The innovations in telecommunications and the new labour identities

Abstract

This paper intends to analyze the changes in labor policies in the telecommunication area highlighting workers’ view about it. In this way, an answer is attempted to the almost null or distorted media coverage that the problematic of the task force negotiation had along the restructuration process that traversed the area.The study is based on statistical information and in-depth interviews conducted to workers in the fixed telephone companies operating in Argentina. The personal experience that persists in workers –whether they have been dismissed or not – is that privatization implied destabilization and fragmentation of a way of living structured on labor identity and culture. This lost of meaning of an ethics in which work is a synonym to personal accomplishment, was experienced by workers as humiliation and disrespect to their labor and professional backgrounds, a diminishment of their know-how, a lack of personal and social acknowledgement of their work, and a persistence of uncertainty regarding the future.