment by supporting policies to extinguish the fees charged to workers for their placement. In Brazil, fee employment agencies never disapeared. The article goes back to the period of expansion of private intermediation in Rio de Janeiro between 1950 and 1975 to observe their market practices. In order to attract job seekers and convince them to pay for an intermediation service, we argue that those actors performed the commodity-hood of job vacancies. Through the analysis of a sample of 3556 job and employment agencies ads published in the Jornal do Brasil between 1945 and 1975, we highlight three social processes of commoditization of job vacancies : the objectivation of job vacancies as “ real things to be bought”, the performing of profusion and collection of job vacancies as “things to be chosen”, and the rhetoric elevation of the unemployed to the status of customer. Through employment agencies market work, the world of labor appears as colonized by techniques, codes and expectations coming from the mass consumption world.

Mots clés: "Consumer"; "Commodity"; "Labour market Intermediation"; "Advertisement"; "Job vacancies"

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Léa Lima. The Commodification of Job Vacancies. Market Practices of Fee Employment Agencies in Rio de Janeiro (1950-1975). Sociologia e Antropologia, 2022, 13 (1), ⟨10.1590/2238-38752022v13112⟩. ⟨hal-03886514⟩