Living Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France

Living Labour Life on the line at Peugeot France

Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld

Living Labour

Living Labour Life on the line at Peugeot France Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld Translated by Dafydd Roberts

© Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld 2003 Foreword © Paul Stewart 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This edition published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–0406–5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Durand, Jean-Pierre, 1948– [Chaine et le reseau. English] Living labour : life on the line at Peugeot France / by Jean-Pierre Durand & Nicolas Hatzfeld ; translated by Daffyd Roberts. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0406–5 (cloth) 1. Peugeot S.A.—Employees. 2. Automobile industry workers—France—Sochaux. 3. Assembly-line methods—Social aspects—Case studies. 4. Assembly-line methods—Psychological aspects—Case studies. 5. Peugeot S.A.—Management. I. Hatzfeld, Nicolas. II. Title. HD8039.A82 F714913 2002 331.7′629222′094446—dc21 10 9 12 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vi

List of Tables

vii

List of Boxes

viii

Foreword by Paul Stewart

ix

Introduction

1

1

Peugeot-Sochaux: A Solid Inheritance and Incessant Change

7

2

The Line Seen from Below

28

3

Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity

87

4

The Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment

157

5

Possible Futures of the Sochaux System

218

Notes

241

Bibliography

253

Index

257

v

List of Figures 3.1 Age distribution of workers in HC and MV, January 1996 3.2 Assembly-line workers’ relationship to work

vi

128 150

List of Tables 1.1 Working hours for shops linked to production flow 2.1 Content of workstation ‘strengthening of rear floor’ in MV 3.1 Career trajectories 3.2 Attitudes of manual workers from the two teams at MV and HC2 4.1 Elections for works council (WC) and for employee representatives

vii

15 33 132 135 187

List of Boxes 1 The research and the methods adopted 2 Operations sheet: positioning of two fixing screws for front right-hand shock-absorber 3 List of responsibilities, according to one team leader 4 Youngsters and veterans: construction of an opposition 5 A young CGT candidate argues from his experience 6 An inflection of career trajectory: the case of young Bruno 7 An inflection of career trajectory: the case of Patrick, the old-timer

viii

5 62 75 123 125 143 145

Foreword

Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld begin their compelling account of the tension between organisational renewal and the persistence of tradition at Peugeot with the celebrated tale of Le chêne et le roseau by French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine. Le chêne is the oak tree and le roseau is the reed. While the oak is taken to represent the old, strong yet unyielding organisation, the reed represents the new, pliable and accommodating. The reed bends in the perpetual storm of change. In the French original, their use of Le chêne and le roseau to pun with la chaîne and le réseau (the chain and the network) is playful and ingenious.1 The chain, the assembly line, iconic institution of Fordist social relations and, for some, destined to history, is contrasted with the idea of the network (le reseau), emblematic of future, postmodern employment relations. Yet one of the goals Durand and Hatzfeld set themselves is precisely to challenge this binarism and they do this by uncovering both the social space in which new forms of work are created and played upon by workers together with the dependence of these on already existing organisational forms. More emphatically, against the persistence of the ‘chain’, the assembly line, workers negotiate new relationships, new networks with one another, on the basis of patterns of social inequality and the myriad struggles against it. The location of their study is the main production complex (the Carrosserie) at Peugeot’s Sochaux site in the Pays de Montbéliard region in eastern France. In uncovering one of the special features of social relations at work, they illuminate the interrelationships and reciprocity between the assembly line and new patterns of work, management and employment relationships at Peugeot–Sochaux. They argue, contrary to the obvious hyperbole of the ‘one-best way’ approach extolled so potently by Womack, Jones and Roos (1990), together with the simplifications of the Japanisation school, that the abolition of Tayloristic managerial practices remains an unlikely outcome of the adoption of actually existing lean manufacturing practices. The subtext of the lean production school, the possibility of the end of social inequality and political exclusion at work is shown here to be little more than managerial rhetoric. ix

x Foreword

While the network, the team in all its myriad forms, is purveyed by advocates of lean production as the solution to the social problem of ‘autonomy lost’, the supposed flexibility of the network is double edged. This is because, for Durand and Hatzfeld, the question to be addressed is more complex than that allowed by the straightforward top–down implementation of a new management agenda. Even managerial strategic prognoses engage, win and lose battles whose future may be determined by social forces over which they have questionable authority and limited understanding. This is inevitable since, for Durand and Hatzfeld, the critical point of daily engagement between management and labour hinges quintessentially on what we might term the ‘moment of autonomy’. But autonomy is also more than a moment since it is on the basis of the quality of this autonomy that the success or failure of the struggle against social inequality both at work and more widely is determined. But what else is meant by autonomy and in what way can it be seen to impact upon social struggles? Autonomy is about the brokered social space in which workers find themselves and it is a position from which they redefine management priorities. In one of a number of memorable phrases captured by Dafydd Roberts sympathetic translation they reveal the broader sense of their meaning: ‘autonomy…has a name, and workers…suggest it is at the heart of social relations, this is the ambience, the atmosphere’. This is inherently always contentious and moreover every actor has his or her view of what makes for a good ‘atmosphere’. In the French original, ‘ambiances d’interieur’ conveys exactly the theme of internal factory, social network and conditions, not just for survival but also for struggle. While lean production can be seen obviously to limit autonomy in its more conventional sense of job determination and time management, ambiance refers to an inherent characteristic of the relationship between employees and their work. Though structural in origin, contingency is what gives ambiance its dynamism. While ambiance, atmosphere, is a creation of the interplay of workers, managers and capital (assembly line and other) practices it is given its spark, its life, by the meanings workers ascribe to their quotidian experiences at work and elsewhere. Moreover, autonomy is not only concerned with time and task control, although these are certainly important aspects. Autonomy is also a question of identification and affiliation. In part it is about subjectivity, but primarily it is concerned with the ways in which we think about our work, who we associate with, in and outside of work, and what the implications of these considerations are for what we do about our subordination, and significantly, our insubordination.2 Thus, behind worker

Foreword xi

flexibility and the permeability of employment relationships is a (social) network that bends, strains in fact, both ways. Organisational flexibility and worker adaptability, perhaps paradoxically, allow the possibility for workers to redefine their relationship to work, on the basis of the renewal of networks of affiliation, inside and outside their immediate workplace and community networks and often at the employer’s expense. Although it has specific roots in the post-war debate in sociologie du travail and importantly in the work of Pierre Naville, this notable feature of their book has a resonance with some aspects of Miriam Glucksman’s concept of the Total Social Organisation of Labour. The themes of worker autonomy, technological change-cum-automation, and struggles against inequality, are at the centre of much post-war debate in sociologie du travail. As a tribute and determination to continue research in the spirit of Naville, Jean-Pierre Durand set up the Centre de Recherche Pierre Naville in 1993. Nicolas Hatzfeld, also a member of the Centre, is a labour historian whose interest in Peugeot– Sochaux began in the early 1970s when he worked for four years (1971–5) in a Peugeot plant as an unskilled worker and labour activist. Their concerns reinvigorate a number of keynotes in Naville’s historical legacy which it is worth pursuing if only briefly to give some insight into this significant contribution to the debate on worker autonomy. Naville’s argument was that automation would be fundamental to seeing this ambition achieved. Moreover, automation would eventually lead to the diminution of inequality, an unlikely possibility in the view of Durand and Hatzfeld. While rejecting his optimism they nevertheless embrace a number of crucial features of his wider agenda including his attempt to link technology, autonomy and social inequalities. Despite co-editing with Georges Friedmann the path breaking The Treatise on the Sociology of Work (two volumes), according to Sylvie Célérier (1997) their common focus on the trajectory of skill, technology and domination nevertheless gave way to an incompatible and antagonistic view of social change. While the Treatise is commonly seen to have been pivotal in establishing a modern sociologie du travail, Naville’s differences with a number of other key researchers, not just Friedmann, in the 1950s and early 1960s was probably inevitable given his embrace of a more open Marxism. This was critical in his development of a broad intellectual panorama, from psychology to surrealism, and his commitment to the International Left Opposition challenge to Stalinism.

xii Foreword

In contrast to Friedmann, Naville felt the creation of a new discipline – sociologie du travail – was of limited importance set against the greater need to make sense of societal evolution: a sociologie du travail for sure, but only until we can get to grips with the more significant theme of social evolution, not just social evolution broadly conceived, but rather change seen from the standpoint of work. Work is central to social structure, order–disorder, social production and reproduction of inequality. If work is foundational in general social terms for Naville, sociology should thus be concerned with seeing it as a process that can be used to explain the ordering, pacing and determination of patterns of social relations in general (Naville, 1963, pp. 43–5 and 87). We should strive to forget the sociology of work, sui generis, whatever its short-term strategic theoretical value as a temporary expedient, to get to the heart of the problem of the motor of social production and reproduction. Contrary to Friedman, the objective of Naville was to highlight the way in which social inequalities are constructed in macro terms. Since both the pursuit and practice of work structures social relations in every sense, sociologists must be able to uncover the way in which our various interactions give rise to historically determined relations of inequality, struggles and autonomies. It is in this sense that one can see his oeuvre as being concerned less with the ‘sociology of work’ and more with what Célérier prefers to describe as ‘work studied by sociology’. What can we learn from work that will tell us something about how societies change? Herein lies one reason for his concern with extant and putative technologies – whither automation? The development of automation will reveal the character of social change since automation demands certain conditions that are not everywhere available. Automation depends upon specific market, state and civil society conditions and where these are met the implications for human relations will be extensive, whether within or without the employment relationship (Naville, 1961). But Naville argued that one critical feature was the impact of automation on skill formation, training and knowledge – but knowledge and skill in the context of social relations of inequality, autonomy and, by degrees, power. That is to say, automation acts on our lives in an all-encompassing and heterogeneous fashion, allowing for the possibility that eventually society can be freed from the contraints of the logic of production (Naville, 1963). For Naville, understanding automation offers the scope for breaking the nexus of alienation and private control of the means of production (Rose, 1979). While with hindsight one can deride Naville’s obviously mistaken optimism 3 it can nevertheless be forgotten that his approach developed

Foreword xiii

out of the search for a cross-disciplinary account of inequality that has been missing recently from the subdiscipline and sometimes notably among researchers working in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. If one of the abiding strengths of the Anglo-Saxon approach to the sociology of work has been to focus on the specificity of workplace relations, this has sometimes had a somewhat debilitating impact on the search for a broader understanding of the contradictions inherent in new phases of production. While it is beyond the range of this preamble to discuss the great heat generated in the period after 1945 in the debate around the significance of a ‘plant-based sociology’, suffice to say that today the dominant tendency has been to reinforce this orientation. Whether seen from the vantage of either conventional or Marxist approaches, the sociology of work has tended increasingly to isolation from crucial questions of political economy. While this was far from Braverman’s mind, of course, the fact is that increasingly there has been a tendency to overplay relations-in-production with the assumption that these adumbrate and give shape to external non-production relations. In part this has grown out of a tension in the International Labour Process Conference in the UK which, until quite recently, was the focus of conflict between, on the one side, the ‘critical materialists’ and the ‘critical social relations’ approach, and on the other the neoFoucauldians and postmodernists. The weakness has been to some extent to overplay the specificity of the labour process at the expense of locating it within broader issues of social inequality, injustice and domination, not to mention the sometimes profound, though often banal, struggles against these. Whatever the verities of this brief and admittedly stylised assessment, the upshot of this concentration on the workplace as the departure point for social domination has been detrimental to a broader societal account of the interstices of work, work–space and social inequality. Significantly, it is interesting to note that the most sophisticated attempt to reinvent a broader sociological account of the relationship between work and society has come from outside the International Labour Process Conference proper. Miriam Glucksman’s Cottons and Casuals (2000) arguably represents a determined attempt to rescue the analysis of labour, employment and social inequality from an AngloSaxon sociological orthodoxy – to save the sociology of work from itself as it were. In France, Naville’s legacy in sociologie du travail is at play in this vital work by Durand and Hatzfeld, although we can see too a number of other influences that owe something to the Anglo-Saxon tradition

xiv Foreword

within Marxism, the most alluring being that of Burawoy. In one especially important passage Durand and Hatzfeld address the undertheorisation in Burawoy’s notion of transparency by counterposing to it the dynamic process of worker opacity. In the tension between transparency and opacity workers seek concealment of their knowledge of work and other social processes by framing their behaviour within the context of ambiance/autonomy. This autonomy depends in turn upon an explicitly Marcel Mauss-style bargain of mutual trust founded upon reciprocity. So they want to unravel the interrelationships involved in networks, identity formation and automation by linking external social relations, history and biography, ethnicity and collectivism: It is the density of the social networks that gives the asembly line its life. Unofficial complicities between members of the team, a shared history of long employment, ethnic and generational solidarities, mutual assistance in the face of difficulties, the sharing of risk, the comradship of past struggles, all these go to form the intricately intersecting networks of relations that make life on the line liveable and tolerable. This neatly sums up their broad agenda – the quality of social change and the indisputable social creativity of work flowing out of circumstances of ‘conflict and accommodation’. This larger interest in the social basis of workplace commitment leads into their concern with how the line is actually ‘lived’. This assumes that ambiance, autonomy, is a social and personal space wherein workers can make sense of their environment with some degree of authority: He is torn between the self-dispossession involved in his work and the impossibility of ever accepting this. The line is the source of a multiplicity of tensions that impinge on the worker as the subject of his own work. Even in networks established by management on the basis of technical and productivity requirements – the teams – social engagement, for Durand and Hatzfeld, reveals the political and social basis of worker autonomy/ambiance. This will be even more obviously the case where workers necessarily establish informal networks based upon social groups, collectifs. Collectifs are essential in giving meaning to the workplace and especially in the formation of sites of opposition. But it is an

Foreword xv

ambiguous cohesion that is established on the basis of shared meaning between workers. It can end in disillusion but the collectif may also, sometimes, ‘easily pass from autonomy to resistance, and from resistance to militancy or to shared trade union membership’. Their argument here is really an explanation for the persistence of worker-centred collectivism, notwithstanding managerial rhetoric about collectivism of the company-sponsored variety. This is supposed to resolve the problem of social fragmentation, ironically brought about by the managerialdriven institutions and ideologies of lean production. Durand and Hatzfeld show precisely how limited managerial grasp is (as is that of traditional trade unionism) of the social sources of worker identification, understanding and practice. This is a fascinating description of the dynamics behind the formation of worker collectivism in lean production regimes. Sometimes these collectifs can be formed on the basis of immediate spatial proximity, or result from non-work relationships, but their purpose is to confront and give meaning to the difficulties arising out of the confusion of the work process including the meaninglessness of task fragmentation. Yet more than this, it could be said that their objective is the fundamental and oftoverlooked notion that technology, including technology of the assembly line together with the various practices of automation, is not just intrinsically, but manifestly, social and political. It is in this sense that they can argue that networks are not about ‘simple complexes of cooperation’ but are rather about ‘self affirmation, implementing personal strategies of conquest, resistance, or renunciation which find expression in the social interaction of the shop’. Production can play havoc with interpersonal relationships including one’s own sense of purpose. Despite production activities reordering hierarchies, recreating links between workers and making and breaking social and personal ties, community and other non-work affiliations are just as crucial in remaking identities. This is all vital in underpinning and giving expression to what they term a ‘productive compromise’ whereby differences of attitude or social status are resolved, however temporarily and expediently. A social peace (‘productive compromise’) enabling automobiles to be manufactured is forged ‘which is inseparable from forms of domination’. The compromise, the peace between workers, grows out of mutual support, reciprocity, whether practical, instrumental or emotional, and is recreated anew each day. This exchange, reciprocity, as in Mauss’s gift, binds people together through mutually assured dependency – a social and emotional debt. So we can see how in an important sense it can be said that Durand and Hatzfeld follow Naville in attempting to locate ‘society at work’.

xvi Foreword

The links they uncover between work and wider social relationships between assembly-line technology in its widest sense illustrate wonderfully the extent to which the reproduction of exploitation and alienation at work are necessarily bound by both structural and contingent characteristics. If, for Durand and Hatzfeld, the politics behind technical trajectories at work can be seen at play across all forms of employment they also demonstrate the generic weakness in new forms of workplace organisation. This is reminiscent of Naville’s view of the interaction of social, political and technological forces and, in the French edition of their book, Durand and Hatzfeld use the term flux tendu to express the idea of both the internal ‘tight flow’ of the work regime and the macro social character of employment today. Lean production promised management a solution to the age-old problem of worker collectivism, yet the social realities of work, including the interstices of work and community tensions, are tied as much as all employment relationships by the reality of a ‘productive compromise’. And it is this necessary compromise that hampers management as much as labour. That is to say, whatever the apparent social and organisational flexibilities promised by advocates of lean production, new patterns of work and employment, like those they supposedly supersede, are formed and limited by social relationships, by networks mediated through time and the experience of subordination or resistance to management. The social reality of networks, both formal and informal, challenge the promise of lean production to resolve management’s insubordinate worker problem. In a variety of ways lean production is bound by the fact of a determinate social realm, much of which has life away from the spotlight cast by management, whatever conceit is assumed about the possibility of strategic social control. The particular ‘productive compromise’ established in the context of variously created networks at Peugeot–Sochaux therefore inevitably limits the malleability of workplace relationships just as distinctively as do those in other employment relationships, whatever the context, space or time. P AUL S TEWART Editor of Work, Employment and Society

Notes 1. Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld, La Chaîne et le Réseau: PeugeotSochaux, ambiances d’intérieur (Editions Page Deux, 2002). 2. Although Ackroyd and Thompson (1997) do not seek to give it a name, ambiance perhaps could be said to approximate the space in which the autonomous worker-centred activities they identify are played out. 3. Notably his view that the assembly line would eventually disappear.

