Artigo de Evento
A cooperação em um sistema de exploração de minério de ferro
Fecha
2019Autor
Rodrigo Padrini Monteiro
João César de Freitas Fonseca
Institución
Resumen
This proposal discusses the preliminary results of a research on the work of cable shovel operators, who work in an iron ore extraction unit, in the North region of Brazil, site of one of the main mineral reserves in the country. The investigation responds to the company's demand, which called researchers from different scientific centers (technical, cognitive, clinical-physical and psychosocial) to work on a specific project, aimed at improving these excavator operators, then called High Performance Operators. The organization's request to our core (the psychosocial) was intended to investigate the psychosocial factors that directly affect operators, in order to ensure their maximum performance. The objective of this project, according to the company's documents, is to develop skills and competences for work carried out at an intense and accelerated pace - ore excavation -, aiming at achieving maximum productivity. The research is situated in a context of replacement of the conventional mining system, which uses trucks to transport the extracted ore, by another model, called truckless. This eliminates the use of trucks, now replaced by mats that take the extracted product to the processing plant. This new iron ore mining system, unique in the world, brought significant changes to the production process and work organization. In effective operation since 2016, this extractive complex is considered, potentially, the largest in the world, in addition to the high quality of the iron content (66.7%) and its low concentration of impurities. This new process, by eliminating trucks and hundreds of workers, requires a complex automated system, from collecting the ore to loading it onto convoys that take it to seaports. In this process, the only non-automated element are the excavator operators who remove the ore from the ground, assisted by a support team around them. Based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Clínica da Atividade, using interviews, field observation, instructions to the double and self-confrontation, we take as a central analytical question the collective nature of the work, articulated to the notion of cooperation. It is a practical-theoretical alternative, opposed to the demand for individualized training of the "operator-athlete". It is understood that the collective dimension of the activity is the foundation of cooperation, structuring the productive process and the solidary work of the work teams. Preliminary results show that, although the organization does not privilege the logic of cooperation in productivity demands and in the preservation of workers' health and safety, it opens itself up to the debate about this new perspective of collective work. In this report, we try to indicate a theoretical and practical alternative to the demand for individualized training of the "athlete operator", idealized by the institution, which was based on a supposed personalization of high performance production, as a skill dependent only on individual characteristics. For this, we argue, on the other hand, that the collective dimension of the activity, which promotes cooperation at work, is a structural element of the productive process, intrinsic to the development of the operator, involving both work in pairs and solidarity with other members of the production teams, in the mineral extraction studied here.