ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to analyze and interpret the policies of labor management in force in the public school system of Rio de Janeiro, in its relationship with the health of school workers. By means of qualitative research, workers from twelve schools were interviewed, and the interviews were interpreted according to an approach of discourse analysis. The policies that were most quoted by the interviewees were: administrative policies associated with the health of education professionals, such as functional rehabilitation and medical leave; the policies associated with teaching practices, such as automatic promotion, the system of cycles and the New School Program; and, also, the policies associated with the current model of public management, such as outsourced employees. We found that the hegemonic paradigm of labor management has not taken into consideration the context of the labor where the micro-political management of this activity is performed. Building on the interviews, we verified how much the educational macro-policies and the governmental measures can determine the current circumstances of health among education professionals, so that a set of actions is necessary to change the conditions and the organization of labor which cause the sickening of workers, and also the development of participative policies in order to reduce the leaves for medical reasons. We developed the argument that is necessary to know and transform the social and economic effects arising from the absence of public macro-policy of health intended for the labor in the schools.
Public policies; workers' health; labor in schools; education Workers; functional rehabilitation