Introduction

In his fable, La Fontaine sets the unbending pride of the oak, the king of the forest, against the yielding humility of the reed; and it is the oak in its pride that is brought low by the storm. Here, however, we shall be arguing that if the assembly line has flourished and become all-powerful, it has the flexibility of its associated work relations to thank for its growth and good fortune. It is the social network – or rather complex of networks – that surrounds the line which combines with the rigidity of the latter to sustain it. The names applied to this dialectical unity, such as flexibility, multi-skilling, tacit skills and so forth, give only an imperfect account of the richness of social life on the line. For in both the laborious physical exertion, and the satisfaction that work can bring, it is the density of social networks that gives the assembly line its life. Unofficial complicities between members of the team, a shared history of long employment, ethnic and generational solidarities, mutual assistance in the face of difficulty, the sharing of risk, the comradeship of past struggles, all these go to form the intricately intersecting networks of relations that make life on the line liveable and tolerable. Contrary to a common expectation inherited from the 1980s, automation has not led to the elimination of manual workers from the factories. Though numbers in this occupational category are indeed slowly falling, manual workers today still represent nearly a third of the workforce. What is more, manual work under constraint of time1 and shift-work2 are both increasing in importance, and assembly-line work – the object of a barrage of criticism in the 1970s, supposedly to be reduced to vestigial status by the automation of the 1980s – is doing more than holding its own. Far from being obsolete, then, the detailed study of assembly-line work in a modernised and still modernising car factory has lost none of 1

2 Living Labour

its relevance, giving us an insight into what has happened to this type of work in the age of the so-called service economy – while this sector itself is turning to the car industry in search of principles for the organisation of the work of its own labour force. For the way in which car assembly plants combine standardisation and diversity and fragmentation and flexibility in the pursuit of mass production has once again made them a source of inspiration for thinking about the organisation of work in general. The successive recombination of these elements, in response to changes in both social demand and technical possibilities, is surely one reason for the longevity of this mode of organisation. Such a hypothesis raises two questions in particular. First of all, what have been the changes? If assembly-line work, at the intersection of Taylorism and Fordism, has both maintained and renewed itself over a century, what is it that has remained the same, and what is it that has changed? The question isn’t purely theoretical, but posed in practical terms each time the researcher returns to the workplace under investigation. On the one hand, one finds oneself bemused by the turnover of managers, roles, structures, norms, and topics of current concern. On the other, one is engaged by familiar routines and relations, and more directly, by those who come and ask why one has come back and what else there might be to find that is new. Very concretely, then, change appears not as a given, but as a postulate, and one has to ask whether there has been change at all, not simply what form change has taken. The other question raised by the longevity of the assembly-line system relates to the relationships established, and how, in the end, through conflict and accommodation, working situations take on form and meaning and are accepted and made their own by assembly-line workers themselves. From its very inception, the Taylorist model of organisation has been as often and as vigorously condemned for so-called social reasons as it has been defended on grounds of its economic efficiency, and this controversy is continuously maintained and renewed, notably by representatives of the two sides of industry. In the effort to attack or defend the legitimacy of assembly-line work, however, one way or another this debate steps beyond the bounds of the workplace itself; but given that work itself remains an essential element in the organisation of relations between workers and employers, it would seem useful, before proceeding to do anything else, to examine how this organisation comes about. This study therefore looks at the rules, the technical lay-outs (installations) and the tools in play, and the adjustments and accommodations that come about in the course of production. It does not, however, make any attempt to assess performance or efficiency: looking at the business

Introduction 3

from the bottom up, it has nothing to do with any managerial monologue. Through this seemingly heteroclite array of objects and the ways they are put to work, it attempts to understand what kind of technological society is thus brought into being. In this respect it is a contribution to the international debate on lean production. The new ‘one best way’ supposedly blazed by the proponents of lean production comes up against all its limitations at this plant, where tradition has gained the upper hand over Japanisation to achieve an enviable economic performance. While we the authors were wondering about the source or basis of workers’ personal involvement in assembly-line work, the management at Peugeot-Sochaux , preparing for organisational changes, were concerned with a certain falling-off in the motivation of assembly-line workers. If these two sets of questions were in a way mirror images of each other, they were concerned with the same object: the process by which workers in the final assembly shop at Sochaux found themselves engaged by their work. The Sochaux management, then, were happy to allow us to carry out this research, whose results would be as important to them as to us. Workers, supervisors, technicians, middle managers and trade unionists willingly responded to our questions and to the demands we made on them. We offer them our warmest thanks, for without their co-operation and without the many, many interviews and discussions, without the plentiful documentation made available, without the feedback meetings to discuss the outcome of the research, this book could not have been written. The core of our investigation is a comparative study of three teams of workers: this choice of the micro-social scale corresponds to the day-to-day focus of the employees themselves, and of the assembly-line workers in particular. It was intended to reveal the social arrangements and interactions which a larger-scale study would have lost sight of. One of the authors worked for twelve weeks on two different lines, gaining a better concrete understanding of the work, and seeing from within, as it were, the logics and conflicts at work on the line and the arrangements established between workers. (More information about the research and the methods adopted is given in Box 1 at the end of this introduction). How is assembly-line work lived? For the worker who performs it, it is the source of many tensions. The rhythms of his own life clash with those that govern the day at the factory; his sense of himself as subject is challenged by the fragmentation of activity; the effective networks of co-operation do not correspond to the formal structures of organisation; he must frequently arbitrate between distinct and sometimes discordant imperatives (such as quality and volume of production), without always

4 Living Labour

having been properly granted the right to do so; the increasing abstraction of the gestures required contradicts the ever-renewed involvement of the body; and finally, he is torn between the self-dispossession involved in his work and the impossibility of ever accepting this. The line, then, is the source of a multiplicity of tensions that impinge on the worker as the subject of his own work. The impossible individualisation of the work shifts our attention to the connections by means of which it can in fact be carried out: the strength of the social networks thus established answers to the fragmentation of tasks at the level of the individual worker. These networks are subtended by technical requirements, each corresponding to a specific aspect of the production process which it is intended to ensure is carried out as effectively as possible. Subordinated to a functional logic, they operate through the mutual adjustment or adaptation of the workers, tools and practices associated in them. Each of these adjustments, brought about in the very course of technical activity – whether directly implemented by the actors involved, sedimented in the lay-out of the shop, formalised in norms and structures, or invisible in traditions and other forms of know-how – expresses the projections, experiences, co-operations, conflicts and arbitrations from which it results. Networks then should not be understood as simple complexes of cooperative technical activity. Through the latter, or in the face of it, workers find means of self-reaffirmation, implementing personal strategies of conquest, resistance or renunciation which find expression in the social interaction of the shop. Thus, in the course of production, hierarchies are reordered, alliances constructed and conflicts engendered, while identities are recomposed as a function of affinities acquired outside the factory, inflexible technical demands, and career opportunities and expectations. The technical networks through which production is effected are thus also vehicles for differentiation and the generation of distinctive identities, separating even as they unite. The technical modalities and organisational forms of production thus mediate career perspectives, identities, affinities and group formation. Behind the immediate appearance of the gesture that can embody in the same movement the fatigue of the veteran and the energy of the new recruit, they disclose the social construct that is the shop. If the purpose of life together at work is the production of cars, it is the construction of dynamic productive compromises grounded in the diversity and opposition of positions and points of view that enables the construction of the complex product that is the car. The idea of productive compromise expresses the fact that divergences or oppositions of interest, of point of

Introduction 5

view or social rank are resolved in daily work to produce a social peace – inseparable from forms of domination – which enables cars to be produced. In the silence of the shop, maintained in part by the clamour of the crowded job-market outside, each contains his disagreements to uphold the essential point, the objective which brings everyone together: the production of cars. Such a productive compromise is dynamic in that the effects of factors such as technical changes, training, the ageing of workers, the cessation or resumption of recruitment and developments in the trade unions and in modes of management mean that it is never self-identically reproduced from month to month. It is always being put into question by one or other of the parties, always being re-established, negotiated and renegotiated, marked both by more or less striking conflicts which mean that it will never be what it was before, and by long periods of calm which can lead one to think that differences and divergences have melted away. This book about car workers brings together two emblematic figures of the twentieth century: a working class that was meant to topple the social order, and a product that largely provided the developmental model of that same order. Neither retrospective assessment nor prediction for the future, it reveals what has changed and what has not, in a workplace that remains a major constituent feature of our society.

Box 1

The research and the methods adopted

Undertaken in the context of an international comparative study of work on assembly lines,1 this research was carried out with the support of plant management, whom we would like to thank here for their co-operation and for the confidence they had in us throughout the duration of the work. The management wanted to have an overall study of its own shops, carried out by outsiders, and was perhaps already planning, although we would realise it only later, a number of reforms, some of which, from 1998 onwards, came into effect throughout the group, and others at the Sochaux plant alone: the replacement of the traditional teams with what are called UEPs (unités élémentaires de production – basic production units), that is to say with units based on working groups, something like those at Renault; the reduction in the number of hierarchical grades; and the transformation of the MV shop. One may thus suppose that in 1996, a number of lines of thought were being considered by those responsible for industrial production at the site. This project was always presented to workers, supervisory staff and managers as a piece of independent academic research, carried out with the agreement of senior management, whose results would be made generally available to the public. Interviewees were guaranteed anonymity, and when

6 Living Labour

Box 1

(continued)

biographical detail was obvious, the transcripts were submitted to those concerned for their approval. Carried out by the two authors, the research combined two approaches, different in their scope and method. In the HC2 workshop we carried out in-depth interviews (between 1 and 2½ hours) with 27 operatives mostly belonging to Shift B on Line 1 (working mornings one week from 5am to 1pm and afternoons the other, from 1pm to 9pm) We also interviewed 5 supervisors and 11 managers directly or indirectly involved in production. These interviews were supplemented by direct observation of work on the line and in other departments directly supporting production, and then by a kind of to-and-fro between direct observation and discussion with certain privileged interlocutors (supervisors, trade union representatives, personnel managers responsible for the shop and for the whole plant). In Montage Voiture and HC1 the research involved one of the authors actually working on the line, over 3 periods totalling 3 months, including training. This participant observation focussed on the team to which the post occupied belonged. The team studied in MV worked in the so-called zone de raccordements et mises en place (adjustment and positioning sector) located between the arrival of the bodies and the arrival of the seats at the beginning of the line in HC1. In addition, we interviewed or observed the supervisors directly responsible, and some others, such as those on the other shift, together with some ten technicians and almost as many managers, mostly outside working time. At the end of each period we carried out in-depth interviews with some dozen operatives from each team, so as to expand on the understandings gained on the job and to confront the results of participant observation with those of the interview approach. Finally, discussions were held with a number of trade unionists, based on actual encounters in the workplace. To sum up, this study offers precise data for three teams working on three different lines. Systematic co-ordination between the two researchers allowed us to explore the complementary features of methods, sites and data. Apart from this fieldwork, we also visited shops where other forms of organisation of work obtained, and also technical departments involved in production. We were able, in addition, to obtain the documentation we wished to consult concerning human resources, industrial relations and the organisation of production. Finally, this study carried out in 1996 was complemented by other work carried out for a doctoral thesis in history 2 and by a study of the transformation of the MV shop. The Aventure Peugeot museum, also located at Sochaux, also provided valuable assistance. 1 Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld, ‘L’efficacité de la tradition: l’usine PeugeotSochaux’, in Jean-Pierre Durand, Paul Stewart, Juan-José Castillo, eds, Teamwork in the Automobile Industry, Radical Change or Passing Fashion? Basingstoke, 1999. 2 Nicolas Hatzfeld, Organiser, produire, éprouver. Histoire et présent de l’usine de Carrosserie de Peugeot à Sochaux, 1948–1996, doctoral thesis in history, EHESS, 2000.

1 Peugeot-Sochaux: A Solid Inheritance and Incessant Change

Peugeot’s Sochaux plant, the biggest factory in France, has a particular place in French society. On the one hand, it is thought of as the birthplace of one of the greatest French companies: Peugeot, and by extension the whole of the PSA group, is still called la firme de Sochaux, ‘the company from Sochaux’. Despite substantial shrinkage, Sochaux remains the group’s biggest car factory, and occupies a distinctive place in its manufacturing structure: the site assembles cars, produces parts shared by the whole group, and is also home to PSA’s engineering and organisation and methods divisions. Sochaux is thus characterised by both an impressive history and an energetic reorganisation of production. From another point of view, Peugeot has been the lynch-pin of the regional economy, so much so that the surrounding area, the Pays de Montbéliard and the northern part of the Franche-Comté more generally are sometimes called ‘Peugeotland.’ Peugeot-Sochaux thus offers today a remarkable example of a regionally hegemonic production plant.

Sochaux, Peugeot’s manufacturing backbone Though Peugeot was one of the pioneers of automobile production, building its first car in 1890, it didn’t actually move to Sochaux until the First World War, its still craft-based production being carried out at a number of dispersed workshops mostly in the area round about. It was in 1917 that the company acquired a vast site on the plain of Sochaux, east of Montbéliard. On its recently acquired land, it laid out new buildings, stretching along the north side of the main road that crossed the plain, and there it concentrated production during the second phase of its car-manufacturing history. In 1926 it built a body shop on the same 7

8 Living Labour

plain, but south of the road, bringing together in one place the trimming of the bodies and their integration with the chassis that carried the mechanical components. Development was brought to a standstill, however, by financial difficulties in the 1930s, and above all by the war and German occupation. The post-war period saw a new expansion, thanks to Peugeot’s shift to mass production. 1948 saw the introduction of the 203, illustrating the strategic options the company had adopted, going for volume growth with a single mid-range model at a single production site.1 The launch of the 403 in 1954, very similar to the previous model, showed a slight modification to this fundamental orientation, and as did that of the 404 in 1960: a market for the older model still existed while the newer one became established. In 1965 the appearance of the 204 marked a change of direction with a new commitment to the provision of a full range. This reached a high point in 1975, with the simultaneous production of six models, ranging from the little 104 to the top-of-therange 604. The growth of the market slowed down, while international trade increased, in particular with the construction of the Common Market. During this period, Sochaux was responsible for almost all of Peugeot’s production, at least until the assembly shop at Mulhouse came into service in 1972. That year, it produced more than 600,000 cars, almost 2,500 a day, ten times as many as in 1950: according to the management it had reached the limit of its capacities. To achieve this result, efforts had been made in every field. From the 1950s on, the activity of manual workers had been studied in minute detail, measured and assembled into operations sheets by time and motion technicians, a process which in 1960 made it possible to move from piece-work to an hourly rate set for the workstation. These decades were the golden age of the organisation and methods department, which gradually brought the definition and organisation of labour and production under its control. The area occupied by the factories almost tripled between 1945 and 1965, old buildings being expanded and new ones built on either side of the main road, to such an extent that in 1973 Peugeot ended up acquiring the road itself, traffic being diverted onto a by pass – a demonstration of the company’s regional importance and its power at that time. The shift system, with two alternating morning and evening shifts, spread through all the production shops during the second half of the Fifties. The numbers employed rose from less than 15,000 at the beginning of the decade to fluctuate between 35,000 and 40,000 in the 1970s,2 and in 1972 Sochaux overtook Billancourt to become the biggest French factory.

