Administration and law facing the challenge of re-signifying post-pandemic work: the phoenix of human labor?

Abstract

This work analyzes the role of administration and law in facing the challenge of re-signifying post-pandemic work. As an element present in human life since the beginning of its action over nature, work has a centrality that goes beyond the mere satisfaction of economic needs and reaches other dimensions, such as social and physical/mental health. In this context, administration and law, especially labor law, are selected because they sustain formal and informal relationships in the world of work. The research was conducted through a qualitative and reflexive methodological approach, based on critical analysis of specialized literature and theoretical articulation with classical and contemporary authors, aiming to open interpretative paths and provoke new readings about the role of these disciplines in the re-signification of work. The results demonstrate that work remains one of the main categories of construction of being in its entirety and that the main challenges facing administration and labor law are to break the secular bonds derived from a vision of coloniality of power, in order to become supporters of the process of integral human edification. Furthermore, the discussion developed in the provocations section shows that the conflict between control and emancipation, already present in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, is updated in the post-pandemic world under the mediation of technology and instrumental rationality, highlighting the need for administration and labor law to re-signify their role so that work can recover its human and social meaning.