Retiros (in)voluntarios -(In) Voluntary Retreats- is a true thesis documentary. Its first part begins as a mystery, starting with the suicide of a Telecom employee, with a series of reports by the director Sandra Gugliotta to former employees, academics, an HR manager, relatives and neighbors or fellow workers of France Telecom who They have committed suicide beginning in the first decade of this century and throughout France. The question is: why did so many employees of that telephone company commit suicide?
From the testimonies, a plot is unraveled that shows the tremendous methodologies of moral harassment with which the company harassed part of its staff to promote their "voluntary" resignation, with severe consequences on their mental and physical health and on their family relationships and in some cases leading them to such despair that it drove them to suicide.
In the second part, the director goes back more than a decade to analyze the harassment policies applied by the same company that had acquired half of the state telephone company Entel in the framework of the privatizations carried out by the Carlos Menem government, Peronist president who, shortly after taking office, turned a somersault carrying out during the 90s an economic program of a neoliberal cut aligned with the George Bush government. She also interviews former employees (including her father, the shooter of the documentary), former union delegates and former managers of the company, breaking down the "voluntary retirement" regime that Telecom deployed to get rid of thousands of employees.
The testimonies and the dryness of Gugliotta's staging and her voice-over of it have a devastating effect and constitute a chronicle that is closer to that of the survivors of a war than that of an employment relationship.
A documentary as necessary as it is extraordinary, related to neoliberalism, the Menem decade, impunity and a daughter's love for her father.
From the testimonies, a plot is unraveled that shows the tremendous methodologies of moral harassment with which the company harassed part of its staff to promote their "voluntary" resignation, with severe consequences on their mental and physical health and on their family relationships and in some cases leading them to such despair that it drove them to suicide.
In the second part, the director goes back more than a decade to analyze the harassment policies applied by the same company that had acquired half of the state telephone company Entel in the framework of the privatizations carried out by the Carlos Menem government, Peronist president who, shortly after taking office, turned a somersault carrying out during the 90s an economic program of a neoliberal cut aligned with the George Bush government. She also interviews former employees (including her father, the shooter of the documentary), former union delegates and former managers of the company, breaking down the "voluntary retirement" regime that Telecom deployed to get rid of thousands of employees.
The testimonies and the dryness of Gugliotta's staging and her voice-over of it have a devastating effect and constitute a chronicle that is closer to that of the survivors of a war than that of an employment relationship.
A documentary as necessary as it is extraordinary, related to neoliberalism, the Menem decade, impunity and a daughter's love for her father.