Peugeot-Sochaux 9

To respond to market demand, Peugeot developed the Sochaux site far beyond the boundaries which had initially been established. Yet, despite its enormous size, the 1970s saw Sochaux decline in importance. From 1970 onward the company reorganised, increasing the number of production sites. Above all, by merging with Citroën in 1974 and taking over Chrysler Europe in 1978, PSA became a major European player, with eight assembly plants, five of them in France. In the early 1980s the new PSA group faced a particularly serious situation, the result of a recession shared by the whole of the French car industry and of difficulties integrating new acquisitions:3 PSA found itself at the head of three totally distinct units, Peugeot, Citroën and Chrysler, each with its own independent range, the older parts of which were selling badly. This dispersion was repeated in every field of the three firms’ activities, from engineering to production to distribution. The manufacturing base represented by the new ensemble was spread among far too many competing, mutually incompatible factories, some of them more than run-down. The conjunction of these factors even threatened PSA’s very existence. Between 1981 and 1985, PSA France’s annual production plummeted, falling to 1.45 million compared to the 2 million produced by the three marques in 1979, while market share in France declined from 43 per cent to 34 per cent between 1979 and 1982. The manufacturing base was reorganised during the 1980s: mechanical components were gradually standardised and their manufacture transferred to specialised factories serving the whole group, such as those at Metz and Valenciennes. Many small factories were closed, while the larger plants were modernised one after the other, in particular by a wave of automation which transformed sheet-metal-working, die-stamping and painting. Plants were more or less dedicated to different models: thus, for Peugeot-Talbot, Mulhouse assembled small cars, Poissy focused on mid-sized models, while Sochaux produced the big cars . . . and the rest. The recovery effort extended into every field: financial austerity, the reorganisation of supply and distribution networks, stock-reduction with the adoption of lean production, the centralisation of purchasing and basic research. By 1985, increases in productivity, measured then in terms of the reduction in down-time (from 2.4 million man-hours in 1980 to almost 1.3 million in 1987) meant that PSA made a profit for the first time in years, having achieved most of the targets set for recovery. There were heavy job losses in PSA’s car manufacturing: employment fell from 180,000 in 1979 to 95,000 in 1997. Apart from the redundancies

10 Living Labour

at Poissy in 1981 and 1983, most of this reduction was achieved by other means. In the first years, reductions were mainly obtained through halts in recruitment, so-called natural losses, and dismissal of temporary staff. Successive early retirement agreements were concluded with the Fonds National pour l’Emploi (FNE), and on several occasions voluntary repatriation assistance was made available to immigrant workers. During the early years, the fall in numbers employed (itself braked by the public authorities), more or less matched the fall in production. From 1983, however, trends in employment and production diverged, employment falling while production stabilised. Since then, under the pressure of competition, the continuing increase in productivity has nearly always been accompanied by further reductions in employment. Modernisation came to Sochaux with preparations for the launch of the 405 in 1987. It called for a greater effort at this plant than elsewhere, given its age and the long time since any major investment had been made. It was achieved over a long period and entailed changes in a number of sectors (die-stamping and sheet-metal work of course, as well as painting, assembly and casting), as well as the discontinuation of certain production activities, such as forging and the machining of engines. It led to the creation of new shops, a high level of automation, and the introduction of new production techniques. One of the high points was the creation of the new trim shop, Habillage Caisse, in 1989. In the course of this wave of modernisation, different activities were again shifted about the site. New buildings for painting and trimming bodies were erected on land directly abutting the A36 motorway, gained on the south of the site by the diversion of the local river, the Allan, to the Rhône and Rhine Canal. This modernisation, however, was accompanied by a reduction in production at the site, which fell from some 466,000 cars in 1979, representing 54 per cent of Peugeot’s production at the time, to 222,000 in 1997, 23 per cent of the firm’s production, and a third of its production in France. As a proportion of the group’s production as a whole, Sochaux represents only some 13 per cent; Sochaux makes a higher contribution by value, however, because it concentrates on top-of-therange models, as well as the supplementary production of models in high demand, such as the 205 and the 306. Furthermore, the site still houses the 5,000 technicians and engineers who work for PSA’s central services, the engineering and organisation and methods divisions in particular. All in all, Sochaux continues to occupy a distinct position in the company’s manufacturing base, but its relative importance has nonetheless significantly declined.

Peugeot-Sochaux 11

The Peugeot factory, heart of the region For more than half a century, Peugeot has stood at the heart of the life of the region. After the Liberation the plant grew gigantic, and until the late 1970s it attracted to itself more and more of the region’s economic activity. Other factories belonging to Peugeot subsidiaries devoted more and more capacity to the production of mechanical components or internal or external fittings, while around the Peugeot group’s own network there developed a large number of sub-contractors. The relative decline of Peugeot-Sochaux since 1980 has had knock-on effects on all these, without however affecting its regional hegemony.

Diversified recruitment and social integration The enormous increase in employment at Sochaux in the period between 1948 and 1979 was managed in different ways, depending on the period. During the 1950s, most recruitment was from the local region, facilitated by the growing numbers of unskilled manual jobs on offer and declining employment in agriculture and in the local metallurgical and textile industries. In addition, Peugeot recruited from all over France, often from industrial sectors in reorganisation or from regions of high unemployment. 1967 saw a return to massive reliance on immigrant workers, most of whom were recruited from countries such as Yugoslavia, Morocco, Portugal and Turkey, through the Office National de l’Immigration. Some of these workers did no more than complete their 6- or 12-month contracts, while others were taken on permanently. In this way Peugeot reduced the impact of the staff shortages, spontaneous turnover and absenteeism that were endemic in the 1970s. The company also dealt with the industrial unrest of the years that followed 1968 by breaking up and recomposing worker groups. Relationships at work underwent considerable transformation as a result of this massive influx of foreign workers, (representing 33 per cent of manual workers in 1973), an unstable population without a settled industrial culture. During this period, when labour was scarce, and then volatile, the company increased wages, which in the early 1960s could often be as much as half as much again as was available from other companies in the region, if not double. It then focused its efforts on developing an employment policy that could attract and even more retain its staff. Particular advantages were offered – such as housing, shops for food and other consumer goods, transport, the apprenticeship school, to mention only the most important – all of which has led to Peugeot’s

12 Living Labour

policy towards its employees being described as paternalist. Yet this description is disputable, for these advantages were all intended to attract staff and to tie them to the business. This tie took on forms which did not all, far from it, correspond to relations of the paternalist type, being rather modelled on American society, inspired by a shared vision of progress. Certain of these ties, such as the Ravi chain of food-shops, or the efforts in the field of housing, were continuations of practices established in the early years of the century, but the content was changed. The Ravi shops were essentially intended to exert a downward pressure on prices in the local market, but also offered employees access to a wider range of goods, from clothing and furniture to the newly available electrical domestic appliances. They were closed down at the beginning of the 1980s, when the big supermarkets and other major chains were able to take over the role. The Peugeot apprenticeship school, too, closed its doors in 1970,4 when the government assumed responsibility for training the middle-ranking staff required by the factory, the supervisors and technicians, with the establishment of a lycée technique (technical high school). The company’s social and welfare activities, earlier an essential element in extending the company’s influence, were now run by the Works Council, controlled by the CGT union from the 1960s to the 1980s. From the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, Peugeot put an enormous effort into the construction of housing, some still intended for ‘single men’, but the majority for families. Even so, during the Fifties the company was directly responsible only for the provision of ‘emergency’ accommodation, and for accommodating the most transient element of the workforce, the single men, building hostels for them called ‘hotels’, or ‘douars’ for the North Africans. Unlike the company’s housing developments at the beginning of the century, in this instance its efforts were for the most part devoted to the encouragement of house-ownership on the basis of private initiative, or channelled through specialist housing associations such as the AMAT and ALTM, and above all the CRL, the most important local social housing organisation. 5 Several major housing developments went up within the Montbéliard conurbation, changing its appearance while contributing to its spectacular growth.6 Often, in successive waves, members of the workforce moved on from hostels to flats, with some of them going on again to buy a detached house; from bachelordom to family, from renting to owner-occupation. For the most part, for the allocation of accommodation or the provision of a loan, they turned to the accommodation service at the factory, which thus found its influence reinforced.

Peugeot-Sochaux 13

There is another element that played an essential role: the sale of the company’s cars to employees at reduced price. From the end of the Fifties this made business partners of an increasing proportion of the workforce, interested in the quality of the product and its price, representing as important a market as an entire regional division of the sales organisation. And finally, during this same period, simply as a result of its own development at Sochaux and Mulhouse, the company offered many career and promotion opportunities for those of its employees who were interested. As a result, a good number of the technicians and supervisory staff in the shops had come from the ranks of the workers, not to mention the remarkable careers of some of the management who started the same way. In fact, during these decades of strong growth, what the company sought to establish with its employees was rather a network of relations based on co-prosperity. These relations were only strengthened by the imbrication of these institutions with the many other close relationships entailed by the company’s position as a centre of regional development. Thus the practice of sponsorship of new recruits by existing employees was frequent, giving rise to future obligations as strong as they were informal. In the same way, among the Sochaux workforce the polarisation of attitudes of loyalty or militancy towards plant management – commonly called the Management, or simply Peugeot – was intensified through the imbrication of occupational and local relationships. The grant of privileges was often a factor in this, and its refusal even more. At the end of this great expansion, and despite a first falling-off in recruitment, Peugeot’s workforce at Sochaux was still very young in 1979, those under 35 representing more than half the total, and those under 45 more than three quarters. This workforce was very diverse, but can be divided into various types. Some lived in the traditionally industrialised town and villages of the Pays de Montbéliard. Endowed with an often solid factory culture they provided the backbone of the plant, with which they had sometimes been linked for more than a generation. Others, on the other hand, formed a new and particularly youthful fraction of the workforce, living in accommodation specially built for them. Without any autonomous social anchorage, their daily lives were closely linked to that of the factory, without their having tied their whole future to the region. The third type came from a much wider catchment area, some 70 kilometres around, and lived in a rural milieu. Many of these retained some supplementary employment of a rural kind, often properly agricultural, which made them relatively autonomous

14 Living Labour

with regard to Peugeot. Nonetheless, their relationship to the plant was reliable, and often stabilising in times of tension.

The new situation in the 1980s The company’s employment policy changed markedly in the 1980s and 1990s, which for Sochaux was a period of retreat and regroupment. Recruitment ceased almost completely in the years 1980–88, while at the same time staff turn-over fell to a very low level and promotions became scarce. Employment was reduced by half, falling to less than 20,000, its level before 1960. This reduction found expression in successive early-retirement programmes, and in a wave of returns to their countries of origin by immigrant workers in 1984. If the whole of the employment catchment area was hit, the major housing developments and the hostels were affected more particularly. This halt to recruitment also robbed the region’s young people of employment prospects, while within the plant itself the workforce was steadily ageing. The company’s social policy was reoriented in the light of the falling numbers employed. The housing effort was scaled-down substantially: entire blocks were walled up. There were other changes: the closure of the Ravi shops, the transformation of the car market, the reorganisation of the activities of the Works Council, whose leadership was lost by the CGT to a coalition formed of the FO, CGC, CFTC and SIAP (Syndicat Indépendant des Automobiles Peugeot – the ‘company union’); the new majority was closer to management, looked more and more to external service-providers, and reduced the scale of the benefits that had made Peugeot employees the labour aristocracy of the region. On the other hand, the relatively guaranteed employment that Peugeot traditionally offered its workforce took on considerable importance, as did the rare jobs young people succeeded in finding there. During most of the 1990s, the company regularly turned to shorttime working, letting drop the tradition of the fixed working week, the week being often enough reduced to four eight-hour days, much less than the five nine-hour days (sometimes supplemented by seven hours voluntary overtime on Saturdays) worked in the 1970s. For manual workers this loss of hours was compensated more generously than for white-collar staff, technicians and supervisors. This brought about not only an unheard-of increase in time off, but also a reorganisation of the relationships between work, family and leisure, and above all, a transformation in the relationship to the factory. Disengagement was all the more likely when this reduction in days worked was accompanied by

Peugeot-Sochaux 15

the maintenance of alternating shifts and the continuing pursuit of productivity increases by traditional means.7 Furthermore, the 2 x 8 shift system that remained in force continued to disrupt the worker’s life, both physiologically and socially. 8 On the morning shift (5am to 1.12pm), some workers who come to work by bus have to rise at 2.30 in the morning. Arriving back home between 2.00 and 3.30 in the afternoon, many of these look forward to nothing more than a nap. After eating supper with the family, they then have to go to bed at 8pm, 9pm at the very latest. If on paper the morning shift seems more attractive, leaving the afternoon free, in practice the physical fatigue outweighs everything else, and with increasing age many come to think of it as the worse. It has an oppressive effect on the life of the family, who are obsessively concerned not to disturb the shift-worker’s sleep. 9 The afternoon shift lets one get up late; but the children have already left, and the mid-day meal has to be taken before leaving for work, in the bus, or on arrival at the factory. Psychologically, the afternoon shift seems redoubtably long: the break at 7pm has a euphoric equality, heralding as it does the coming end of the working day. On one’s return home (between 9.45 and 11.30 at night) the family is often already in bed and social life is impossible. In practice, both of these shifts disturb bodily rhythms and in their own way play havoc with family and social life during the week. As for the weekend, it allows for physical recuperation with the long night’s sleep or the naps that are indispensable to the restoration of physiological equilibrium. Table 1.1

Working hours for shops linked to production flow Morning shift

Afternoon shift

0500 0700–0730

Shift begins Meal break

1318 1500

0930

First rest break (10 mins) Second rest break (10 mins) End of shifta

1700

1130 1312 a

1900–1930

Shift begins First rest break (10 mins) Second rest break (10 mins) Meal break

2124

End of shifta

Line stops at 1309 and 2121 respectively.

Industrial action and plant agreements The history of the factory can also be approached by way of the conflicts that have punctuated the passing decades, and which also form part of

16 Living Labour

its inheritance. As at the national level, the years 1948 and 1950 were years of great tension, marked by the rising cost of living, the end of the alliance formed during the Resistance – which here had brought together managers with unionists of the CGT and the CFTC – and the influence of the Cold War. There were two fierce and lengthy conflicts. 10 The decade that followed was calm, marked both by a rapid rise in wages11 and substantial growth in productivity. It was in this context that, in 1955, the management adopted a policy of company agreements intended to establish a contractual industrial peace with the unions: the hampering of industrial disputes through a procedural framework being traded against social advantages. Going beyond the example offered by Renault, the inspiration was American, and despite the refusal of the CGT in the early years to associate itself with these agreements, they underpinned the industrial peace that dominated the decade. The 1960s, on the other hand, were marked by significant unrest and industrial conflicts of different kinds. First of all, the strikes of 1960 and 1961 challenged the intensity and organisation of manufacturing work. These fairly disorderly and sometimes rowdy conflicts also coincided with the arrival of many young recruits, inexperienced as workers or as trade unionists. Beyond achieving their somewhat mixed results, these strikes led the CGT and the CFTC to disassociate themselves from the FO, to reject the company agreements and to abandon a contractually-based industrial relations policy, which for the management represented a serious breach. Two other bouts of industrial action, in 1963 and 1965, focussed rather more on the distribution of the fruits of growth. The first, generally well-supported, even by part of the supervisory staff, demanded and won, after 15 days of stoppages, a fourth week of paid holiday, as at Renault. The strike of 1965 was much longer and harder, and had much more long-lasting effects: at first, for the workers, coming out of a period of under-production and short-time working, it was a matter of rejecting any return to the 46-hour week, or perhaps of taking advantage of the good situation of the company to turn this to monetary advantage. The management refused to negotiate, and imposed sanctions. The stoppages lasted nine weeks, but gradually petered out. At Sochaux, the end of this conflict marked the close of this period of turbulence with a serious defeat for what had nonetheless been a united trade-union action. The strike of 1968 was very different. Embarked upon amid the wave of social unrest that affected the whole of France, the occupation of the

Peugeot-Sochaux 17

plant began by involving everyone through the month of May, while attention remained fixed on events outside. The change in the national situation in June once again brought employers and employees face to face, revealing the complexity of relations within the plant.12 On the one hand, only a minority played an active role in the occupation, organised through the unions and sometimes challenging them to some extent; on the other, the management for its part failed to generate a clear movement towards a return to work. Worse: on 11 June, wishing to impose a return to work through the intervention of the CRS riot police, it provoked a massive reaction and a day of violent confrontation which left two dead and dozens injured among the workers. The strike continued, at home, and was ended, after a month of conflict, only at the price of significant concessions, mainly in terms of pay and hours. By the end of the conflict, the management’s authority had been weakened. The year 1968 marked a turning-point in industrial relations at Sochaux. In the years which followed, management went onto the offensive. On the one hand, it established a dynamic system of internal communications, making use in particular of a range of company press titles, and strengthened its hold on line management and supervisory staff. On the other, it took many initiatives to reform the wage relation and conditions of work. From 1970 onward, manual workers were gradually shifted onto monthly payment. In 1973, a partial pay guarantee, an insurance against career fluctuations, was introduced to counter the risk of loss of pay resulting from changing posts.13 This step marked the beginning of a shift towards the individualised calculation of pay. A scheme awarding additional days’ holiday on the basis of attendance and seniority helped reduced staff turnover (the Plan Individuel d’Épargne Congés or Individual Holiday Savings Plan, the subject of a company agreement which came into force in 1977). At the same time, working conditions became a major field of management intervention. This was concerned in part with the working environment, with improvements to sanitary or eating facilities and the creation of rest areas. Ergonomics made its first explicit appearance, with the introduction of numerous health and safety measures and improvements in equipment or working posture. If overall the traditional organisation of work was maintained, certain experiments were carried out on the enrichment or complete recomposition of work, with mixed results depending on the line management concerned. In parallel with these reforms, management hardened its attitude towards shop-floor militancy. After a brief recourse to the use of ‘heavies’ (the ‘Niçois’) against bothersome militants, it then encouraged the

18 Living Labour

establishment of the SIAP, the ‘reformist’ union later affiliated to the Confédération des Syndicats Libres (CSL) (see pp. 187ff.). The CGT and CFDT accused management of trying to marginalise them, denouncing discriminatory practices against their activists and issuing leaflets complaining in particular about the supervisory staff. 1981 saw conflict, mainly localised in the body shop, in reaction to a series of more-or-less-negotiated productivity measures,14 and the entry of the Left into government, which allowed hope for a relaxation of industrial tensions. This led to negotiations on the technical rules governing the organisation of work and led to a clear relaxation in industrial relations. 1989, the year the new trim shop was opened, saw pay strikes at Sochaux and Mulhouse (see Chapter 4). After almost a decade of productivity growth against a background of falling employment, a struggle for a share in the profits saw several weeks of daily stoppages, indicating the limits of the consensus. The conflicts that have punctuated the history of Sochaux have had different effects on attitudes, varying with generation and career trajectory, ex-strikers often being marked by one conflict or another. The collective memory of the plant turns in particular on the events of 1968, in which only a minority of the older workers was directly involved, which have nonetheless given birth to a powerful myth. An important role is also played by the most recent strike, in 1989, which the great majority know about, even when they weren’t involved, and which is regarded as the typical, generic dispute. Even if often present as a more or less hidden alternative, this memory represents an important point of reference in shop-floor relationships. In terms of the wage relation, as one has seen, the history of Peugeot Sochaux bears the traces of successive periods. The 1960s and 1970s brought substantial increases in pay and benefits, regional supremacy, and relative youth, mobility and turbulence. The 1980s and 1990s, on the other hand, were marked by an unheard-of retreat, a loss of advantages and prospects.

