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Mobbing and the worker's mental health

Globalization and neoliberalism generated a precarization of work, one which has had consequences for everyone. "Productivism," based on the capitalistic production mode, brings to scene a new way to manage human resources in companies. This new management is composed of a series of requirements, translated by the managers, in everyday life, as increased pressure to achieve goals and personalized impositions for growing quantitative results. Combined, this has caused a brutal change in the workplace - understood as a set of conditions that are external and internal to the workplace and its connections to the workers' health. These changes render the work environment a hostile, inhumane place and, thus, qualitatively unbalanced with abrupt effects on the workers' mental health, since employe-es spend most of their lives developing interpersonal and social relations at work. Therefore, their quality of life is largely dependent on the quality of their work environment. It is in this environment, marked by quantitative performance and target-reaching pressures, and by the workers' depersonalization - treated as an object of production - that the socalled mobbing takes place, a process of extreme psychological violence against the worker that causes a series of psychological damages to them.

mobbing; violence in the workplace; worker health; work precarization


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