Collective Actions and Moral Struggles in Outsourced Workers Mobilization

Despite some current interpretations stressing the weakness of precarious labourers, strikes, protests and mobilization of outsourced workers has been comun among them at least during de 10th first years of XXI century in Brazil. In the past few years, strikes lead by outsourced workers in some tradicional industrial segments has increased, and has been even more important than direct workers' ones in some sectors. In these paper we propose to analyse outsourced workers from three differents huge steels' industries in Brazil which went on strike for at least three times between 2000 and 2013. The steel industries of Usiminas (Cubatão), Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (Volta Redonda) and Arcelor Mittal Tubarão (Serra) passed througth outsourced workers' strikes and paralisation, that had negative impacts in its production. Analysing interviews and unions press the main reason used to support these collective actions was based quite often on moral statements as the search for “recognition” or “respect”. Beside the demand for material recognition, there were, among outsourced workers, in a important level, claims for equality of conditions in relation to direct labours. It means that the management of differences established by the widespread outsourcing process can be potencially conflictual. Thompson's concept of “moral economy” represented an important innovation for academic studies in order to consider notions of justice, rights and obligations in the evaluation of reality by poor, opressed and subordinated people. Breaking with a narrow vision which considers peasants' colective actions in XVIII century as result of economic struggle, or as result of irrational pulses, Thompson aims to highlight the moral dimension of these events. In the same path, analysing current collective actions, Noronha (2009) states that strikes are less a result of low wages than of the perception of low wages. Wages are seen as low in contrast with other workers' wages, or in relation to a previous situation. Outsourced workers earn less than direct workers and less than they earned before outsourcing to perform the same activities. They do not struggle for entirely new rights, but for the rights lost in the general process of outsourcing activities. The research has also shown that outsourced condition lead to a reconstruction of colective identity, capable to gather in one single movement diferent enterprises' employees. If the number of direct workers decreased in relation to the past, trade unions were capable to organize unified identities, that cross borders between outsourced workers. Outsourcing plays an important role in economic changes since the spread of flexibilization ideology. This paper aims to show that the struggle against this major wave in restructuring program has been made by a discourse focusing the disparity of conditions between workers. We also search to demonstrate that mobilisation and collective actions performed by outsourced workers were considered as disadvantages of outsourcing, which may have had impact on economic action in some cases.