The Carrosserie, at the heart of Sochaux The Carrosserie building, which holds the assembly shops, is the inheritor of this manifold history. Its development can thus be considered from different points of view. On the one hand, with fewer than 6,000 people working there in 1996, its workforce had shrunk significantly since its high-point in 1979, when it alone accounted for 9,600 employees. On the other hand, its relative weight within the Sochaux plant as a whole

Peugeot-Sochaux 19

has considerably increased, almost doubling in thirty years: more than ever, the Carrosserie is the heart of Sochaux. The Carrosserie consists in fact of a group of shops, whose geographical dispersion is a result of the history of the site; at the same time it stands at the heart of a complex system of flows. In 1996 it included the final assembly shop, called Montage Voiture, or, by reference to the old days, le châssis. Another building constructed at that time (in the 1950s) housed the finishing of the seats and the preparation of the upholstery. The last of these buildings, called Habillage Caisse, opened in 1989, and stands some hundreds of metres from Montage Voiture, replacing the old Finition. This new building was also to house Montage Voiture, the final assembly, to be moved in stages between Autumn 1998 and 2001. In the meantime, during the period of study, these different activities were very widely dispersed, and two ages of assembly technology co-existed. The half-century that stands between these two shops shows to what degree time is measured in decades at a production plant of this kind. The Carrosserie forms a complex system of shops fed by a network of conveyors carrying sub-assemblies from one sector to another. While the body is trimmed at HC, the car doors, which have been removed before entry, are prepared separately in another shop; the seats are assembled at Garniture; in the Groupe Avant shop the engine coming from Mécanique Nord is connected to the front-end assembly. Once the body is trimmed, all these sub-assemblies, plus the rear end are sent to MV for final assembly. These movements require sophisticated co-ordination, because when everything has been done the car at the end of the line is to correspond to a single, individual order. The movements and the necessary supplies are thus organised down to the last unit by a Flow Department, which imposes a speed and a rhythm on the shops just as an assembly line imposes its rhythm on the workers. The whole system stops and starts at the same time, with a break of ten minutes every two hours called the dépannage, and half an hour for a meal, at seven in the morning or seven in the evening: the casse-croûte. Within this system, the two assembly shops, Montage Voiture and Habillage Caisse, stand out by virtue of their size. The Montage Voiture shop has four parallel assembly lines, quite straight from end to end, each structured in the same way. A car passes every 2 1/2 minutes on three of these lines, and every 5 minutes on the fourth, which assembles top-of-the-range models. On each line, the engines already attached to the front-end assembly arrive with the rear-end assembly, suspended from an overhead conveyor from the first few metres onward. They are brought down, located on moving jigs, and

20 Living Labour

the exhaust and fuel-tank are fitted to them. This is the ‘mechanical components’ sector. Further on, other workers fit the body to the chassis and relevant mechanical parts too, this being called mariage or coiffage, the heart of the flow through the plant, here requiring more than eight people working in co-ordination, four above the wheels, and four beneath, working in a sort of pit which begins here and runs half the length of the lines: this, one of the last examples in Europe, allows the workers to work beneath the car. The wheels are then bolted on, coming from an enormous machine at the edge of the shop and being dropped down to each line on two spiral chutes. From then on, the car with its wheels stands on two parallel bands of metal platens, advancing slowly at the rate of some 2 metres per minute, on one side and the other of the pit. This arrangement involves very particular conditions of work, with a ‘hands up’ working position making particular demands on the heart and imposing a special strain on arms and shoulders. On the other hand, the work-load is generally less demanding than at the average workstation. This ‘under-body work’, with the worker’s head level with the shop floor presents other characteristic features: the workers engaged in it are relatively isolated and this contributes to the formation of a specific group with its own special attitudes. Hidden from view beneath the cars, one has the opportunity more than elsewhere to organise ones workstation as one wants, to lie down during the casse-croûte break, to read or talk between cars without being bothered. And finally, some of these workers feel that the work that they do concerns the essential features of the car, its mechanics and its interface with the ground. In general, workers who have once agreed to work in the pit are reluctant to emerge again to take up stations above. The sector of the line that lies downstream of the point at which the bodies come down is responsible for screwing or clipping numerous accessories and mechanical or electronic parts, the connection of cables, wires and pipes of every kind, and finally the fixing of the seats and doors. Here the car becomes a coherent mechanism, the functions being linked together. The workers often walk alongside the car, sometimes bending down into the interior, sometimes succeeding in placing their feet on the advancing metal band so as to spare their legs. Further on, reservoirs of every kind are filled with fluid and checks on operation are carried out. Women workers, rare until now, are more numerous in this last sector. It is here too that one finds the office of the AM2, the supervisor who stands above the team-leader or AM1, and who is still often called the contremaître.

Peugeot-Sochaux 21

After being started up briefly, the cars leave the line to go either to the defect repair section, if a problem has been detected, or to another building, Bâtiment C, where certain additional checks are carried out and final touches made. The cars are then treated as having been delivered by the final assembly shop. At Montage Voiture, all this activity is confined within a space restricted by the age of the building and the installations within it. In a few strides one can cross the width of the four lines and the parts racks bordering them as well as the narrow gangways along which run the trolleys that carry parts to supply the workstations. On each side of the line is the bord de ligne, literally the line-edge, where one finds the boxes of parts and the tools, sometimes simple, like the pneumatic screwdrivers, and sometimes more sophisticated, ranging from an electric screwdriver connected to a computer module to a fully programmed robot. Assembly workers’ equipment also includes their small portable tools. A high proportion of posts involve work with semi-automatic servo-mechanisms which impose their own rhythm and are often linked to printers to stamp quality-control sheets. Above certain areas, overhead platforms and conveyors accentuate the sense of a low ceiling and the relative darkness of the whole. Within this space, initially designed for production alone, areas for rest, meeting and eating have been added, while sanitary facilities, canteens and changing rooms have also grown in size. Alongside each line, small glassed-in cabins, the boquettes, house the team-leaders’ (or foremen’s) working areas:15 a desk, a cupboard and a computer terminal allowing the direct input and treatment of certain data and access to other more general information. But there is no space for any significant furnishing in the production area. Sometimes a table or two may have been officially placed at the line-edge. There too one finds the odd hand-basin, set back a little. Apart from these official introductions, there are others, just about tolerated, which represent the place of the rest-breaks in the life of the shop. Everyone has his own bag, slipped in beneath the trays of parts. Seats are squeezed in among the part containers. Private coffee-machines, scattered along the line’s edge, provide foci for informal affinity networks. The formal and informal structuring of the shop encourages groupformation along lines that cut across the officially established teams. In fact the living density of the shop encourages this complex social fabric, which encloses and relativises, in its use of space, the formal structures of the organisation of work. At Montage Voiture the articulation of inside and outside is redolent of the past. The opaque breeze-block

22 Living Labour

walls, the poor light and the patina of age reduce the difference between day and night, summer and winter. But the outside is not far away. The shop stands right on the central avenue of the Sochaux site, the old main road. In less than ten minutes, some assembly workers can find themselves outside the limits of the plant, and during their breaks can take the air, drink an espresso at the bar, or buy a morning paper. The Montage Voiture shop occupies only a small part of the vast Carrosserie Nord building. The scene in the old Finishing Shop is striking: ultramodern sectors lie alongside dark and abandoned areas, industrial decay alongside cutting-edge technologies, as if it were balanced between two alternative futures.

‘In HC, it’s not like it used to be’ Habillage Caisse (HC), the trim shop, is a long metallic shed, the monotony of whose external aspect is broken up by five projecting bays. These accommodate the changing-rooms, the refectories and the sick-bay, whose ruby-red doorframes testify to a desire to break with the past represented by the old grey shops elsewhere. Inside, certain structural elements are painted in apple green. The building, several hundreds of metres long, is on two levels. On the ground floor, workers trim the doors, prepare the front of the car and the dashboards on conveyors. Surrounding the offices of those who manage the workers in the building are stocks of parts (for between 1 and 8 days). On the first floor is the Habillage Caisse, properly speaking, opened in spring 1989 and brought into service in successive phases over the next two years. As indicated by its name, HC involves taking the body as it leaves the paintshop and fitting to it all the necessary electrical and mechanical parts (the fitting of electrical wiring, pipework of every kind, seals, gaskets, lights, reservoirs, bottles, pedal boards, etc.) and of the interior décor (woodwork, carpeting, ceiling, rear shelf, dashboard, etc.) before sending it on to Montage Voiture. The work is carried out on four parallel assembly lines, each subdivided into outgoing and return sections. At the ends of these sections are elevators, fourteen in all, which by providing for the aerial transport of the car bodies facilitate the movement of pedestrians and trolleys across the floor itself. Although certain criticisms have been made of the cost and sophistication of these elevators and of certain technical errors in the circulation-plan for the car bodies, the shop is incontestably easy to traverse in every direction, which also limits the risk of accident.

Peugeot-Sochaux 23

At one end of the shop there are robots which fit the front and rear windshields, and also the dashboard. The presence of 8–10 bodies as a buffer-stock up- and downstream of the kuka zones (which take their name from the robots) does not significantly slow down the regular progress of the car bodies in the course of being trimmed. There too, the two lines HC1 and HC2 converge into a single line of overhead conveyors. Finally, the offices of the technical departments stand not far from the lines, as do a number maintenance workshops and workstations for the manual preparation of small sub-assemblies. Here, as on the ground floor, the high ceilings give the shop a spacious feel. The zenithal and lateral lighting through glass panels, and the lively colours (dominated here too by apple green) give the shop an undeniably modern character, and also encourages attention to housekeeping: it is as clean and tidy, for instance, as Toyota’s new factory at Kyushu (Japan). This modernity nonetheless has certain disadvantages, such as the poor thermal insulation: in very cold weather, it is difficult to heat such large volumes, and temperature in summer regularly exceeds 30 ° Centigrade, which gives rise to much complaint, the ventilation installed being inadequate to the task. At the launch of the new workshop management wanted to mark a break with the past, with a new beginning in terms of working conditions and the introduction of new forms of organisation and relationship, and finally in terms of productivity (see Chapter 5). The doors are thus removed on entry into HC, and the bodies are placed on ‘sleds’ of adjustable height which move forward on a wide metallic conveyor: the workers get onto this for the period allocated (some two and a half minutes), standing in a fixed relation to their work, because they are moving together with the body. Not only have the obstacles on the floor been got rid of, but this fixed relation eliminates the fatigue associated with the worker’s having to walk on constantly to keep up with the work which was constantly moving on. 16 Operations which necessitate getting into the passenger compartment or under the bonnet are always wearing because they call for repeated feats of gymnastics. On the whole, however, safety standards are much higher than they used to be, the space for movement much greater – workers no longer get in each other’s way – while workstations are lit by powerful fluorescent lighting to supplement the natural light. The modifications connected to the creation of HC are part of a development that extends beyond the workshop to the whole of the Carrosserie, and indeed to the Sochaux site itself. The great change of the last decade is the adoption of lean production, the organisation of

24 Living Labour

production so as to do almost entirely without stocks, despite increasing variation. Since computer control reached maturity, with the breakdowns and errors associated with it becoming uncommon, line stoppages have fallen considerably, which has concomitantly reduced the time spent on enforced breaks by assembly-line workers. Thanks to advances in co-ordination, a number of tasks have been removed from the assembly line and assigned to sub-assembly production (wiring bundles, splash shields, dashboards), which are supplied synchronously and with very few stoppages. At the same time, computer control has allowed a further increase in variety of product and so in the complexity of the task of assembly at the same time as helping ensure the regularity of flows. The move from the old Finition (finishing shop) to HC thus appears as a high point in the rationalisation of labour, tending to restrict workers’ autonomy in the organisation of their own activity during the time it takes a body to pass, and reducing the margins for initiative. In some ways these changes represent a close combination of technical rigour and social control. Even if this is not explicitly recognised, the often heard formula ‘it’s not like it used to be’ in fact reflects this association – and this all the more as the ambiance or ‘working atmosphere’ has been profoundly changed. Across the whole of the Sochaux site, workers, moniteurs and supervisory staff say that hierarchical relations are not what they were. Furthermore, the use of the English word ‘management’ is beginning to percolate down from the top to replace the French word commandement. Yesterday, it is said, hierarchical relations were robust: workers did not fail to reply in kind to being bawled-out by foremen, if they felt themselves in the right; conflicts were often man-to-man, and suspensions and even dismissals were not uncommon, though they were a less serious matter, given the full employment of the time. If this style of command has been toned down, ‘boss’ remains as a form of address despite changes in official titles, evidence of a strongly hierarchical structure with welldefined ranks. The authoritarianism of command is being replaced by a management by argumentation which presupposes the internalisation of behavioural norms by each worker: regularity of labour to meet the inflexibility of the flow, respect for the operations sheet to ensure quality etc. Those who break the rules risk an admonishment or the GPI (Gestion Par Interaction – management by interaction) interview laid down in the supervisor’s manual, whose conclusions will remain on the worker’s personnel record, with the likely result of the loss of individual points (a form of entitlement to extra pay). ‘Physical’ command has given

Peugeot-Sochaux 25

way to a more administrative control, which the assembly-line workers say leaves scope for interpretation and for social interplay between the parties. The overall trend in the evolution of hierarchical relations in the shops, very progressive on the whole, has taken a particular form at HC. The launch of the shop involved in fact a plan to break up and recompose work relations (see Chapter 5). Certain traces of this project still generate comment at every level, often highly negative. This applies to the apple-green working clothes unique at Sochaux, the selection process that was applied to the first postings to the new HC1 assembly line, and the long three-week training course at Morvillars for all manual workers in the new shop. In general, the management’s plans for the launch of HC1 are felt to have been utopian at best, totalitarian at worst, and seem to have provided a focus for attitudes of rejection. The rest areas are an important example of the traces left by the launch of Habillage Caisse. They are regularly sited along the lines, providing space for some thirty people (an entire team) on pine benches with low tables. There one also finds notices and documents issued by the Works Council, the shop journal Cap au sud, and also trade union leaflets, more or less tolerated depending on their origins and on the goodwill of the relevant supervisory staff. Each rest area, surrounded by a 1.60-metre partition, has a drinks machine and individual lockers to hold personal effects (previously put down somewhere near the workstation). Here workers assemble during breaks to smoke, to snack or take a drink if they like, while ‘meals’ are in principle eaten in the canteen. Without ceilings or personality, these rest areas – which are very like those in modern Japanese factories – offer a kind of cold comfort that discourages all conviviality. They represent a paradox, for if the level of comfort seems much higher than that in the odd corners set up in the old shop, the workers criticise them for their lack of warmth and the visibility they impose on the social relations that take place within them, in full view of all. For an assembly worker (37 years old) who used to work in HC0, the rest areas are ‘cut off’ from the line by the passage that separates them: paradoxically, the prohibition on smoking in the cloakrooms and on the line makes them into a place of constraint, because they have become the only place where one can smoke and their layout makes them an oppressive space. Furthermore, the rest area is also the home of the team leader (AM1). This mixed use, more or less inspired by the Japanese model, is very often put forward as a symbol of the initial project. It stands for

26 Living Labour

both a will to supervise and a refusal to recognise workers’ control over their own rest time. In reaction to this, worker groups invent specific behaviours to demonstrate that the rest area, or at least a part of it, belongs to them during breaks, the group marking and delimiting its territory and giving spatial expression to its social relations, and many of the AM1s leave their offices during rest periods so as to respect the privacy of the team and to maintain their own: they thus escape the gaze of the workers, always inclined to irony or criticism. To defuse suspicions, and also to insulate themselves from the familiarity of the operatives, sometimes a problem for their own work, certain AM1s have separated their office from the remainder of the rest area by means of a partition. At the end of the day, the two big shops that make up the Carrosserie show marked similarities and a strong sense of solidarity, through the similarity of the work, the shared production and management, their social composition, the rhythms of life and work, relations to the business and shared or similar traditions. However, the separation provoked by the creation of HC in 1989 has led to the development of marked distinctions which find expression in the techniques of work and in the social relations that accompany them. The difference of generation between the shops highlights important differences in terms of comfort, ergonomics, efficiency and productivity, of density of work. At HC, they say, one works more than in Montage Voiture, even if workstations are easier. The supervisory staff at HC are said to be less tolerant and less understanding than at MV. In complaining that ‘it’s not like it used to be’, the assembly line workers in HC put into question the modernity of the shop, which while an improvement in terms of comfort (lighting, space, colour, ergonomics) has also increased the social transparency that is characteristic of these new spaces. Memories of the launch of the inauguration of the shop nourish attitudes of distance between manual workers, line management and the technical departments, which find expression in formal and administrative styles of relation. Montage Voiture, on the other hand, is characterised by a greater porosity between teams and assembly-line groups. Relations and networks traverse the whole of the shop, in accordance with informal and even hidden lines of communication. The hierarchy has learnt to tolerate these adjacent sets of relations. This is why reference is often made to the ‘atmosphere’ of the shop, or to its ‘conviviality,’ depending on one’s vocabulary and thus on the point of view one adopts – the result of the imbrication of formal institutions and informal

Peugeot-Sochaux 27

relations, the recognition of the implicit, and the more immediate solidarities. And so, beyond the similarities in hierarchical relations, the pursuit of rationalisation of labour, the repetitive nature of the tasks, each of the shops retains its particular forms of work, of relationship and of initiative.

