The objective of this article is to discuss the possibilities and the limits of social intervention and of job satisfaction in the work done by health professionals. Within the boundaries of capitalism, it tries to understand what makes the working conditions of health workers, educational workers and production workers similar, and why. For this purpose, the text discusses the double face of work as a producer of both use values and exchange values, a dialectic relationship that makes up a totality by contradiction. It is this double face that simultaneously denies the human character of the worker, when it creates alienating social relations, and produces it, when it considers him an individual and part of humanity. In contemporary capitalism, marked by flexible accumulation, the demands for better-qualified health and educational workers make this contradiction even greater due to a very peculiar characteristic of their work: its non-material nature. Based on this discussion, the article shows that, as it happens in education, if the progressive commercialization of the health services - with its peculiar forms of organization and management - on the one hand, accentuates the dimension of suffering at work, on the other, due to the practical character of the work, it permits the development of strategies in the struggle against social inequalities.
suffering at work; commercialization of the health services; restructuring of the production processes; health work; educational work