Fabriquereas. Trabajo, familia y sindicalismo en la industria quimica y cosmetica. Gran Buenos Aires, 2007-2011.

This research explores those social proceses in which women’s subalternity at work is founded. By using a qualitative methodology, it analizes the links, joints and tensions between two spheres of social life supposedly independent of each other: the familiar domestic sphere and the economic labour one.
This píece of work focuses on the intersection between these dimensions among non-skilled manual workers. The case study were two branches of cosmetic and chemical industries placed in the Gran Buenos Aires between 2007 and 2011. Particularly, there was selected a research group which personify the image of the worthy worker of the current Argentina: registered and unionized. Nevertheless, the results of this research shows that the above mentioned image tends to conceal other aspects of the collective worker’s life. This finding is significant insofar these aspects become crucial when they are considered together with the cleavage of sex, understood as a social relation.
This research approaches different perspectives such as the social relation between sexes, the economy of care at the same time that goes deeply into four emergent aspects of the selected cases. Firstly, it considers the way by which the construction of technical qualification involves the naturalization of women’s productive skills at the convey belt. Secondly, it explores how familiar paths and the organization of care at workers’ home are crossed by those routines restored in the factory. Thirdly, this study critically examines the model of conciliation between family and work used by the local labour legislation and collective agreements of work on the one side, as well the intensity and modality of female participation in trade unions, on the other. In addition, it reflects the extent to which female heteronomy within trade unions but also in their estrangement of these organizations can be related to the predominant conciliation model, their working conditions and the burden of care within their families. Finally, there is analyzed how the implementation of entrepreneurs’s policies in order to discipline workers’ labour is nurtured and guided by representations and images that tend to reproduce traditional sex roles.
Our purpose is to contribute to a set of debates about the particularlities of the social experience and the type of relation that women establish with their work, in the case of unskilled industry workers of contemporary Latin-American societies.