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For the last 13 years, basically all of my professional career
I have listened to the stories of different people,
worker groups from different areas.
Nice stories, sad stories, stories about conflict, funny stories,
all caused by situations that came about from the working environment.
Many times you don't realize that all this is going on.
Truth is a thousand times stranger than fiction.
Surely, when at work, you've all been through situations
that you never thought would happen
until you found yourselves facing them.
I listened to stories from butchers, teachers, executives,
public officers, bosses, chairmen.
And I also listened to many union delegates, job inspectors
and employers that ask themselves questions every day
about how to create a working environment
that caters better to people's needs.
One thing is clear, and Christophe Dejours,
a French psychiatrist that is supervising my doctorate thesis,
always says is that there is no neutrality about work:
It either makes us feel good or it makes us feel bad.
Work affects us.
Work can teach us new things.
We can test ourselves to see what we're capable of.
We can create new rules and new cooperation bonds.
We can make a contribution to society that didn't exist before.
We can create wealth that didn't exist before.
We think we can even reach emancipation in working.
Or, on the contrary, it can make us lose
our self-confidence.
Work can makes us defensive to such an extent
that we don't do more than protect ourselves
from our colleagues, or our bosses, or our reports.
And attack our colleagues,
and our reports and our employees.
We can be harassed. We can die going to work.
We can find many types of psychopathological and physical suffering
through the work-related diseases
that working can give us.
In the last 30 years, a whole new group
of psychopathological conditions
and pathologies related to overwork have appeared.
Things happen nowadays in working environments
that would have been unthinkable to our grandparents,
to our parents.
Today we find an acceleration in the work pace
that has been happening for some time.
And there are individual performance assessments,
even though no one ever works completely alone
and the international work market is increasingly flexible.
Let's say that, if we think about it, in our professional career
we have had different positions
and there are few people today
that can feel safe at work
and certain that they will be there for a long time.
This creates a series of new psychopathological conditions.
The most famous one is Burnout Syndrome,
which surely many of you know.
Another one is "karoshi",
a Japanese word that means "death by overwork".
There are young people without medical or family records
of cardiovascular conditions who suffer strokes
and die and the only indicator of the probable cause of death
is overwork.
And a quite dramatic situation that arose in the last 7 or 8 years,
is suicide at work.
Not at home because of something that happened during work,
but people who in the workplace call a staff meeting and shoot themselves,
open the window and throw themselves through it
or down the elevator shaft and they leave letters saying
that they're doing this because of work or because of things
they were going through at work and couldn't take anymore.
Three weeks ago, I had the chance to attend a colloquim
on suicide at work in Paris, and the amount of such cases
is very high, alarmingly high.
And it is not restricted only to Latin America or Europe,
there are cases also in Japan, Taiwan, Canada,
Australia, all showing the same situation.
But I didn't come here to be a fatalist.
Because, as I said, work can makes us feel terrible,
but work can also make us feel great.
Wealth was, is and will be made only through work.
Only through work can we contribute to our culture.
Only through work can we test ourselves,
what we can do individually and in community.
What a group is capable of doing,
they can do it through work.
But in order for work to be able to generate the best
and to be able to strengthen our identity and the building
of subjectivity and to strengthen our individuality,
we cannot ignore something very important
which is creating rules together.
It is important that we can talk
when we start to notice disagreements or situations
at work that are preventing us from living how we want to live.
Doing that is not always easy, we all know that the working environment
is full of dominance,
there are moments when we can't talk,
there are things we cannot talk about.
Often we think we shouldn't talk about suffering at work
because of the risk of being excluded from the group.
So, we need to act in a collective way.
And that is what I came to invite you to do today.
Because it isn't just workers and their representatives
who should talk about suffering at work,
but it is also the responsibility of the State.
For example, in Argentina we don't have national mandatory
mixed Health/Safety committees at work, just to name one of the many problems.
And also the employers, which are one of the main parties
that cause this intensification of work, and flexibility
and individual performance assessment.
But this is not restricted only to this environment because,
as I've just said, the working environment
is full of dominance, and we need other parties
that have influence in the political arena
or in public debate to speak about these topics.
People who have a key role to debate on these topics are
journalists, filmmakers,
playwrites, artists of every genre.
And this is already happening through many documentaries and movies
shedding light on many such situations happening today
and that used to be inconceivable.
Through the possibility of building new cooperation
there is a possibility to transform work into a mechanism
to strengthen our health.
As I was saying, work is not neutral,
meaning that it makes us feel either good or bad.
We build who we are through work.
Work is a second chance for us to test
what we can do
to develop our intelligence.
And when I speak about intelligence, I mean not only individual
but also collective intelligence, social intelligence,
the contribution that we as a generation are going to leave for our children,
our grandchildren, our nephews and nieces,
those coming after us.
The situation is quite critical today.
But let's not lose hope in the possibility
of building networks that strengthen that possibility.
This is what I wanted to talk to you about today.
Thank you very much for your time.
I ask you to think about this question:
To what extent am I using my work
to leave a mark that is about me,
about my dreams, about what I dream to build with others?
And I invite you to start talking about this.
To talk about work in a context in which
we can start to transform the situation to live in a working environment,
an organization, a city, a country, a humanity
that is related with the mark we want to leave
and not the mark that we think is left on us
because we victimize ourselves.
Thank you very much. (Applause)