PERCEPTIONS OF THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM ON LABOR IN THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND REFLECTIONS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF DECENT WORK

Abstract

This article aims to reconstruct the elements that structure the content of the expression “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, as it is adopted by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and to analyze this content with the purposes of promoting Decent Work, under the terms disseminated by the International Labor Organization. It is an exploratory and analytical investigation, for which the deductive approach methodology and the bibliographic procedure methodology were used, with emphasis on the examination of official documents (studies and reports) of WEF, edited between 2014 and 2019 and whose content addresses more directly the impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the world of work, especially in the strategic dimensions of promoting Decent Work prescribed by the ILO. In the end, it is concluded from what is shown in the documents examined that, in spite of the apparently reasonable approximations between the strategic objectives of promoting Decent Work and the treatment of the impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the world of work, this is established as a rhetorical artifice, deprived of aptitude to attack the core of the intensification of the exploitation of the workforce and of social inequality, aggravated by the technological advance on the forms of labor.