‘Working mouths’ and possible repairs in times of a pandemic

In this article, the objective was to carry out a critical analysis of the relationship between oral health and labor. The reflection emerged from the significant increase in the search for emergency dental care in a basic health unit during the coronavirus pandemic, in which the subjects had something in common: the termination of their jobs in shoe factories. Based on critical social theory, an analysis was carried out on how labor, understood as a founding category of the social being, has its meaning emptied in capitalist societies, operating more as an obstacle to oral health in the dynamics of hired and alienated work. This is because it was possible to perceive that the newly unemployed subjects accumulated several oral health needs, such as infections and inflammations that caused suffering, until then internalized and hidden so that they could keep their jobs in a context of imminent unemployment, thus enabling them to continue reproducing their material life. Thinking about the relationship between oral health and work brings us closer to understanding the health-disease process as socially determined, when exploited work relationships materialize in ‘working mouths’. In this way, the democratization of access to oral health is seen and understood as a right to a full life.

Keywords:
oral health; labor; Covid-19; pandemic