Rupturas y continuidades en el mundo del trabajo: Trayectorias laborales y valoraciones subjetivas en un estudio de caso

Abstract

During the last decades, work has changed drastically. Knowing that these changes modified the material life's strategies of workers and their valuation and perception of work, this article pretends to investigate how people face this phenomenon and the consequences that these events produced on their subjectivities. Here, we present a case study that tries to describe and analyze the labor trajectories of ex OFA's workers. This firm was a medium-sized metallurgical factory located in Gran La Plata that closed due to bankruptcy in 1993. According to this purpose, in our analysis we adopted a qualitative methodological perspective using the concept of labor trajectories. It intends to show the dynamical relation established between structural conditions and strategies developed by social actors. In the fist place, we describe the analyzed trajectories: work in the enterprise, labor searches done and present occupational insertions. In the second place, we focus on the analysis of valuations and perceptions that workers have about past and current job and the transformations occurred along their trajectories. Finally, we conclude that work is still being a structural axis in the life of studied workers, although the break of their labor trajectories