LABOR PRECARIZATION IN BRAZIL: QUALIFIED UNDEREMPLOYMENT, WAGE DEVALUATION, AND THE CRISIS OF THE PROMISE OF SOCIAL MOBILITY THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

This article critically examines the precarization of working conditions among degree holders in contemporary Brazil, problematizing the historically consolidated association between higher education and upward social mobility. The objective is to understand how the expansion of formal schooling, although socially relevant, has ceased to operate as an automatic guarantee of qualified occupational insertion, decent pay and stability. It is a theoretical, bibliographic and documentary essay, combining a narrative literature review with the analysis of secondary data from IBGE and Ipea, in dialogue with the sociology of work and the sociology of education, drawing on authors such as Bourdieu, Castel, Sennett, Antunes, Standing, and Boltanski and Chiapello. It argues that the precarization of degree holders does not stem from an absolute loss of the diploma's value, but from the combination of educational expansion, fragile productive development, scarcity of qualified positions, flexibilization of labor relations, and the individualization of responsibility for professional success. It discusses qualified underemployment, overqualification, occupational mismatch, wage devaluation, and contemporary forms of informality, outsourcing, false self-employment and platformization. It concludes that the diploma remains relevant capital, though insufficient when isolated from structural conditions, and that its conversion into social mobility depends on policies integrating education, decent work, productive development and social protection.