ArcelorMittal

Resumen El artículo tiene por objetivo analizar el proceso de reconversión productiva experimentado en la empresa siderúrgica Acindar, en su planta principal ubicada en la ciudad de Villa Constitución (Santa Fe, Argentina) a partir del conflicto que tuvo lugar en el bienio 1990-1991, con importantes antecedentes en materia de rees-tructuración laboral y productiva desde mediados de los ochenta. En el caso bajo estudio se apunta a dilucidar el vínculo que se ha expresado entre el proceso de reconversión, con punto de inicio a fines de los setenta y profundización en la década de los noventa, y la expansión de la tercerización laboral. Palabras clave: INDUSTRIA SIDERÚRGICA; RECONVERSIÓN PRODUCTIVA; TERCERIZACIÓN LABORAL. Abstract The objective of the article is to analyze the restructuring of production in the steel company Acindar in its main factory placed in Villa Constitución (Santa Fe, Argentina), between 1990 and 2001, considering previous background in the mid-eighties. The cas...

Resumen
El artículo tiene por objetivo analizar el proceso de reconversión productiva experimentado en la empresa siderúrgica Acindar (que desde 2007 se encuentra integrada al grupo multinacional y principal productor de acero, Arcelor Mittal), en su planta principal ubicada en la ciudad de Villa Constitución (Santa Fe, Argentina) a partir del conflicto que tuvo lugar en el bienio 1990-1991, con importantes antecedentes en materia de reestructuración laboral y productiva desde mediados de los 80. En el caso bajo estudio se apunta a dilucidar el vínculo que se ha expresado entre el proceso de reconversión, con punto de inicio a fines de los 70 y profundización en la década de los 90, y la expansión de la tercerización o subcontratación laboral.

Palabras Clave: industria siderúrgica; reconversión productiva; tercerización laboral.

Abstract
The objective of the article is to analyze the restructuring of production in the steel company Acindar (which, since 2007, is part of Arcelor Mittal group) in its main factory placed in Villa Constitución (Santa Fe, Argentina), between 1990 and 2001, considering previous background in the mid-80s. The case under study can shed light to the link between the restructuring process and labor outsourcing, which started in the late 1970s and showed an important increase in the 1990s.

Key Words: restructuring production; outsourcing labor; Steel industry

Accident prevention is a particularly tense field where mining encounters take place. Rather than being a localised practice, accident prevention is tied to global flows of capital in raw materials’ market, international risk management systems and safety regulations, as well as relations with the national government and histories and cosmologies of the particular place. An accident in Kazakhstan is produced by, or causes a tinkle in a tea cup in London and the insignificance of that sound is acutely sensed in the Central Asian steppe. Following Pijpers and Eriksen’s conceptualisation of mining encounters in the introduction to this volume, mining encounters of accident prevention involve frictions, tensions and negotiations between different global actors regarding the cost of lives and are a particularly rich site to explore the overheated
world.

Earlier analyses have demonstrated the loss of industrial worker autonomy and the rise of deskilling after production is automated. But what happens to autonomy and skill in times of austerity, when automation breaks down? Through studying the labour process in a Kazakhstani coal processing plant, I explore how the lack of investment in machinery and staff influences the way female workers conduct their everyday work. Workers are simultaneously reskilled and exhausted by invisible extra maintenance work, with their gendered dispositions drawn on as a resource. Ethnographies of the economic crisis and austerity have so far paid little attention to the transformation of everyday industrial work. This ethnography makes a distinctive contribution by shifting the focus on to an embodied and detailed analysis of industrial work in austerity, developing ideas of gendered maintenance, repair, and skill.

El articulo tiene por objetivo analizar el proceso de reconversion productiva experimentado en la empresa side-rurgica Acindar, en su planta principal ubicada en la ciudad de Villa Constitucion (Santa Fe, Argentina) a partir del conflicto que tuvo lugar en el bienio 1990-1991, con importantes antecedentes en materia de reestructuracion laboral y productiva desde mediados de los ochenta. En el caso bajo estudio se apunta a dilucidar el vinculo que se ha expresado entre el proceso de reconversion, con punto de inicio a fines de los setenta y profundizacion en la decada de los noventa, y la expansion de la tercerizacion laboral.

Earlier analyses have demonstrated the loss of industrial worker autonomy and the rise of deskilling after production is automated. But what happens to autonomy and skill in times of austerity, when automation breaks down? Through studying the labour process in a Kazakhstani coal processing plant, I explore how the lack of investment in machinery and staff influences the way female workers conduct their everyday work. Workers are simultaneously reskilled and exhausted by invisible extra maintenance work, with their gendered dispositions drawn on as a resource. Ethnographies of the economic crisis and austerity have so far paid little attention to the transformation of everyday industrial work. This ethnography makes a distinctive contribution by shifting the focus on to an embodied and detailed analysis of industrial work in austerity, developing ideas of gendered maintenance, repair, and skill.