Useless keys? Changes in employment's and labor's culture from the perspective of young people's experience of discouraged unemployment

Abstract

From the perspective of young persons that live at São Paulo’s metropolitan area, and taking account their narrative of work and search for work, this article aims to illuminate the new relations between a work’s culture and a labor’s culture. Analyzing the projects and the meanings attributed by those young persons to their own trajectory, we argue that, as long as their discourse points out recent changes in labor market, their narratives also reveal new forms of experiencing social, cultural and economic inequalities. In this sense, their decision to interrupt the search for work appears sometimes as a refusal, but also as an astonishment in front of a reality that is different from that the socialization they have been submitted prepared them for.