2 The Line Seen from Below

To designate the work of the manual workers on the assembly line, the Sochaux plant has a variety of expressions such as travail en chaîne or travail en ligne, while those involved will talk of travail en poste. These phrases express a variety of points of view on the situation so designated. The phrase travail en poste, work at the post or station, expresses the point of view of the individual in his encounter with the ensemble of prescribed tasks. It places emphasis on the workstation, as the place to which the operative is assigned to carry out these tasks, which explains why among manual workers in the shop it is the term most often used to distinguish this situation from others where one enjoys greater freedom of movement. What is more, this way of looking at things is echoed in the classical approach to the sociology of work, which analyses productive activity from the standpoint of the individual worker. It raises two questions: First of all, can work on the assembly line be individualised in this way? Such individualisation makes it very difficult even to articulate the very content of the work, lost somewhere between the enumeration of a set of relatively incoherent gestures and a manner of representation that becomes all the more abstract the more it aims for coherence. In particular, it obscures the relations the operative entertains with his partners in the technical ensemble within which his own activities are embedded, whatever these partners might be: other operatives, installations or machines. Briefly put, it excludes what might be gained from the idea of activity within a technical network, or within a work group, an idea that is necessary for any understanding of the nature of co-operation in the realisation of such a complex product. Secondly, is this not to oversimplify the social structure of the shop, which then tends to be represented as a mere aggregation of these simple 28

The Line Seen from Below 29

relationships between individual worker and the system of production? Such simplification may encourage, for example, a relatively schematic notion of workers’ identity, and a somewhat mechanical image of the enterprise as a social ensemble. The two terms ligne and chaîne (both translatable as ‘line’ in English), refer to the same system of organisation and differ only in linguistic register, expressing differences in the point of view of those who employ them. The term ligne is relatively recent; well-established among management, deliberately introduced to replace the word chaîne, which had become loaded with evident negative connotations in the course of the 1970s. Its use testifies to the hope of being able to ‘turn the page’, to begin anew, looking at recent changes made by the business in a modernising and favourable light. With this is associated the substitution of ‘operative’ for ‘hand,’ and of ‘AM1’ and ‘AM2’ (AM = agent de maîtrise, hence ‘Supervisor 1’ and ‘Supervisor 2’) for chef d’équipe and contremaître. With the word chaîne, the emphasis is primarily on the system of transport, the conveyor which links together the cars to be produced. But the word also connotes the constraint imposed on the workers, introducing a social as well as a technical element and implying that the system has not changed in essence and that the worker remains ‘chained’. This word is widely current among manual workers. Innovations in vocabulary tend to establish distinctions between linguistic registers associated with different systems of representation: one the one side, expressing the point of view of the factory management, insisting on changes of function, systems and relations, and suggesting through all this an organisational dynamic, and on the other, expressing the point of view of the workers, emphasising the continuities, and through these, the traditionalism of the plant. Yet the cleavage is not as clear-cut as it might appear. In fact, certain managers and technicians always speak of ‘the mines’ when referring to the assembly line. For them, to go and work in the assembly shops, even at their own level, is to ‘go down the mine,’ which evokes both physical strain, timeless subordination, and no doubt a characteristic complex of social relations. It is a way of suggesting, as an aside, agreement with the point of view that prevails among most of the workers, and thus a certain plant-wide complicity and understanding. Another possible approach, based on the team, which places the emphasis on the working group with its hierarchical structure and its complementary array of specialisms, has however been little used in studying work. It is as if this form of collective structure had little weight compared to the overall system of the assembly line, or the individual

30 Living Labour

position of the worker at his station. The work team has nonetheless been a subject of lively discussion among economists, sociologists, management experts and industrial economists, in terms of its significance in the organisation of industrial work. Indeed, the particular configuration of working groups in Japanese companies has often been presented as one of the essential factors in their performance, and has thus been designated as a model to be adopted. Here it is a question of teamwork, often badly translated into French as travail en groupe (work in groups), as opposed to the traditional Fordist workgroup.1 This idea is tending to acquire a certain hegemony, and underlies a number of attempts at industrial reform. It has also been subjected to critical discussion. 2

The workstation: place of arrest and time of subjection Many studies that have been published on assembly-line work, and on industrial work more generally, have considered it from the point of view of the worker at his/her post. However, all though it does correspond in scale to the individual worker who occupies it, one may well ask whether the individual workstation represents a relevant object of analysis. Physically, the workstation is first of all a position assigned along the length of the line. This is the primary meaning of the poste in the phrase travail en poste. But this is as yet no more than a vague area, identifiable by the tools and supplies specific to the operations assigned to it and bordered by those of its neighbouring positions. In this it is different from what one sees in a Japanese car factory, where the area for each assembly-worker is delimited by two lines painted on the ground. It is the line’s starting up that gives the expression reality. First of all, it requires the worker to ‘take up’ his post, attaching him to his place of work. This will vary, depending on the specific characteristics of the operations to be carried out, and in particular on the presence or absence of fixed equipment that limits the scope for movement. Semiautomatic equipment imposes the most severe constraint, frequently imposing on the operative its own rhythm of operation, often governed by a computer programme, and generally reducing the scope for movement. On a descending scale of constraint, this is followed by equipment such as electrical screwdrivers connected to quality-control printers, whose cables are some 10 metres long; or by the need to fit individualised parts supplied to the line precisely when required, autonomy being limited by the cable of the reader that matches the bar-codes on the part and on the body. These are followed by compressed-air tools, screwdrivers or

The Line Seen from Below 31

riveters, whose air-pipes, also some 10 metres in length, can, if need be, be moved from one connection to another along the line. Finally, those posts which require only light parts, and light and above all mobile tools, provide the greatest freedom of movement. When the line starts up, space shrinks and its nature changes: it is no longer chiefly defined by a more or less clearly delimited area on the ground, but by an ensemble of tasks to be carried out on the car that is passing by, each one of these tasks being characterised by a distinct degree of autonomy relative to a fixed point. The pressure of constraints associated with a particular post determines its effective extent and becomes a major criterion of discrimination between them. The term poste can also suggest a position to be defended against an enemy offensive. To go along with this image, to take up ones post or workstation would then involve opposing the linear movement of the passing cars with another movement, that of the gestures that correspond to the tasks to be carried out. To the passing flow, the worker responds with the fluidity of his gestures. In this sense, to remain at one’s post is first of all a victory against the possibility of being ‘sunk’, of being swept away by the flow. This success has its cost: to take up one’s post and to set to work results first of all in a reduction in the field of mobility. One then needs breaks, or ‘gaps’ in the line (moments when one or more car-positions on the line is vacant), in order to be able to relax these limits and to extend one’s space of mobility. It is only by sticking to ones post that one can bring about a certain conquest of territory through ones work against the flow. Space and time thus come together as the ground for a struggle between subjection and self-affirmation. The fierce force of constraint on the assembly-line worker at his post distinguishes this role, in a way that is often much underestimated, from other roles such as that of moniteur or polyvalent, whose spatial autonomy is regarded as a precious privilege. The starting-up of the line thus concretises the space of the workstation: its extent, its borders with those alongside and its structure are all constituted by the operations, the tools and the movement that it requires. More generally, this space is constituted as a field of possibilities, constraints and solidarities with the posts upstream, on which the assembly worker is now dependent, and with those downstream, which now depend on him.

The workstation, an abstract assemblage of varying lifespan The workstation is also a sum of operations, as is evidenced in the process of learning the job, which begins at the shop’s training school (see

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Chapter 4) and then continues on the line, with the learning of each separate operation. One then starts to combine two, then three operations, and so on, until the whole sequence of tasks associated with the particular workstation has been mastered. Progress is then made in speed: working on one car in two, then two in three. The training process is highly integrated into working practice, but its length may vary: as a rule of thumb, assembly-line workers reckon on a week to learn the requirements of one workstation, though some of the younger ones may master them in a few hours. It would be a mistake to suggest a single measure, for the time taken varies on the one hand with the difficulty of the workstation and the variation associated with it (meaning here the variation in operations required by the different options for each model), and on the other on the skill and adaptability of the worker. It is in the course of this learning by progressive addition that the lack of relation between the various operations making up the workstation becomes clear. This lack of coherence also appears when one looks closely at the workstation in MV called Renfort de plancher arrière (Strengthening of rear floor), a position actually occupied in the course of research. The list of operations making up this work station (Table 2.1), extracted from the Organisation and Methods documentation, illustrates this lack of internal coherence; there is no logical relation or complementarity between the various operations: they are simply juxtaposed.3 After memorising the requirements of the workstation, the operative combines these operations in accordance with a number of different logics: 1 a logic of spatial proximity, which groups together neighbouring tasks inside the passenger compartment of the car that share no other relation: fastening the fixing-stud of the airbag logic-controller and strengthening the right side of the rear floor; 2 a logic of assembly, grouping together operations associated with fitting a shock absorber (placing the screws, driving them home with an electrical tool, printing the confirmation of work done on a checklist taken from the windscreen), or an anti-torque rod (using electrical screwdriver and printing on checklist); 3 a logic of gestural economy, which passes the checklist from one printer to the next, thus associating the fitting of the shock absorber to that of the anti-torque rod; 4 a logic of memory, which places at the beginning of the cyclical routine an operation on an isolated part of the car, which therefore risks being forgotten: connecting a pipe to the water-pump when this is in a high position.4

The Line Seen from Below 33 Table 2.1 Content of workstation ‘strengthening of rear floor’ in MV (1/100ths of a minute) Stamp confirmation of having fitted an anti-torque rod (insert quality-control checklist into printer connected with screwdriver, then withdraw) Stamp confirmation of having fitted the anchorage of front right shock-absorber, (insert quality-control checklist into printer connected with screwdriver, then withdraw) Lock screw on the anti-torque rod in the engine compartment (using a servo-controlled electrical screwdriver) Position 2 of 3 front right shock-absorber screws Screw home 3 front right shock-absorber screws, in engine compartment (using a second servo-controlled electrical screwdriver) Connect pipe to water pump, when this is fitted in high position, in engine compartment (using special hand-pliers) Fasten fixing-stud of the airbag logic-controller, between front seats Position and fasten with 3 rivets a reinforcing plate for right side rear floor, beneath back seat (using compressed-air rivetter) Movement, handling and miscellaneous allowances Total

14

14

27 35 36 40 7 57 26 254 = 2.5 4 mins

Source: Extracted from the documentation of the shop‘s organisation and methods office, defining the work to be carried out at this workstation, January 1996, Automobiles Peugeot, Carrosserie Sochaux.

The difficulty in committing to memory the parts to be fitted is further exacerbated by the great variety of possibilities. At the majority of workstations, the worker must read from a list attached to the body the codes for the parts to be fitted. The absence of any logical relationship between operations makes memorisation more difficult, and a number of the workers have to read the list twice if they are not to make a mistake. Only those who have the opportunity to remain at the same workstation for a long time come to detect clues on the body itself which suggest which part to pick up and to fit, a procedure that does not fail to cause the occasional surprise, especially when changes have been introduced in the accompanying list. In the course of formal learning, and later in work on the line, the worker deploys different kinds of care and attention: 1 a strictly gestural care, grounded in the importance of the operation itself: some are of crucial importance, for the safety of the vehicle, for example; others, difficult to carry out, are a perpetual challenge;

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2 a monitoring attention, which in this case keeps an eye on the operation of the automatic printers: if the printed output is wrong, the operation must be carried out again; 3 a selective eye on different models that succeed each other, to determine the work to be carried out; 4 an attention to combinatory possibilities, intended to ensure the most effective concatenation of largely disparate operations. As this combination of constraints and types of attention calls for qualities of different kinds, the variety of actual combinations calls for a particular mental effort. This is increased by the well-known constraints associated with assembly-line work, which bring with them, as Christophe Dejours has shown, both fear and boredom. 5 The work is extremely fragmented, and this for various reasons. The first, generally put forward by those responsible for organising it, is their concern for the easy memorisation of brief operations by assembly-line workers of limited intellectual capacities. The second reason, less public but more serious, has to do with the greater malleability of the workstation when it is composed of extremely fragmented tasks: in fact, it is easier for the équilibreur 6 to make up a workstation around one or two main tasks by adding a number of micro-tasks requiring some hundredths of a second, rather than on the basis of major operations only – all the more as the équilibreur must also take account of the necessary technical ordering of tasks. The third reason has to do with a concern to pack each workstation with the greatest number of productive gestures, and instead of enjoying a unity through focus on one or two major elements of the car, the workstation takes on a little bit of everything within a limited area of the body determined by the need to avoid time-wasting ‘travel’. In fact, the spatial circumscription entailed by the reduction of such movement is the principal logic governing the line-balancing process, dispersing operations among a number of neighbouring elements. At certain stations the operations are not at all related to each other, but are rather intended to initiate or to complete work carried out at others. And lastly, things can be different at a station where the work is dominated by an important operation that imposes a certain coherence on the whole cycle. In general, however, workstations are constituted by an additive logic, while the whole ensemble – or juxtaposition – must represent a socially acceptable workload in the eyes of both workers and production managers. The succession of stages of production on the assembly line is itself very far from the functional logic of the major

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elements of the cars, and no individual assembly operation can be thought of as meeting the requirements for their proper functioning, as these requirements are unknown to the workers. This handicap is overcome by the multiplication of control-procedures (operations sheet, quality controls, audits, etc.) intended to offset the risk of error. Without technical logic or functional significance, operations appear disjointed, leading to the worker’s lack of interest in his own work. The decomposition of work increases the risk of mistakes, makes the work lose its meaning and robs the workers of responsibility. The recomposition of assembly-line work through the holistic approach of reflexive production as practised by Volvo, is no panacea, 7 but it attempts at least to pose these problems as problems. The fragility of the workstation is illustrated by the circumstances of its creation, transformation and abolition. It is in fact subject to two types of change. In the longer term, a workstation undergoes modification, or the elimination of certain assembly operations, as a result of suggestions or other productivity improvements. Here the annual productivity increases registered by the plant over more than a decade find striking expression: from one year to the next, on one assembly line, at stable production levels, this will mean six or seven, or even eight, nine or ten line workers fewer than the hundred or so required before. Furthermore, the workstation is subjected to the ordinary variations in the monthly production programmes which determine daily production volumes, and so the rate at which the cars progress along the line, the number of workstations necessary as a consequence, and hence the distribution of operations among them. These variations in the distribution of work lead to changes in the operations associated with several workstations, and sometimes to the creation or abolition of certain stations altogether: workstation creation when volume increases and the speed of the line increases, and abolition when volume is reduced and the speed of the line falls. This variation in the content and number of workstations is thus a commonplace feature of the life of the assembly line, just as the variation in monthly production is a normal feature in the life of the plant and in the history of any particular model. In the case of an increase in production, for example, the équilibreur creates a workstation on the MV team by selecting from other stations, in such a manner as not to change their nature completely, a number of minor operations. The result is an aggregation of scattered tasks that is particularly difficult to memorise. Such a workstation will be the first to be abolished should production later have to fall. Here one can see a difference in robustness between workstations, those characterised by

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important indivisible operations having a long-term viability, being more resistant than others to the monthly fine-tuning of the équilibreur. Variations in throughput and the creation and abolition of workstations lead to a structural instability in the work of assembly-line workers which is passed on to their relationship to the cars and their relations amongst each other. The commitment to a frequent redistribution of tasks, generally monthly during the period of research, with the instability that this entails, thus represents a technological culture specific to the company, which hopes in this way to be able to stick close to targets set for overall workload.

