THE COMMODIFICATION OF JOB VACANCIES: MARKET PRACTICES OF EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES FEES IN RIO DE JANEIRO (1950-1975)

Abstract

Abstract “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, employment agencies fees never disappeared. The article goes back to the period of expansion of private intermediation in Rio de Janeiro, from 1950 to 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 commodityhood of job vacancies. We analyzed a sample of 3556 job and employment agencies ads published in the Jornal do Brasil, from 1945 to 1975, highlighting 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 social ascension rhetoric of the unemployed to the status of customer. With the employment agencies work market, the world of labor appears as colonized by techniques, codes, and expectations from world of mass consumption.