Humor on the Internet: workers employ new strategy to protest against resignations and outsourcing

Abstract

The aim of this article was to analyze how the workers from EMPRESA employed humor to protest against resignations and outsourcing, which took place in the 2000's.While the steel company proposed the implantation of the "new way of being EMPRESA", which would be more modern, clearer, and participative, the workers produced and posted two videos on YouTube to tell their own history ridicularize the official discourse and protest. By using the combination of humor and the internet, the workers demonstrated their capacity of updating themselves and finding new ways to protest against their current living situation, which appeared to have increased their power in a symbolic fight. Although the resignations and outsourcing were not reversed, the "new" management was replaced by the stokeholders after two years of their mandate. The videos were analyzed by the French-based discourse analysis technique, which considered oral and written texts as discourses and with the support of semiotic methods to analyze the images associated with their words. The analyses indicated that the workers denounced the rupture of their psychological contract established with the company. The authors of the video associated the company with a female figure, sometimes a mother, sometimes a lover and the work in the factory as something fated in their lives They demonstrated their feelings of neglect and betrayal, which were coherent with this type of situation.