Prescribed time and real time The gap between the activity formally prescribed by the organisation and methods department and what is actually done by workers on the line is a prominent and recurrent issue in the social relations of the shop. It has existed ever since engineers made their appearance in the arena of the workshop: following Taylor’s example, indeed, the engineers have seen prescription as an essential means of taking control over manual labour and rendering it more efficient. This gap has been critically investigated by sociologists who have insisted on the irreducible division (coupure) between these two registers of work and challenged the scientific or technological foundation of the control exercised by organisation and methods departments. But how far is it correct to talk of such a division between prescribed work and actual practice? Training methods offer a first means of approach to the question. Since the 1980s, the process of learning a workstation has begun off the line, at the shop’s training school (see Chapter 4). After the execution of simple operations has been mastered, the remainder of the new recruit’s training is done on the line, generally under the supervision of the present occupier of the workstation: in the finesse and certainty of his practical knowledge, the latter is the master of his own field, and the trainer can hardly compete. The method here follows a similar temporal structure (demonstration, trial, and then work at a reduced pace), but the practised assembly-line worker adds something entirely new. In most cases, the right gesture that he will pass on not only conforms to the operations sheet but is that which allows the operation to be carried out while saving oneself and one’s strength: safety and economy of effort are priorities for the worker. This attitude to the right movement explains the following recommendation given by a worker from HC1, functioning as a trainer and commenting on a risky manoeuvre: ‘Be careful, because it’s here you can always hurt yourself.’ In this particular

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instance it was a matter of getting hold of a hidden electrical cable by inserting a finger through a hole in the bodywork, which regularly caused cuts. Seemingly worrying to the neophyte, the advice is an invitation to learn one’s lessons thoroughly. The example demonstrates both the progress of prescription in the process of training, and its limits in the practical mastery of the work. In addition, the workstation called ‘Strengthening of Rear Floor’ effectively illustrates how a workstation is in fact constructed. In addition to the choice of combinations of operations discussed above, the line worker organises the workstation himself, in terms of movements and the organisation of supplies. He will not pick up a single item at a time, whether parts or tools. To limit movement back and forth and time taken (each car requiring one cap, three rivets, two screws, a collar and a sheet-steel plate, not to speak of the four different tools), two pockets of the overall hold stocks of screws and collars, replenished every ten cars, and a third holds the collar-pliers. He will still have to pick up, for each car that passes, a cap, three rivets, a sheet-metal plate, not to mention the three air-driven or electrical tools, and the check-lists to be moved between windscreen and printers. This falls into the field of personal arrangements, while the operation sheet has its own flexibility, as a result of the assignment of a fixed, overall allowance of a number of 100ths of a minute under the item Complementary Operations. In most of his movements the worker endeavours, by methods which to some extent are entirely personal, to achieve a smoothing-out and purification of gestural sequences. It is this which gives work on the line its highly characteristic style, whose status as the result of the worker’s work on himself is not immediately clear to the outsider. This work on oneself is, of course, the crucial aspect of learning, and involves acceptance of the paradox that is offered as advice in the course of training: ‘More haste, less speed’. In this field, every gain is the result of attention paid to oneself, to objects and to materials, to the spatial structure of activity, and finally, to other assembly-line workers. One aspect of the learning process is precisely the development of this personal interpretation, which in order to achieve the result intended must establish its autonomy from prescription.8 This work is, once more, extremely personal: comparison of the mode of work developed by two workers at the same workstation is always instructive, and sometimes spectacular, especially as these differences do not always lead to differences in efficiency, and that two very different manners of proceeding can both claim rigorous adherence to the operations sheet. This personal contribution by assemblyline workers – which gives expression to a double logic of efficiency

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maximisation in ensuring both optimal performance and minimum effort – is known and recognised by the work-study technicians, one of whom speaks of ‘efficient and graceful gesture’. The definition of an operation is sometimes the source of endless uncertainty: for instance, the mere positioning of a screw involves manipulating it by hand in such a way that it is correctly engaged in the thread. But when does one know that this has been done? The operations sheet for the positioning of shock-absorber screws specifies four turns of the screwdriver. But it does not say how these turns are to be measured, and for good reason. The abridged MTM 9 table used by the work-study technicians has a whole page of different screw-positionings (varying diameters, one-handed or two handed, from above or from below) and envisages three turns of the screwdriver only, including the first, with the possibility of an additional turn. During a meeting of supervisors at HC, this question was the subject of serious and critically important discussion, in connection with a dispute with MV; the uncertainty was over the definition (it was then a question of 2 turns), but what was at stake was the attribution of responsibility for defects. 10 Finally, if the line-worker’s skills generally allow him to make gains in relation to the time theoretically allowed, the real time of work is also subject to chance events that are not allowed for in the theoretical calculations, and whose probability increases geometrically, rather than arithmetically, with tension, hurry and fatigue: the hoses and cables that snake around one’s feet, the electric screwdriver that can be applied only by force to certain types of car, the rivetter that jams, a new worker up the line who isn’t preparing the work properly. To deal with all these, and to protect himself against being overwhelmed, the assemblyline worker has constantly to keep himself to some degree ahead of the game. For him, to be just-in-time is to be vulnerable. Hence the not uncommon sight of someone working up the line from his own station, getting ahead of his work without waiting for it to arrive, and thus apparently irrationally increasing the distance moved and expending in this movement a gain that is constantly renewed. This is the price paid for maintaining a margin of safety, and thus a form of peace of mind. The discordance between prescription and practice can, however, have negative effects, related to the heterogeneous composition of the workstation: in HC for example, the workstations where the boot-seal is put in place require that the worker wears a manique, a kind of strap that goes around the hand and is strengthened over the palm, when pushing the seal into place and tapping it down. Among other things, the manique prevents the transmission of vibration to the wrist, a source of

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potential medical problems.11 This same workstation also involves clipping and connecting electrical cable, operations for which the manique is a definite handicap. To save putting it on and taking it off at each stage, it simply isn’t used, despite the several warnings received in the course of health and safety audits. Here one can see clearly how prescription can co-exist with infraction. How, in the end, is the validity of the operations sheets drawn up by the organisation and methods department assessed? The équilibreur, who does not determine the times allowed, but only applies them, willingly admits that the times allocated should not be taken as gospel, but rather as a necessarily conventional approximation – recalling the notion already discussed of a socially acceptable outcome. For their part, the assembly-line workers, perhaps because of the long experience of many of them, never take their stand on this method and its logic; if they ever do challenge an operations sheet, it is in terms of its field of application, that is to say, the workload at the workstation itself. Such non-internalisation on the part of those who implement the operation sheets is a significant characteristic of work relations in this kind of car-assembly shop. The gap between prescription and reality can take on very concrete form, especially in the HC shop, given the scale of trimming operations. It is in this context that one comes across the portable ‘toolchest,’ which a number of the workers use on a permanent basis. This contains a sufficient and proportionate supply of each small item used at the workstation, plus any necessary light tools such as ordinary screwdrivers. The worker moves with it from car to car, only stepping off the conveyor to gain access to fixed tools and accessories installed alongside. This toolchest consists of a basic element (two trays and a handle) to which are sometimes fastened smaller rectangular plastic trays, the number depending on the workstation’s requirements in the way of screws, collars, clips and other small parts. The design of this toolchest, and even more the way it is managed, are also a matter of the personal equilibrium established between the convenience of stock-holding and the weight and encumbrance this represents. An anxious worker, concerned to have proper reserves, may multiply the number of compartments, while another may do the same thing simply to be able to work his way up the line more easily. On the other hand, a worker confident in his work-rate, who prefers to ‘work in post’ will be more concerned with lightness and ease of handling. In sum, like toolchest, like man. It is carefully prepared, generally at the beginning of the shift – even by the younger workers – before the line begins to move. This moment of

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the day, marked by a sort of concentration, is symptomatic of the tension of work, or, to put it another way, of fear of the speed of the line. In HC, this atmosphere is particularly noticeable in the mornings: in the minutes before the 5am start, there is a sense of great concentration among the assembly line workers, who approach their work well in time; they have picked up their tools from the lockers allocated to the team. Most of them, whether young or old, carefree or conscientious, have got their toolchests ready, filled them and tidied them. They now make contact with the cars that await, sticking a head inside to check that work has been done, passing a hand over the body, as if to pet it. Some have already begun producing cars. The start of the line, then, is nothing but its starting its crawl, the potential effect dulled by the beginning already made on work. There is nothing insignificant about the toolchest, and other things being equal, it carries a charge of presence that recalls the workbench described by Robert Linhart. 12 The toolchest, indeed, is no object of value; too heavily used to last very long, it has no time to acquire the patina of age. Yet it is respected: unless the object of deliberate malice, a toolchest left behind will be found in the same place the next day, perhaps moved a little out of the way. For everyone recognises it as the helpmeet the other has constructed for himself, in accordance with a personal logic which means it has no equivalent elsewhere, not even in the hands of ones counterpart on the other shift. In the toolchest, then, the personalisation of a worker’s relationship to his workstation finds institutional recognition. If operations on the car are scrupulously and precisely laid down in the operations sheet, the toolchest concretises the grey area that is tolerated in the organisation of supplies. This is one of the components in the organisation of manual work it is difficult to standardise. Here the technicians responsible for drawing up operations sheets allow the worker a certain time, accorded more or less as a ‘lump sum’. So the toolchest in some way escapes the sway of the time and motion experts, forming part of the recognised, autonomous territory of the assembly-line worker.

Density and difficulty: two aspects of effort The study of work at fixed stations on the assembly line soon leads one to consideration of changes in intensity – a topic that has become the object of a controversy deriving from an ambivalence in the word itself, which evokes both effort and time. The two aspects, however, develop discordantly: what is one to make, for instance, of the reduction in difficulty brought about by ergonomic progress, when this leads to

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a work time more densely filled with gestures? First of all, though, how do assembly line workers themselves think about such change in their own work? Here, disparate observations and responses can lead one to contradictory conclusions. For some, work has improved, while for others it has become worse. Moniteurs, in particular, who are only infrequently assigned to productive work on the line – but also workers who for one reason or another find themselves at any ‘easy’ workstation, can wax eloquent on improvements in layout and ergonomics. Many workers, however, and sometimes the very same, believe that the work has become more difficult because the load on each workstation has increased, or as was said by one from HC2, ‘because they’ve speeded up’. This kind of discussion of changes in workload by older workers is difficult to judge. They are looking back, in fact, to their own youth, and may tend to minimise the difficulties of the time: the measure of comparison is in fact their own sense of vitality, which has decreased. By refining the questions, however, one can get a more highly qualified and relatively concordant response: ‘Before, it was more of an effort, but the workload was less.’ Present and past are then compared under two different aspects, and in two different ways. In describing the work of today, assembly line workers often talk about it being easier: most of the older workers – generally those older than 37 or 38 – will talk of more attention given to ergonomic factors. Working posture is more comfortable, muscular effort less violent than before. Strain is less frequent, stance more secure, gesture less extended, there’s less getting in and out of the bodywork. Ergonomics, in fact, plays a much greater role in the design of work. Hence the involvement, for the first time, of representatives of the plant’s occupational medicine service in planning the 406, intervening in the design both of the model and of methods of production. They had their place in the joint working group which brought together all the specialisms involved in the project, introduced for the first time for this new model. An ergonomist also monitors the organisation of working positions in the shop, and a list of ergonomic criteria is applied to operations, to calculate their degree of acceptability. Despite these advances, however, it still happens that an ergonomically controversial operation may be decided upon by the organisation and methods department and imposed on the production team.13 Modifications to the product, to the car and all its parts, have led to constant improvements in what the technicians call montabilité, assemblability or the ease with which components are fitted. These are ever better prepared and increasingly easy to fit. The testimony of older

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workers reveals the technical advances made in the development of new materials; new, more easily executed procedures; and new shapes for components that make them easier to put in place. Indeed, the simplification of work comes about through this technical progress in materials, tools and equipment, and methods of work. In particular, the management claims that it has succeeded, thanks to the efforts of engineers and technicians, in making assembly operations on the 406 distinctly easier. For the majority of the workers, the new procedures – most of them evidently simpler – are associated, however, with an increase in workload as between the 405 and the 406, for example. These points of view, of course, are not exclusive. In the face of these trends, considered as improvements in the organisation of assembly-line work, workers’ own testimony tends to evoke the increased difficulty of the work, referring to a picture of an earlier time when the manual workers enjoyed greater autonomy and more free time while at work, so long as they had the advantage of average dexterity. Discussion of this historical development is often illustrated by the disappearance of the ‘double’ or even ‘triple’ workstations frequently mentioned in talk of the past. If the average time taken for the car body to pass from one workstation to the next was, let us say, three minutes, certain workstations responsible for complex operations that were difficult to distribute amongst different stations, such as fitting dashboards or lining the passenger-compartment ceiling, might require four of five minutes, if not longer. Such a station was then covered by two workers, each taking every other car, both of whom enjoyed rather more free time than a worker occupied for 90 per cent of the time at a ‘single’ station. Assigned to these workstations, which often required particular manual dexterity, it was easier for workers to arrange significant rest periods through the efficient organisation of work and by making arrangements between themselves to cover for each other, the one resting while the other worked.14 Such organisational autonomy was bought at a high price in physical effort, but it was certainly seen as positive then, and even more so now after its disappearance, and with it, the overall system that allowed it.15 For the double workstation meant variation of rhythm and pace, which workers could to some extent determine for themselves, but above all it meant partial control over time, and the free disposal for one’s own purposes of time won from the monotony of the line, and subjectively, from the time paid by the employer. In reality, these double workstations represented only a minority of stations in the old bodyshop, but to

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recall them is to evoke in the most striking manner this organisational autonomy at work, which was greater in those days; whether the workstation was double or single, it was then common to work one’s way 2 or 3 cars up the line before the break, so as to make it even longer, and the most skilful might get themselves ten cars ahead. In a general way, the efforts made by technicians from the organisation and methods department to adapt parts and tools, to reduce the need for movement and to improve ergonomic conditions, have led to increases in productivity and to a more detailed and rigorous control over manual workers’ time. The reduced need for awkward gestures, or helping hands, sometimes even for whole jobs carried out on the line, has led to a reduction in the times allowed in operations sheets. On a larger scale, organisational changes that have brought an evening-out of flows have led to a reduction in the reserve of personnel held by team leaders and supervisors, which was necessary to absorb the occasional surges in production, more marked in the past than they are today, and which they were free to dispose of as they wished at quiet times. The notion of intensification of work, often employed to describe these developments, takes account of only some of the changes, and ignores the reduction in one form of intensity, the intensity of physical effort and discomfort. The change in the nature of work, indeed, is characterised by an increased density of working time, a reduction in the number and length of moments of rest interspersed in a time dedicated to activity, a situation which can certainly be well described by the claim that ‘It’s not as hard, but the workload is greater’. The creation of the new HC shop to replace the old Finition gives a particularly good illustration of this double trend. The changes in layout in HC have lead to significant increases in efficiency, particularly through a reduction in activities considered non-productive. In exchange for a reduction in materials-handling and of geographical movement by workers, and then the simplification of postures brought about by the new metal conveyor and its ‘sleds’ of adjustable height, the number of tasks to be carried out per station per unit time has significantly increased. As a result, the effort invested in work has been shifted and changed in nature, which explains why a workstation can be felt to be both less difficult and more tiring. This ambivalence of perception is reinforced by the fact that in the change of layout the workers lost their fixed points of reference. What is more, the redefinition of workstations in HC has led to reductions in the length of compressed air hoses, and especially in the cables of electric screwdrivers, which has severely limited workers’ freedom

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of movement along the line. To this has to be added a reduction in the time allowed for the bodies to move from one workstation to another (the cycle time), which also limits the freedom of internal organisation for each workstation. In fact, regardless of the constraints imposed by the operations sheet, the range of possible combinations of operations (movements, uptake of tools and parts) is much greater the more numerous they are (with longer cycle time). For the workers, a reduction in cycle time is a reduction in autonomy and freedom. The opening of the HC shop represented a stage sufficiently important, identifiable or symbolical to bring to mind for the workers employed there the whole set of changes they have experienced over fifteen years or more: the changes which at MV are considered in the most general terms of then and now, are at HC polarised in an opposition between the old and the new shops. Change and development continue, of course, as they do in the many factories around the world, where organisation and methods departments have concentrated their research on the availability of parts and tools to the assembly-line worker, the goal being further reductions in time spent in geographical movement and in accessing parts and tools. To achieve this, rather than let the worker go back and forth between the car and the fixed racks alongside the line, the operations and methods department has developed mobile racks which accompany the worker as he works on the car. Tools and supplies are thus within hand’s reach. In workstations where this has been introduced, the percentage of time reckoned as directly productive has markedly increased. In ergonomic terms, the distance covered by the worker has thus been considerably reduced, while the handling of tools, some of them relatively heavy, has been substantially diminished. This is why workers and employee representatives are calling for the extension of the procedure. As a counterpart to this, the number of directly productive gestures has increased, leading to greater demands on the limbs concerned and on powers of mental and physical concentration: fatigue tends to shift from the legs to the hands and brain. At the same time, the assemblyline worker’s spatial and temporal autonomy has been reduced, because the movement of the rack, co-ordinated with that of each car on the line, imposes its own rhythm on the user. Is this irony or paradox? The mobile racks are called servantes, waitresses, but they impose increased constraints on workers even as they reduce the distance travelled during the working day. Such developments put into question certain ideas about the automation of industry. The 1980s saw a wave of systematic, large-scale automation,

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often making use of robots, which was then in some cases followed by problems and a return to manual labour, especially on assembly lines. But for some years, this somewhat spectacular trend succeeded in obscuring, in France, the more discreet advance of a more rudimentary automation that was sometimes no more than a simple mechanisation of tasks. This is the case here, where the ‘waitresses’ conserve what is still irreplaceable in human labour – its adaptability and wealth of gesture, while continuing to eat away at the labourer’s autonomy and field of movement. In this particular area, senior managers at Peugeot had been perhaps more cautious than their counterparts elsewhere, but the company tended to catch up somewhat in the period 1997–99. More broadly considered, these were the years for which PSA management set a target of around 12 per cent for the annual increase in productivity. These targets (expressed in terms of time or materials) were somewhat scaleddown in the assembly shops, and were more or less achieved at Sochaux. The result has been a constant pressure on time, even if changes of model or layout have been the key factors in gaining time in the assembly process, through improvements in the manufacturability of the product (the responsibility of engineers and technicians) and through increases in workload on the line. Management justifies these constraints by evoking international competition and the better results achieved by other manufacturers, American and Japanese in particular, but now even Italian and British. Organisational changes, though, have not increased the density of all work time, as can be seen in the two following examples. The first concerns a relatively recent change in the rules regulating the order in which cars are embarked on the line. The new rules have significantly reduced the unevenness in the quantity of work demanded of assembly line workers resulting from variation in model, which has reduced the margins of manoeuvre available to the flow managers, while changes in workload were evened out. To compensate for the rigidity thus established, manning levels had to be increased. The second example concerns changes in the organisation of breaks, which came into effect for the whole bodyshop when HC1 came into service. Until 1987–88, breaks were taken individually. A break was called a dépannage because the place of each worker in turn was taken by a dépanneur, a replacement, who stayed as long as was necessary for the worker to get to the toilet and back. The distribution of such breaks through the working day was a source of perpetual tension and endless horse-trading. A worker replaced at the beginning of the day, after 20

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minutes work, felt disadvantaged, while such a spell, when linked to the meal-break or the end of the day, was considered particularly advantageous. The value of the break varied in the same way depending on whether it related to work on a ‘costly’ or an ‘easy’ car. Hence the need for a skilful rotation of the dépanneur among the workstations, so as to ensure fairness as between workers. Someone or other would nonetheless feel hard done by, and favouritism and revenge were both frequent. 16 An actor with a fundamentally strategic role, the dépanneur could easily anger the less well-served, whose response would follow rapidly, as they stretched their absence to increase the number of cars their replacement would have to work on. Complaints, disputes, alliances and interventions by foremen went to constitute a social game played by subtle rules which allowed the most cunning or most powerful among the workers to construct arguments of a sophistication hardly expected in such an environment. The decision of bodyshop management to introduce compulsory mass breaks abolished this permanent disputation, which threatened to undermine the authority of supervisory staff. The loss of car numbers entailed by a general halt was balanced out by a gain in the labour of the replacement workers, now unnecessary, and a small reduction in total rest time. On the other hand, this rationalisation in the organisation of breaks has stabilised the rhythm of rest periods and reinforced the collective life of the team, as these breaks have become collective and simultaneous rather than individual and sequential.

