The imaginary of abundance and the reality of exclusion

Effects of meaning on labor in Cascavel-PR

Abstract

This article analyzes the effects of meaning in the speech of a subject-worker interviewed in front of the Worker's Agency in the city of Cascavel-PR, with the main objective of revealing the discursive tension between the belief in an abundance of jobs, exhaustively propagated by local institutional and media outlets, and the material experience of not securing employment. Based on French Discourse Analysis (DA), the study employs fundamental concepts such as conditions of production, discursive formation, and ideology to understand how meanings are constituted in the relationship between language and history. The methodology consisted of qualitative field research, using a semi-structured interview with a young migrant whose subject-position reveals marks of vulnerability and precariousness resulting from a long period of unemployment. The results demonstrate that the worker's discourse is profoundly permeated by ideological processes that operate through the naturalization of the social, leading the individual to interpret structural barriers in the labor market, such as turnover and the precariousness of job openings, as personal or logistical limitations. It was observed that ideology erases the marks of capitalist exploitation by producing an effect of individual responsibility, where even attempts at resistance remain captured by imaginary formations that validate the current structure. In conclusion, the worker's speech is not an isolated event, but the materialization of the struggle between the discursive memory of the "land of opportunities" and the reality of socio-economic exclusion. It is worth noting that this work arises from a master's thesis in its final stages of completion, utilizing an interview and part of the thematic framework developed in said research, which was conducted with the due approval and monitoring of an ethics committee nº 82778524.8.0000.0107.