ENVIRONMENT OF UNEMPLOYMENT: THE RIGHTS WITHOUT THE CITY

Abstract

The basic premise to link unemployment, migration and citizen rights the fact that most of the time, unemployment affects the impoverished and underprivileged people that live in the periphery of the big cities around the world. Hence, this triad involves issues about the quality of urban life. It is important to emphasize that the term “urban periphery” should not be taken as synonymous of actual outskirts of the city. In the big Brazilian metropolises, for instance, there are peripheralized people living in the very center of the city. Often those people can be found sleeping on the streets, under bridges or occupying abandoned buildings. Thus, being peripheralized means to be distant from or without access to social wealth and services. Note that an unemployed person does not take part in social transactions since s/he does not produce or consume any product available in the community where s/he lives. Given this state of affairs, we conclude that citizen rights won’t be effective if the society is not conscious about the role of social forces in conquering and maintaining urban spaces. Under this geographical approach, citizenship is defined without adjectives like “complete” or “full”, mainly because there is no such thing as half-citizenship, as there is no half democracy. Unemployment is the cruel face of lack of democracy and citizenship. It exposes the fact that in certain societies labor and its results are not evenly distributed. That means that not all inhabitants of these societies are citizens.