Between pleasure and pain: paradoxes of life on the line When an assembly line worker ‘takes on’ a workstation, his first goal is to master the operations well enough to ‘do’ all the cars to a satisfactory level of quality. Once that goal has been achieved, and monotony has set in, two work behaviours may make their appearance, neither of which excludes the other: on the one hand the effort to economise on the worker’s own resources, often so as to be able to achieve other goals outside the plant, and on the other, the attempt to find self-affirmation in the work itself. It should be remembered that a sense of repetitiveness is felt only by those sufficiently experienced workers who have mastered the demands of their workstation, while those who have difficulty in completing in time, who are ‘sunk’ as they have to work further and further down the line, feel entirely different emotions: anger at the line, at the supervisors, but also at themselves, because others succeed apparently without great difficulty. These days, it is workers who come from other shops, or

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those whose physical capacities have suffered, who tend to find themselves in this kind of situation. Difficulties can reappear when the line is rebalanced, before a rhythm is established for the new succession of gestures, or even more so, with the arrival of new vehicles. At such a time, a number of assembly line workers become fearful: they are afraid of not being able to keep up, they fear they may bring the line to a halt. Will they be good enough, will they maintain the respect of others? And finally, there is the fear of the injury or fatigue that will stop them working and lead to their marginalisation in the eyes of the AM1.17 One of the workers questioned at HC2 (aged 44) told us that it had taken him more than three weeks to get on top of his new workstation after a recent rebalancing of the line: ‘It’s the first time it’s happened to me. I said to myself: I must be able to do it, the guy who had it before did. My back was really hurting, I bought a support; and I lost 6 kilos in 6 weeks’. 18 As well as this ‘physical fear’, assembly-line workers also have a ‘moral fear’ of quality defects. Faults identified can lead to 15-point penalties, which when accumulated beyond a certain level can result in the withdrawal of the collective bonus paid to workers in HC1. This bonus, called the prime d’objectifs or performance bonus is not very high (55 F per head per week) and as such need not be taken very seriously; but in fact it acts as a vehicle of group pressure that is internalised by everyone. It operates as a tool of social transparency which obliges each and every one of the workers on the line not to commit a fault; even if the name of the one responsible for the 15-point penalty is not formally published, everyone knows soon enough who it is, and this is enough to encourage every effort not to do it again. If this fear, and the tension to which it leads, helps maintain vigilance, it has a psychologically destabilising effect on those who are having difficulties, and it increases their fatigue. Repetitiveness, the source of a gestural efficiency that sometimes lends itself to games of self-affirmation, and sometimes simply to economy of effort, may thus sometimes be an essential ingredient in unease, fatigue or pain. For workers of a certain age, the overreaching of capacities can lead to pain, more or less clearly related to the work itself, felt more particularly in those parts of the body the most intensely or the most frequently exploited. In this case, the operative can find himself caught in cumulative sequences of pain (difficulty of communication, combination of the mental and bodily) which find themselves aggravated to the point of obsession by the repetitive aspect of the work. Experience and time thus teach the necessity of protecting oneself against the excessive

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demand that gestural repetition can impose, depending on the specific features of the workstation. This concern is a central feature of the culture of the line. It is all the more important as the alternation of rhythms imposed by the double-shift system develops capacities for adaptation and recuperation. It leads the worker, with the passage of time, and in accordance with an experience entirely personal, to economise on his own resources and to avoid approaching his own limits. One example suggests the force of cumulative strain, even though it concerns not only mental fatigue but also the ageing process, loss of a smallholding, lack of prospects and tensions between workers. One morning at HC1, soon after the meal break, and following an altercation with a younger man overflowing with energy, an assembly-line worker in his forties delivered himself of a heartfelt opinion. In the face of the work and the atmosphere of the shop, you had either to explode into violence or to keep it all bottled up. Which was even worse, he knew, but he was afraid to let himself go. He said he was suffering from anxiety, from stress. Some time ago, he was dosing himself up with lots of tranquillisers, but he’d succeeded in cutting them down by half, they weren’t a solution. He was wondering, in fact, whether he was becoming abnormal. Then his conversation took off in another direction, with his remarking that you couldn’t do two things at once. He referred to his past experience. Years ago he used to have a smallholding that he was able to run while coming to work at his first job at Sochaux, on a machine in the engineering shop. But when he came onto the line, this new work, so much more testing, was a shock. He realised that he couldn’t do two jobs, and gave up the smallholding. If fact, underlying the talk about doing two jobs was another story: he didn’t have the energy any longer. Earlier, he used to buzz with energy. Having left the plant he could do another day’s work, tireless and all-powerful. Today, his difficulties go even further: he’s not even interested. The sum total of physical, temporal and mental constraints involved in prescribed work suggest that workers’ defensive resources and strategies are somewhat limited, given the very interstitial autonomy that remains to them. This conclusion appears to be generally borne out by the detailed investigation of line workers’ behaviours and their real occupation over the long term: one may find the occasional dextrous worker who finds time to regularly sit down on a chair between cars, or who works his way up the line (see below), but these are a minority. The workload at most stations keeps operatives fully occupied. Paradoxically, the defensive strategy adopted by some is to invent operations in addition to those laid down on the operations sheet, operations

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for which no time has been allocated, and which the worker is only able to carry out by squeezing the time he allows to those operations that have been laid down. For example, a worker in HC2 responsible for fitting safety-belts to the 405 has a way of preparing his screws, which he lines up in his toolbox before approaching the body; each screw being provided with two washers and a spacer, which must be removed again on arrival in order to insert the belt-anchorage between them. Not only has he never admitted the uselessness of this operation, but he hurries over the prescribed work so as to be able to prepare his screws, while complaining that he hasn’t enough time. In fact, this voluntary overburdening is a more or less conscious defence intended to gain time of his own, even if to do this he has to speed up the rhythm of work and to exacerbate his fatigue. In one’s imprisonment in prescribed time, the winning of time of ones own seems so important that it can lead to overwork, so long as this work is experienced as an act of freedom. Another paradox. While the majority of assembly-line workers complain of the poverty and repetitive nature of the tasks they must carry out, they at the same time reject any kind of work enrichment. They prefer short, repetitive cycles, they say, in which all operations can be easily committed to memory. Hence their distaste for workstations where they must read and memorise the code of the part to be fitted from the job-sheet. Job enrichment is even rejected by multi-functional workers (polyvalents) reassigned to fixed tasks, who had earlier appreciated the variety of work that came their way. Even more, most of these expolyvalents today reject any rotation between workstations, itself a certain form of multi-functionality. There are many assembly-line workers of long experience who argue that a well-mastered fixed workstation is a solution preferable to all others; precise and well-honed gestures avoid fatigue, while the ability to develop certain ‘niches’ allows one even to find some satisfaction. To understand these experienced workers’ relationship to their work, one has to recollect certain characteristics of assembly-line work, and in particular the specific forms of pleasurable relationship to work that can also develop in this context. The subject of work-satisfaction is often discussed in the literature in terms of results. From this point of view, work gives pleasure when it is done on or ahead of time, indeed, but above all when the resulting product makes the activity gratifying. The time may have been a constraint, but it disappears as soon as the work is done, when faced with an object of pleasing quality. In assembly-line work, the relationship between the variables is in a way reversed, quality paradoxically becoming

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secondary. Despite the increasing importance of ‘quality’ as a value in norms of work prescribed for the operative, its role in evaluation is limited: the operative in fact produces conformity, or ‘non-quality’. An intermediate area of ambiguity admittedly continues to exist, but it is not recognised; it is even the object of quality-control organisation. When quality is no more than conformity, it isn’t any longer an issue, a goal or a measure, and the quest for self-affirmation shifts to other fields more rich in nuance. It can be found in the sensation, or even the aesthetics, of the gesture, comparable, ceteris paribus, with other gestural practices such as sport, craft or artistic creation. In this sense, every advance, every gestural gain or elaboration is a source of inward satisfaction. In this game on the line, time is the dominant variable. The speed achieved becomes the expression of dexterity, of a know-how beyond quality. To gain time, and so to control it, becomes a game charged with significance. What is more, the affirmation of gestural skill is generally also directed at others, and demonstrating ones skill by working ones way up the line brings in another layer of meaning.19 To these two possible logics of overcoming – of aesthetics or competition – one must of course add another: the effort to obtain recognition of ones skill and devotion to work from supervisory staff, in the hope of gaining a more satisfactory workstation. But these three logics are not always associated, or even present together, which gives an extensive range of possible behaviours. Mental and bodily resources are indispensable to such patterns of self-overcoming, self-affirmation, and game-playing at work; but for many workers such resources find themselves limited by age, in ways which vary with the individual and with the workstation occupied. As soon as he has taken up his station, the assembly-line worker then finds himself confronted with a choice. Should he stay where he is, or try and get himself moved elsewhere? This is a question faced by most, in one way or another. On the teams studied here, the younger workers only ever wanted to know when or how they would change workstation or even job, the first being seen as a prerequisite for the other. Among those over forty, too, there were some who talked of their desire for a change. Then there were those who, although nothing in their behaviour betrayed it, had certainly asked themselves the question, as became clear in interviews. What leads all assembly-line workers, or nearly all, to hope for a change of workstation at one time or another, is the effect of repetition. Repetition leads to the feeling that one’s own time, the time of ones own life as it passes, is being dissolved in that of the paradoxical movement of the line, which progresses and remains exactly

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the same – in the time of one’s own infinitely repeated labours. This sensation may come over one at any age, leading to an obsessive relationship to the workstation, whose spiral development can come to threaten the worker’s mental equilibrium. Change, however, is not without its disadvantages. It means losing a good deal of ones painfully acquired know-how; it is to start again on the laborious conquest of a new cycle time, only at the end of which will one find a certain margin of peace of mind. If accumulated experience can ease the task of appropriation, it never suppresses it, and advancing age does nothing to help matters. There is something unknown, too, about the new demands that will be made on the body, while the problem of repetition will quickly enough raise its head again. The desire for change can then lose something of its edge, and find itself embodied in more modest hopes. At the lowest end of the scale, one might hope for the recognition of a minor degree of multi-functionality, allowing one to look forward to relatively rapid progress to point 190 on the scale; or to a move to a more favoured workstation. Gradually, these prospects shrink: the scale-point is reached, but the next seems far away; perhaps there’s been no gain at all in changing workstation; one tends more and more to think that the whole thing is an illusion; not to mention the fact that to harbour such aspirations puts one in a position of weakness in relation to the team leader. This is then succeeded by a process of withdrawal, an acceptance of the boredom, of the dissatisfaction caused by this institutional blockage, and the sense that the dissatisfaction won’t ever go away. To understand better the sources of this acceptance of boredom, one can observe workers who have reached a certain age, who know that they have practically no chance now of getting off the line. The monotony of the work becomes even clearer when it is compared to their activities outside. To take only a few examples from among the teams studied here, some have built, or organised the building of, their own homes – a venture that reveals a ‘spirit of enterprise’ that goes far beyond what is required of them at the plant; one of the line workers makes model aeroplanes, finding in the product the unity and complexity nowhere in evidence at work; while another, attentive to work and little loquacious while at it, is the chair of a Portuguese cultural organisation that has 270 families as members, in which role he displays those capacities of organisation, initiative and public self-expression one would expect. These examples demonstrate the gap between the aptitudes of many workers and the real content of the tasks assigned to them. The intellectual regression brought about by assembly-line work is self-reinforcing, and

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in a certain way produces the men and women that such work requires. One may wonder why such regression should be accepted, but what most strikingly calls out for attention here is the whole ensemble of processes which make this kind of work acceptable. The reduction in the breadth of activities, or at the very least, its restriction to a very narrow range, is accompanied by a diminution in workers’ aspirations that is necessary if they are to give due weight to a change of detail, if they are to retain the capacity to be surprised, and, in a word, be able to take pleasure in work. In other words, so as to be able to stick at his work, the assembly-line worker who knows that this represents one of the least bad options available to him constructs for himself a frame of reference which allows him to gain a certain satisfaction at work, but one that has no relation to the one he has outside the plant. It needs to be repeated that this satisfaction is only available at the cost of a considerable downgrading of one’s own aspirations. One can speak of amputation of the personality, or of a defensive strategy, as does Christophe Dejours.20 For him, such defensive strategies in the face of suffering at work save the manual worker or white-collar employee from the occupational disease that afflicts precisely those whose defences are inadequate. There is however no strategic reason to grant more importance to suffering than to pleasure at work. A more dialectical conception of the relation between the two might make possible a richer description of the work situation, clearly profoundly ambivalent, that would help explain how this system of work reproduces itself while also producing change. Here one returns to the concept of constrained involvement.21 On the one hand, the worker can do no other than remain at his workstation, accepting its rules and norms (constraint), but there he creates a universe that makes this constraint and its norms acceptable, while at the same time providing him with pleasures and satisfactions that lead him to involve himself in his function and thus to carry out to an acceptable standard the tasks associated with it, fragmented and repetitive though they might be. The amputation of the personality that comes about in this process is one of the definitions of alienation: not only does the assembly-line worker not dispose of the product of his labour – he no longer freely disposes of his personality, as he has had to give up a part of himself to make the labour acceptable. Let it be emphasised once again, however, that the fact that he finds pleasure and satisfaction in work with limited scope for initiative, that he finds meaning for his activity in the details of the daily variation, is a fact of quite as much theoretical significance as alienation itself. For this process, as we have analysed it, to a great

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extent explains why the assembly-line worker accepts this regression, accepts then his condition. Of course, he both accepts it and does not accept it, at different moments (of the day, of the career and so on): the anti-management vote, the stoppage, the shouting match and the longterm strike are all manifestations of this ambivalence in life at work. And finally, the very monotony nourishes a certain acceptance, by freeing the mind of any preoccupations directly related to the work in hand. One assembly-line worker (44 years of age) explains: ‘You think of something else; the work gets done well enough. It’s not that putting in 4 screws. . . . You can’t just keep your mind on what you’re doing.’ This vacancy is filled with thought and reflection on out-of-work activities, and on family life in particular. The close relationship between life at work and life at home finds expression not only, for instance, in a bad mood on arrival at the plant, following a family dispute, or in fatigue and irritation on leaving work for home – while the two spaces, of work and family, come together of course in discussion at home about the factory and relationships with bosses and fellow-workers – but also, even more intensely, in these moments of mental freedom on the line, when everything is going well and gestures succeed each other fluently. At the same time, if difficulties arise in one of these areas, the other is rapidly contaminated. Vacancy of mind in the course of assembly operations encourages this transfer of preoccupations, which can go so far as to produce a change of mood while at work; assailed by family difficulties or buoyed up by good news, the worker works differently, because the content of operations allows, or requires, this kind of distraction. All these topics that occupy the mind also provide the basis for discussion between workers working opposite each other on the same body, or working at neighbouring stations and regularly coming up against each other during the cycle. The latter leads to a conversation in snatches, sentences begun in one cycle and completed in the next, following the temporal imperatives of the production process. It entails a particular mental effort, requiring attention not only to the requirements of work, but to the construction and unfolding of this broken communication. Such conversation, a voluntary involvement, makes up for the vacuity of the work itself, as if the human mind needs occupation in order to exist. ‘You shout,’ says one worker of 43 years of age, ‘you talk to pass the time. I can’t be on the line without talking. I joke with the lad and when. . . . You have to be careful when you’re making jokes, it can be misunderstood, but it’s quite a laugh here, just the same.’ Having a laugh on the line can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, like bragging and boastfulness in other situations, it can be

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a form of challenge. Or, without denying the constraint of the work situation, having a laugh is taken as one element of work, just like repetitivity and fatigue, filling the interstices of time on the line, a reconstructed pleasure in company. No doubt that if the workers had a free choice of activity they wouldn’t for long remain on the line. The moment, however, that wage-labour is instituted, the condition of the worker appears, both accepted and rejected, at the same time and by the same people – to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the occasion and on ones position on the career trajectory.

