| dc.description.abstract | This paper examines how and why a mediation process may transform an antagonistic labormanagement
relation, in two post-privatized telecommunications companies in an emerging
economy, and make it evolve from severe confrontation to responsive collaboration. We deem
that the analysis of such process allows gaining a better understanding of the positive impact that
frank dialogue and trust may have on an organizational conflict, even when the prevalent social
and political context, present in a good number of the Latin American countries, encourages
labor-management altercations (Reade & Reade McKenna, 2009). After a decade of structural
reforms that dismantled the state-owned economic apparatus, social turmoil, economic
depression and extreme political weakness led, by the end of 2001, the Argentinean government
to collapse. A new government, inaugurated in 2003, proclaimed the instatement of a new policy
of wealth distribution guided by equity that eased the access to power within their organizations
to the most combative union members and, consequently, made labor-management conflicts
proliferate. After a tumultuous episode in 2004, both Telefónica de Argentina’s (TASA) and
Telecom de Argentina’s (TECO) management and the Federación de Obreros y Empleados
Telefónicos de la República Argentina – Sindicato Buenos Aires’ (FOETRA-BA) leadership
agreed to carry out a mediation process seeking to transform their unproductive confrontation
into fruitful collaboration without relinquishing their respective interests. The contribution of this
exploratory case study is the exposure of the transformative capabilities of a mediation process
on a previously strenuous labor-management relation. | en_US |
