ILPC 2026

 As it is well known, in the capitalist mode of production the labour process is organized in view of the generation and accumulation of profits. To this end, workers are imposed an amount of demands that push them to give their greatest effort during the working day and that allows their employers to extract from them the greatest amount of surplus value. Under these conditions, workers are exposed to numerous risks that damage their health and also face physical and mental demands that deteriorate their well-being in very different ways. In this regard, occupational diseases and accidents are the human costs that underlie profit accumulation.

If there are different uses of the labour force at each stage of capitalist accumulation, therefore the labour risks will also be transformed and different patterns of pathologies will arise. Taking this into consideration we would like to discuss the growing incidence of a new class of labour risks, called psychosocial risks and how they relate to the current regime of capitalist accumulation.

Among other features, this regime is characterized by the increasing productive flexibility, the intensification of work, the expansion of the service sector and the raising rationalization of production that companies apply to gain competitiveness. In this context, workers not only suffer from the traditional labour diseases and accidents (associated to physical, chemical or biological risk factors), but also face the incidence of psychic and emotional disorders that have increased dramatically in recent years.

Particularly in the service sector, the productive processes demand workers to mobilize their creativity, their emotions and their ethical, communicative and cognitive abilities. All these demands increase their global workload, with very different consequences for their health: stress, burnout, chronic fatigue, anxiety, gastrointestinal disorders, only to mention a few examples of the symptoms that are widespread in the working population these days.

For the purposes of illustrating these issues in our paper we will outline some researches carried out in Argentina of which we have participated about psychosocial risks at work. These researches were conducted in the service sector and allowed to establish the articulations (not always visible or recognized) that exist between the way the labour process is organized and the risks and illnesses that affect workers.

In this way, the proposed approach seeks to overcome the individualized explanations about the causes of occupational risks and shows that the explanatory keys and also the possibilities of intervention (for prevention purposes) are located at the level of the labour process: in its content and in the way it is organized.