Claude Giraud, recognized French sociologist with an extensive professional background in sociology applied to industrial and activity systems, socio-anthropology of work and sociology of mediation, spoke at UOCRA’s headquarters before the presence of more than 100 union delegates, national and sectorial union directors, union leaders and several CGT RA union consultants.
 “ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS IN UNCERTAIN SCENARIOS”, topic of rigorous modernity and present in the current scenario, was clearly developed by Giraud, who is specialized in organizational changes within the institutions, the companies and the trade unions.

Giraud expressed that people live uncertainty times that have changed forms of interpersonal relationship in the organizations. It is necessary to think over and question about new modalities in organizations. Today we are facing greater social risks as well as uncertain environmental risks and organizations are in center of those uncertainties and risks. The perverse effects of globalization and its recurrent crises have removed work centralization; even worse, traditional systems of solidarity and loyalty have been destroyed. The prominence of consumption as the virtuous driving force of the global economy has skidded with this international economic crisis, and today’s challenge is focused on creating a virtuous circle between produced wealth and distributed wealth.

The present globalization has got rid of work centralization and given a macabre centralization to a games model. Organizations are created in the short term, being as unforeseeable as the market, with a multicultural predominance of a reduced language, a postmodern coarse Latin as it is the English language. Everything is reduced to abbreviations in that language which can roughly penetrate the depth of interpersonal and institutional relationships.
The change from work centralization to game centralization has generated logic of frustrated action that reduces self-esteem and causes violence. Under this game logic, the weakest link is no longer the subject who needs to be taught to generate commitment with the organization, but the subject who needs to be eliminated, moved and that competition does not know about values. Under the premise of the organizational horizontality the job has been reduced to scraps where nobody really knows the value of the task performed, in an extremely hard competitive environment where indifference, time acceleration, and lack of self-esteem prevail.  It is not accidental that the rate of suicides (what I call blood sacrifices) due to labor matters have enormously grown and that is the product of this game logic.
In this dynamics, typical of Capitalism, the breach between fairness and unfairness is almost invisible.
Facing this up, the trade unions have an advantage so as not to be reached by this game logic, its social action, its essence, recreates the hope, and therefore the commitment and loyalty. That is its best performance, facing this predator Capitalism, where Capitalism generates defection, absence, low self-esteem; the trade union opposes collective operation, virtuous practices, the brotherhood of values. Trade unions should suit the purpose of strengthening these values and I think they are doing very well.

Claude Giraud shared the Panel with Guillermo Peres Sosto, Head of UNESCO Chair on the social matters in Argentina and presented by Antonio Jara from UOCRA, Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, who gave him a book on Evita’s life and work on behalf of the General Secretary.

  Marita González