Beyond Innovation-Speak: Swiss Telephone Workers and the Making of Technical Identity

This article examines how maintenance workers in Switzerland's Post, Telephone and Telegraph company (PTT) understood and represented their own labor between 1921 and 1959. Drawing on union magazines and previously unpublished sources, it argues that maintenance was not inherently invisible or undervalued but became the object of ongoing struggles over status, expertise, and technological identity. As Switzerland's telephone network expanded, automated, and aged, workers moved from identifying themselves as builders of infrastructure to presenting maintenance as a specialized and indispensable form of technical labor. These shifting representations emerged through debates about outsourcing, training, mechanization, and professional recognition, including disputes over the very name of the job. By tracing how workers alternately reproduced and challenged the "innovation-speak" that marginalized repair labor, the article reframes maintenance as a political and discursive category rather than merely a technical activity. In doing so, it contributes to the historiography of infrastructure, labor, and maintenance in modern communications systems.