Surveillance, discipline, new work rhythms, and psycho-emotional discomfort in a group of telephone operators / Vigilancia, disciplina, nuevos ritmos de trabajo y malestar psicoemocional en un grupo de operadoras telefónicas.

Resumen

Introduction: For just over three decades, those interested in occupational health have warned of the importance of macrosocial transformations, technological change, and the automation of work processes since they are perceived as causing physical and psycho-emotional health problems that derive in new ways of getting sick and dying of different groups of workers. In Mexico, until recently, started the study of the effects of supervision, surveillance, discipline, and control of the bodies in the exercise of work.
Method: This study had an ethnographic orientation, through which the work´s dynamics were observed for almost a year in the traffic department of a Phone company, and diverse interviews with the group of participants were performed. Some analytical axes, oriented from interpretive anthropology, and supported by ethnographic data, show that it is in the operators´ body where the transformations are inscribed of the world of work led by a productivism ideology.
Results: In this article, I propose to describe and analyze an aspect that, derived from the study on stress with a group of telephone operators from the most important company in the country, stands out as a constitutive element of technological change. This change in which strict supervision, discipline, and the new work rhythms, bothers the operators the most, from their point of view, and contributed to the deterioration of their health, through what they called stress.