The discourse of restructuring: employment in the New Zealand telecommunications industry

Conceptualisations of employment in the New Zealand telecommunications industry are no longer shaped by the notion of a social partnership between union and employer in a national labour market. Rather they are constituted through managerialist discourses in which individual and enterprise are linked in the pursuit of international competitiveness. One consequence of this shift is that workers are more directly exposed to the mechanisms of the market. Drawing from the neo-Foucauldian literature on governmentality, the paper traces qualitative shifts in the discourses and practices governing the employment of workers in the New Zealand telecommunications industry, thereby elucidating the contested processes through which the re-commodification of labour was achieved.