labor designates the manual labor generally employed in the production of industries, but it can also be used to refer to the worker of any company.
Since entering the New Orthographic Agreement of the Portuguese Language in 2009, the expression “mabra-de-obra” (with hyphen) started to be considered incorrect. THE correct way to write is labor, without the hyphen.
The workforce can be divided into:
- Direct labor: when labor is directly employed in the manufacture of a good or service;
- Indirect labor: when work is performed in activities that are often indivisible, such as supervision or support for the production of maintenance of machinery and equipment, cleaning or surveillance and etc.
- Qualified labor: when the worker has specific training in certain areas, guaranteed through technical courses or undergraduate and graduate courses.
Labor can also be used colloquially, to refer to a task that requires a lot of effort or commitment. Used in the sense of expressing that a certain activity was really very difficult to be carried out.
One of the most used and requested labor is in the area of construction and civil engineering.
But it was not always so. At the time of Brazil Colony, the most used labor was slave, at first by the indigenous people who inhabited the country and later by blacks coming from Africa.
Currently, the so-called “outsourced labor” is also quite common. It consists of contracting specific services provided by other companies and applied within the contracting company, in order to reduce costs and bureaucratic processes.
