The central object of this study is the analysis of the labor culture of the telephone operators of the Telephone Company of Chile between 1970 and 1998. As general methodological procedure a historical-anthropological approach was used that incorporated the relations between men and women as a cross-sectional analytical category. Written and oral sources were used: official company documentation, documents from the National Historical Archive, newspapers, magazines and union documents, and in-depth interviews with telephone operators. The work culture of telephone operators was characterized by a work organization based on strict control of working hours, bodies and the standardization of speech. The constant technological changes intensified the work of the telephone operators and generated their progressive obsolescence as a labor sector until their disappearance. Permanent and replacement telephone operators had different working conditions, forms of union organization and class affiliation that allowed higher levels of exploitation of the female workforce.
