Us and others. Domestic outsourcing and union responses in the petrochemical sector and retail

Abstract

The changes in the way of organizing work and production in recent decades have ten ded to blur relations between employees and employers, often causing precarious working conditions and fragmenting workers’ collectives. However, this process is neither univocal nor immutable, and union action is one of the key instances to deepen or reverse it. In this article we focus on one of the business strategies that modified the organization of work: outsourcing processes. Based on a qualitative analysis in two case studies (in the petrochemical sector and in supermarket companies) in Argentina, we analyze the form that outsourcing takes in each sector, the consequences of outsourcing processes in work collectives and the characteristics of union action before such processes.