HR2
Human rights in human resources
'Equality is a juridical principle . . . Difference is an existential principle which concerns the modes of being human, the peculiarity of one's own experiences, goals, possibilities, and one's sense of existence in a given situation and the situations one wants to create for oneself. The difference between woman and man is the basic difference of humankind [. . .] Equality is what is offered as legal rights to colonized people. And what is imposed on them as culture.'
Carla Lonzi's (1970) early insights into the shift in global situations in the workplace, where transformations in the international economy would leave workers wide open to inexplicable cultural differences in rights and responsibilities to their companies. The foregoing essay looks at the interchange of corporate workday experiences and the emergent human rights as human resources in the South American context. Based on Brazilian organizational culture, the case study addresses the distinctions that arise in environments like Brazil, where citizen-workers express consistent belief that they 'stand apart' in terms of cultural, linguistic and legal history.
If Brazilian identity enforces 'difference' as a salient interpretation of socio-political consciousness, then 'equity' is not comparable to cultural knowledge of national identity to one's neighbors. Indeed, Brazil's unique history has often placed its interests as a national community in a scope of possibilities, as a country with radical contradiction in the construction and adherence of equitable distribution and equality in legal rights (Jaquette, 2009).
Once a Portuguese colony Brazil's legal infrastructure is decisively 'Western,' yet its application has been engendered with the specificity of classist, racist and sexist violence in a nation transformed under dictatorship and human rights activism. The impact of the international human rights scene on Brazil, and that society's contribution to the formation of its contemporary legislation is indicative...
So too, the country was one of the most active participants aside from neighboring Argentina and Chile to redefinition of some of the most important international human rights convention legislation, including the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
The legal (not to mention psychological) affect that this process had on Brazil's population is seen through exercise of those mechanisms to this date. When grassroots responses to discriminatory actions moved to quasi-official NGO network collaboration, the expansion of populist interest and designated governmental activities produced the kind of energy and seriousness pertinent to proliferation of children's rights, women's rights, worker's rights and a host of others in everyday practice.
Amidst such progressive thought, Sexism in the traditional sense still finds fecund ground. The hyper-sexualized Carnival is for many Brazilians what it means to 'be' Brazilian. The excessive use of sex in this case, operates as an inversion to all things traditional. Feminists argue that the presence of Carnival in Brazil counters male dominance, only for an instance, but agree that the feminized ritual turns the world upside down for the best.
Potency in radical difference rejects submissive female sexual positions; and with it old models of 'doing business.' In spite of Carnival's momentary dismantling of patriarchy, Brazil's enormous commercial investment in advertising media dedicated to scantily clad supermodels like Gisele finds normative presence after the party is over, consolidating objectification…
