Reestruturação, precarização e resistência nas telecomunicações do Rio de Janeiro: o trabalho no campo de batalha

Abstract

This research investigates the changings that occurred in telecommunications after its privatization in 1998, focusing on the labor in the companies of Rio de Janeiro, in the three constituent segments of the category, nowadays divided between the operators and the companies that provide the services. This labor, which underwent technological and managerial changes, was deeply flexibilized and it has become so precarious, also as part of the strategies adopted by the capital, at a global level, to face one of its major crises, starting in the 1970s. In this case, the (un) employment has been an important instrument for recovering the companies average rate of profit, which explains the very high turnover among the most "precarious" segments of the category, that is, the telemarketing workers and the network ones. All of this has serious consequences in the condition workers have and will have to carry out their activity, increasing the number of illnesses - by harassment, intensification of the journey - and it also has consequences for their ways of organization and representation. We ask ourselves, in a scenario like this, if it is possible to think of some kind of workers resistance. The analysis of the documents accessed - homologation files, complaint e-mails - as well as interviews with union leaders and questionnaires with dismissals allow us to say that there is a daily resistance, sometimes invisible, sometimes open - as in strikes and in Commissions Of Workers - who are able to stand against this logic of the precariousness of work