This text approaches the actual moment of productive restructuring of enterprises, with its politics of participative management and the involvement of employees, from a point of view which places them within a wider context: the context of democratization of Brazilian society and the forming of a public sphere that contemplates the relationship between capital and work as constitutive. In this sense, a contractual matrix and a corporate matrix are put in confrontation as two competing driving forces in the history of industrial relations in Brazil. The discussion on fordism is made by the means of this confrontation. The virtualities of a contractual path are associated to the wave of negotiations that have taken shape in syndicalism in recent years, bringing them closer to a practice that emphasizes the procedural aspects of the agreements; pointing to the innovating character they have in a historical environment traditionally resistant to the public presence of work representatives.
work; unions; public space; social contracting