Abstract

How do salaried workers respond to unfair situations in their workplaces? This article examines different repertoires of action deployed by workers in the Chilean labor context, characterized by high levels of wage inequality and a weak union structure. Eight focus groups are analyzed in which workers discussed how to respond to perceived injustices in the workplace. The article identifies five repertoires that have varying degrees of legitimacy according to the socioeconomic level of the group: neoliberal, managerial, trade union, fatalistic, and resilient. It argues that the neoliberal repertoire offers professional groups a greater capacity to respond to distributive and procedural injustices, while the resilient repertoire would offer unskilled workers a set of cultural tools to deal with grievances in the workplace. A greater adoption of a managerial repertoire among supervisors is driven by their motivation to manage the work environment in contexts of low union legitimacy and fear of conflict. The article concludes that in highly deregulated labor contexts, such as the Chilean case, a differentiated appropriation of repertoires could contribute to reinforcing existing inequalities at work.