III.Cultural meanings

The workers believed that hazard was an intrinsic part of this production process. The heat that every worker experienced in all the production sections where there were furnaces was not seen as a problem. This perception, related to a physical understanding of work, shaped the constitutive characteristics of workers´ identity. Those workers who better tolerate the heat and its consequences demonstrated their bravery, masculinity, and job skills among their comrades.

In this sense, being a worker is constructed, among other ways, through specific corporal acts and experiences: the body comes to bear cultural meanings (Butler, 1988: 520) built inside the factory.