THE BRAZILIAN AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY: AN ANALYSIS OF THE MAIN TECHNOLOGICAL SHIFTS IN THE PRODUCTIVE SYSTEM AND ITS IMPACT OVER EMPLOYMENT

The Brazilian automobile industry is of vital importance to the economic and social development of the country. In the last decades, the automotive sector underwent important changes in its productive system, especially since the 1990s. In this light, the present study aims to analyse the evolution, the main technological shifts in the productive system of manufacturers in Brazil, and its impact over employment between 1957 and 2018. In order to grasp this, the work was based on literature review and research on secondary data. As a result, it identified that with the trade liberalization and productive restructuring, the automobile industries began adopting the production system based on Toyostism, which had also been improved with the introduction of the JIT and Kanban systems. Such transformations aided in cost reduction and improvement in production and work productivity, which in turn has impacted the rates of employment in factories insofar as human labour was being substituted by machines.