The current configuration of the workplace is characterized by the complexity and intensification of worker health risks. This present thesis addresses labor and health with
Dejours’ psychodynamics as a reference point, focusing on the category of pleasure and suffering within the labor-with-automation context at the Manaus Industrial Complex (PIM).
Seeking to situate macroeconomic aspects, this study presents the socioeconomic conditions of operators and the context of productive restructuring at PIM, predominantly characterized by
increasing automation. The purpose of this study was to analyze labor organization with automation and its results on health of automated machinery operators, focusing on pleasuresuffering
and its impacts on the health-illness process. In accordance with Dejours’ theoreticalmethodological groundwork, we chose to use a qualitative approach. The empirical research was conducted in the automation area of two large Japanese companies in the electronicselectric goods segment of the PIM. Twenty-one machine operators participated as subjects (ten
from one company and eleven from the other). The main source of data was conversations with the subjects, who responded to a semi-structured interview. A linking between the Grounded
Theory with psychodynamics was used for analysis, as a qualitative technique suited to individual interviews. The concern over “quality” stood out as a core category, proving to be present in all spheres of labor organization and modulating the experience of pleasuresuffering: one of the main sources of pleasure, often mentioned, consists in performing their tasks without errors. On the other hand, the fear of errors is one of the main sources of suffering, a permanent source of tension, aggravating the risk of illness. Pleasure also comes from identifying with the task of operating high-technology machinery without committing errors. Learning more and mastering “cutting-edge technology” is a source of subjective mobilization. Suffering results from underpaid work overload, under intense pressure to produce “quality”. Workers construct collective defense strategies to support suffering: they make jokes at colleagues who make mistakes, interpreted as a resource to reduce suffering coming from fear of failure. They also use a wide variety of individual defense strategies, a reflection of individualism within this productive context. Acknowledgement, considered an ideal manner to achieve resignification of suffering, is infrequently used: less than half of the operators consider themselves duly recognized for their work; they mention the low wages as proof of the lack of acknowledgement. Symbolic acknowledgement is also lacking in one of the companies, thereby worsening suffering. The predominance of suffering over pleasure in the workplace leads to an imbalance that results in the exaggerated use of defenses: these are manifest as workplace social pathologies, among them overload pathology, related to excess work imposed on operators, since the purchase of the machines corresponds to a reduction in the workforce. Workplace suffering at PIM is far from being eliminated. In fact, it is intensifying with automation, within the context of the everworking of labor, as part of the flexible organization of capital.
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