Condições de trabalho e saúde psíquica dos catadores de materiais recicláveis de uma cooperativa de segundo grau da região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The objective of this thesis was to investigate the relationship between working conditions and mental health of waste pickers linked to a secondary cooperative in central region of Minas Gerais. Working conditions are understood in a comprehensive way, considering the content and surrounding work from four categories (1) contractual and legal; (2) physical and material; (3) processes and characteristics of the activity; and (4) sociogerencial environment. A mental health is taken in the broad sense, not just as the absence of disease, but from the ability to set new standards in different situations. To achieve the proposed objective, we applied different methods, as follows: participant observation, documentary research and structured questionnaires. The observations were based on respect for the worker´s knowledge and the pursuit of their knowledge on the job. In documentary research, we sought records as minutes, statutes and notes of sale filed with the cooperative, as well as legislation and information on the World Wide Web. To learn how the collectors realize their working conditions and their own mental health, in addition to the development of participant observation, we applied structured questionnaires: the Questionnaire of Working Conditions (QWC), the General Health Questionnaire, short version (GHQ-12), the Scale of Positive and Negative Affects (SPNA), and Self-esteem Scale (SS) of Rosenberg,. As a result, we identified that the collectors occupy an economically underprivileged place in the production chain of recycling, but has been organized in recent years, constituting a representative movement that contributed to the formation of a functional group. The collectors are aware of the inadequacy of some of the working conditions, as factors Repetitive Motion and Exposure to Violence. On mental health have good prevalence of positive affect, good self-esteem and low psychological signs of exhaustion, most associated institutionalization of the scavengers work and less specific aspects of working conditions.