Learning to be a worker. Imaginaries of modernity and industrialization in the training of workers in Ecuador since the 1960s

• In Event: The formation of social classes

Abstract

The distinction between professionals and workers, despite the reflections and discourses on the flexibilization and even the end of work, is still valid to analyze the life experiences of workers. The worker is a subject that is built in different instances such as educational and work trajectories, associative processes, their relationship with their work object and labor markets, the relationship between the state and productive sectors, global perspectives on work and the different ways in which they learn to work. In Latin America, education for work emerged in a tripartite scheme (State, company, workers) and with a relative independence from formal education systems, and precisely because of this, it allows analyzing the learning of what it means to be a worker beyond the abstract vision of formal education, or the more simplified one that comes from the study of the structure of labor markets. In line with other countries in the region, in the 1960s, Ecuador created the SECAP Ecuadorian Vocational Training Service, with the objective of intensively training labor for the commercial, industrial and service sectors. This research seeks to analyze the different ways in which the shifting imaginaries of modernity and industrialization that have arisen in Ecuador, are condensed and intersect in the worker ideal that this institution produces in its training processes, distinguishing at least between the creation of SECAP, the stage of military dictatorships, the neoliberal phases of the 90s and 2000, and the changes introduced by the process known as "citizen revolution”.

Author

• Alexander Amézquita Ochoa, Universidad Central del Ecuador