From the team to the network It is beyond the workstation that work finds its coherence. Relations, indeed, are not limited to the domain of the team, which only partially covers the integration of machines in the ensemble of relations between operatives and the interactions that follow from them: the organisation of work cannot be dissociated from technical constraints. Staying with the point of view of the assembly-line workers, any representation of the institutions directly related to production will demonstrate to what extent they are directed, managed, monitored and trained. These prescriptive relations are mediated by the plant itself, by the flow which imposes its own rhythm, by the interventions of the various technicians of the organisation and methods department; and they are imposed finally, through the direct line of hierarchical control. In the face of these constraining forces, the workers’ resources seem limited: for them the choice appears to be reduced to acceptance or rejection of what has been laid down for them. Certainly quality issues or the suggestion system may allow assembly-line workers an opportunity for more active co-operation, but taken as a whole their position is strongly determined by other elements of the institutional network in the shop. Such a picture, however, leaves out of account certain channels of reaction that are available to the assembly-line worker alongside the structures of production properly speaking, such as the trades unions or the occupational medicine service. Furthermore, in limiting itself to institutionalised relations, focussing on the explicitly organised, formalised aspect of relations, it neglects the implicit and informal aspect of the ensemble of relations involved in the activity of the shop. To properly represent these relations, one has to fully take into account both the strength and the forms of the prescriptions imposed on operatives, and the diversity of the network of relationships formed around these.

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The domain of the team leader – the reconciliation of discordant requirements The team is first of all a group established by the plant management, primarily an expression of the latter’s will with regard to the technical organisation of operatives. But the team is also the object of multifarious strategic endeavours expressed in distinct logics of production that are sometimes mutually contradictory, as when one attempts to combine productivity and quality, two imperatives generally presented as absolutes, and thus capable of entering into opposition. Formally, the team is the last level in the posting of an employee, after the plant, the shop, the shift and the line. Posting to a particular workstation is not itself formalised, and most workstations are in fact difficult to identify, except in a partial, allusive way, by reference to the principal operation involved. The team corresponds to the lowest level of hierarchical authority, the team leader, or foreman, now called the AM1. The new worker is thus assigned to one of these. The team is a unit of command, organisation, management and motivation centred on the AM1. First of all, he assigns his men to the different workstations so as to carry out on the cars that pass through the sector assigned to him the operations that are required, in conformity with the norms laid down. A significant element in this process is the roll-call, often thought of as indicative of the team-leader’s skill. Taking place just before the line starts up, this involves his touring the area for which he is responsible to ensure that all the members of the team are present. Since clocking-in was abolished in 1981, it is this check which determines whether a worker is present, leaving it to the AM1 to decide whether or not to report significant lateness. He deploys his men, taking into account any absences and the aptitudes of each, and reports to the supervisor or AM2 the numbers available and his requirements for additional hands, either multi-functional polyvalents or supers, from the pool available to the AM2.22 The team leader, however, cannot ask for too much: for shop management and supervisors, a team is generally considered to reflect its leader. Finally, in the short-term management of manning, it is also the AM1 who issues passes for temporary leave, grants exceptional days off, allocates workers to training courses or sends them off to the infirmary, generally seeing to the adjustment between the needs of the individual and those of the team. For the AM1, the essential goal is to ensure the reliability of production across the sector for which he is responsible. Success depends a great deal on the margin he has available in terms of numbers, which has

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been greatly reduced over recent years. For team-leaders, this has required a campaign against absenteeism, which at Sochaux, as elsewhere in Peugeot, fell significantly during the 1980s, (from 10 per cent to 4 per cent among manual workers). This fall was connected to the difficulties encountered by the company in the period following 1979: financial losses, the halt in recruitment, increased efforts to gain productivity, cuts in manning levels etc. The trend was reinforced by management action against absent workers: supervisors told of paying visits to the homes of workers whose sickness seemed suspect. This kind of intervention has left its imprint on worker behaviour, sustained by periodic clampdowns. To limit absenteeism, team leaders must in addition generate an atmosphere in which, for varying reasons, a worker will do his best to be present when required. The team leader must also ensure the best possible fit between worker and workstation, in terms of physical aptitudes and psychological factors. This kind of adaptation, however, comes into partial contradiction with another aspect of production management: the management of multifunctionality within the team in response to variations in production. On the one hand, adaptation increases with time, which allows each worker to better master the tasks associated with his workstation. On the other hand, conditions of production are not stable, and there are variations in volume as well as changes in bodywork or engine, optional equipment, trim etc. These variations represent constraints, sometimes expected, sometimes unpredictable in form, in the face of which the team leader must maintain, through his management of multifunctionality, the team’s collective capacity to produce. The AM1 must thus reconcile contradictory imperatives: to bring about the necessary production with the human resources available to him, in unstable conditions, while aiming for total quality. To ensure better control of these aspects of work at team level, plant management has split each team into two or three parts, sometimes called groups and sometimes modules. In the shop, the term is sometimes used to designate the team as a whole, which can lead to confusion. The use of such terminology, associated with organisational reform, to a great extent reflects the political geography of its acceptance. One thus finds every kind of confusion or rejection, depending on the situation, to such a degree is vocabulary a privileged position marker in this respect. The modules have no match in the hierarchy of authority, properly speaking, and the team’s AM1 remains entirely responsible for them. It is in the module that multi-functionality and quality are dissociated in principle, finding embodiment in two

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specific roles, those of the polyvalent, the multi-functional worker, and of the moniteur. At the individual as at the team level, multi-functionality is a fluctuating datum, unequally distributed among workers. It is embodied to a great extent in the team’s substitutes, the polyvalents, and others which may be assigned to it on a temporary basis, the polyvalents d’atelier and the supers mentioned above. The team’s own polyvalents take the place of other workers as necessary to deal with casual and relatively short-term absences due to a worker’s undergoing training, attending to administrative requirements, visiting the infirmary, taking individual leave or being late. They also assist in the process of adjustment to the workstation by new arrivals, returnees, or assembly-line workers changing station. Apart from this normal assignment to a workstation they also provide varied and more or less formalised assistance. Their field of activity within the team depends on the AM1, and they may move about the whole team, or simply within a single module. These polyvalents must enjoy the confidence of the team leader, and their occupation of this role is in fact precarious: they have no specific status, 23 and this binds them to him even more closely. The function of the moniteur, responsible for the quality of production, is more formalised (see Chapter 3) and is further consolidated by the various distinctions which tend to separate these from the general run of assembly-line workers, and which make their promotion to this status more and more difficult to reverse with the passage of time. The moniteur is not in principle assigned to assembly-line tasks, nor counted as part of the manual workforce. The level of pay is not the most important of these distinctions, even if the foreman will accelerate the moniteur’s progress along the scale in such a way that the latter rapidly passes the ordinary ceiling on assembly-line workers’ pay. The moniteur will have followed a particularly high number of courses, some of which go beyond production in the narrow sense to deal with his role within the company. The moniteur is often called in on particular days, such as the Saturday before a new redistribution of tasks between workstations, or on certain days when the plant is shut. In the same way, he is often found working with technical groups formed to solve a problem of manufacture or quality, or with quality circles where they exist, and is consulted by technical staff on suggestions that have been made or proposals for future redistributions. The moniteurs are the team leader’s assistants. The organisation of the team therefore expresses a compromise between the different requirements that structure the work of the assembly line.

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If the imperatives of productivity or intensity of labour are on the whole imposed by the speed of the line, it is the job of the AM1 to ensure that cost objectives are met through the precise management of the operatives and their assignment to different workstations. To meet other requirements, they depend on workers with specialised functions: the polyvalents offer the possibility of flexibility and adaptation to the hazards of production, while the moniteurs attend to the level of quality required. The relations between these requirements provide the basis for strategic games. Counterbalancing the tensions which exist between them, a powerful unifying force is exerted by the authority of the AM1 and by the career process that regulates relations between these functions. In fact, the traditional path for worker promotion is that which leads from assembly-line worker to polyvalent to moniteur to team-leader. These stages support a hierarchy which encourages the peaceable regulation of conflictual relations between the different actors. The formal structure of the team, however, only gives a partial picture of the relations which effectively bind the team together.

The team: an unstable group of shrinking numbers If on the whole the functions and organisation of the team are relatively clear and stable, the same cannot be said for its composition. Who is a member of the team? Who is not? It is not as easy to answer these questions as one might think, and examination of the team’s composition across the medium term reveals shifting contours not perceptible to punctual observation. And for good reason: this indefiniteness is the result of the flexibility available to the team leader. This idea of flexibility, at first sight so unremarkable, plays a key role in discussions of organisation at every level. It signifies the availability of resources in reserve to meet the challenge of hazards of production that higher authority prefers not to pay any attention to. It is in some way the other side of opacity, in the sense that the margins of autonomous action are space abstracted from the control of hierarchical authority. The MV team should consist of 26 assembly-line workers, to which must be added 3 moniteurs not officially included among the basic manual workers, as we have seen, giving 29 in total. For purposes of flexibility it also disposes of 3 polyvalents. On the computerised list supplied by the plant’s personnel department, then, the team is made up of 32 people, four of these being temporary workers who have been working on it since the launch of the 406. For the team leader, the composition of the team varies from day to day with the vagaries of absence. What is more, it isn’t always easy, even for him, to know whom exactly he can count

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on as members of the team. Given the diversity of status in the shop, it is difficult to draw a strict line through the borderlands formed by absence, substitution, reciprocal loans of staff, temporary postings and temporary employment: the team varies through time, and its numbers include people of widely varying status. In fact, the real numbers involved only exceed the strict minimum of 26 assembly-line workstations plus three moniteurs on two days out of three. The team studied in HC1 falls below this minimum on most days, a situation which sees the polyvalents assigned to fixed workstations, and sometimes even certain moniteurs. In general, the number of titular members of the team is less than or equal to the number of workstations to be filled, and numbers are made up with polyvalents the AM1 is obliged to call in from outside. This shortage, and the tension which results from it, is a major factor in the organisation of work in this shop. In the longer term, the team experiences astonishingly large fluctuations in its size and composition, fluctuations which come to threaten its internal cohesion.24 Between January 1995 and February 1996, half the team’s workers moved on elsewhere. This mobility corresponds in part to various events which on each occasion required specific movements of staff: the launch of a new model of the vehicle, variations in the volume of production, summer placements, the introduction at this production centre of another model assembled on another line. A year and a half later, in 1997, the proportion of stable workers was two-thirds of the total number, which shows the permanent character of this instability. Other production choices at a plant-wide level had brought about other movements. This mobility of the team’s workers is all the more surprising in that it was seen during a period in which external mobility – arrivals and departures – was very low, even in the case of temporary workers. It was intensified by the management’s adjustment of manning-levels to a level of production markedly lower than earlier. It appears then that the team is to a great extent a place of transit, relatively unstable in its composition. What are the effects of this instability? It means that the AM1 must make efforts, if not to unify the team, then at least to keep it capable of responding to the demands that are made on it. He has from time to time to give up some workers, and to take others on. Who are these others? In general workers who have been dropped from neighbouring teams, or from other shops. In this informal marketplace, the AM1’s direct control over ‘incomers’ is limited, though he has a rather greater say in departures. In either case, he can take advantage of whatever he has in the way of assets to play against his colleagues or superiors. As a function of these strategic assets, the

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AM1 can act on the identity of his team, within the limits established by the mobility of labour within the factory. What is more, this mobility weakens groups and networks. In a general way, given the low level of external mobility, operatives tend to get to know and to recognise each other, as they move between teams and between lines: but internal mobility threatens in particular the construction and maintenance of solidarity in the course of work itself, established between operatives in the course of their activity, around goals, supplies, tools and lay-out. It makes the relationships between all these operatives more superficial, and does not always allow them to develop properly. Furthermore, mobility encourages the development of a generally informal hierarchy within the work group. Within this, the rank each person has, the position he occupies in terms of influence and area of operation is connected to the degree of multi-functionality and mobility, but not in a simple proportional manner, as might be supposed from the official discourse on the essential character of these qualities. The interaction of these two characteristics, the rank and the degree of multi-functionality of each worker on the team generates a number of groups with different positions. The first group, the most highly valued, is made up of the moniteurs and the polyvalents, the ‘office-holders’ who are in a way the right-hand men of the AM1. Very close to these is a very small, loose group of young men looking to be given their chance as soon as possible, the ‘young pretenders’. The AM1 then disposes of a large group of the most reliable workers occupying the key workstations in the sector, particularly sensitive or decisive for activity as a whole. These ‘mainstays’ form the nucleus of the team, which the AM1 attempts to conserve as a stable group, and with whom he establishes informal agreements and encourages certain arrangements. Then comes the peripheral zone of the team, made up of some third of the workers, who have come from elsewhere and who are in general the first to leave for another group. They are assigned to less strategically important and thus less prestigious workstations. These are in a way the stop-gaps, without any firm anchorage, and to crystallise their paradoxical position, they may be said to be the losers of multi-functionality. The team appears as an ensemble of limited technical cohesion: a place of transit, where one may stay for a longer or shorter time, with undefined borders, a place of formalised or almost imperceptible distinctions, it is furthermore subsumed within wider ensembles which each have their own coherence. It does however exhibit certain features that make for an identity, through the play of relations enacted on the basis of its institutional aspects and the careers that are constructed

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through it. In addition, the team is a form of organisation strongly connected to the authority of the team-leader: to respond to the force of constraint exercised by the line and its law, the group of operatives is subjected to a rigorous discipline. To properly understand the significance of this strongly hierarchical relationship, one has also to refer to the traces of the earlier period of strong growth, when the staff employed on the assembly lines were characterised by youth, occupational instability, immigration, lack of industrial experience and a low level of co-operation between operatives.

Networks and the hazards of production The idea of the network allows one to describe the connections that are made in the course of production, as well as the interactions that arise from them. 25 The idea is used here to designate a complex of relations between tools, parts, technical lay-outs and employees. It is to be distinguished from formalised structures, always normative, which tend to separate the technical and social aspects. It takes into account the great variety of elements involved in working operations, as well as the diversity of the connections themselves: one can thus find rules, knowledges, complicities, relations of constraint or adaptation. 26 With this diversity of both elements and their connections, the image of the network allows the representation of effective working relationships in all their complexity, open to the interactions that occur. Within the network, each operative, each tool, each arrangement tends to function in accordance with its own logic or its own goals, in terms of its own horizon, but remains dependent of the technical and social logics of the elements to which it is connected. The horizon could be defined as the ensemble of relations perceived by or accessible to it, and by the type of understanding it has of these relations. In a stable situation, a network remains to a great extent latent, even hidden. In fact, relations are concretised and put into action as a function of the occasion which mobilises them. They are revealed by the intervention of a hazard of production, as can be seen in the case of an event concerning the ‘strengthening of rear floor’ workstation already considered. At this workstation, one of the operations consisted in ‘positioning’ two fixing screws for the front right-hand shock-absorber. The operations sheet prescribed the gestures indicated in Box 2. Each item on this list corresponds to an ensemble of calculated time values, to which is added a co-efficient of rest. Here we will concentrate on a particular gesture, the use of the broaching tool, and on the relations brought into play by this simple gesture.

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Box 2 Operations sheet: positioning of two fixing screws for front righthand shock-absorber – – – –

Take two screws from box. Take screwdriver and broaching tool from table. Place screws, screwdriver and broaching tool on wheel-well lining (COa). Take broaching tool, position on shock-absorber cup. Take screw, start it by hand in shock-absorber cup. Take screwdriver from wheel-well lining, position on head of screw, drive screw (4 turns). Put down screwdriver. Use broaching tool to align the hole in cup with the hole in shockabsorber well.

ATTENTION: IF DOES NOT PASS, SCREW BADLY STARTED – Take screw from wheel-well lining, start in shock-absorber cup. With tool, drive screw (4 turns), remove tool, place on wheel-well lining. Use broaching tool if necessary. – Take screwdriver and broaching tool from wheel-well lining. – Return to line edge (COa). – Place screwdriver on table (COa). – Discard empty box, bring up full box of screws. a Complementary operations, group of more or less detailed timings allocated to operations of handling, movement and preparation.

Source: This is the reproduction of a document drawn up by a work-study technician from the organisation and methods department, defining the way in which one of the operations at a workstation occupied by one of the authors was to be carried out (Carrosserie Sochaux, O&M documentation, January 1996).

The car arrives at the workstation with the shock-absorber attached to the body by only one screw, just started in its hole when the body is ‘married’ to the chassis and mechanical components by the other team working upstream on the line. The shock-absorber isn’t fastened directly to the sheet-metal of the body, but through it, by means of three screws, into a mount of more rigid metal, called the coupelle, meaning a shallow cup or dished plate. Given the state of the initial attachment, still loose and with a single screw, the other threaded holes in the mount may not be properly aligned with the holes in the bodywork, which will prevent the screws being driven home. This is why use is made of the broaching tool, a tool much like a screwdriver, whose end however is a tapered cone, which when positioned in the hole will bring the mount into line with the holes in the bodywork. As the result of a suggestion, it was decided to exclude the use of this broaching tool from the operations sheet, because the threaded holes

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were, in fact, always aligned with the holes in the bodywork, and it was as a result always possible to drive the screws home straight away. The assembly-line worker, then, was no longer ‘paid’ to use it, losing a few hundredths of a minute per car. But it was known that the broaching tool was hardly ever used, and this deletion, bringing the prescribed operations into line with reality, seemed logical even if not particularly fortunate. That is, until the day when several cars arrived at the workstation with the mount out of place, requiring frequent recourse to the broaching tool. The worker concerned tried to find out what was the matter, asked questions, and discovered that the colleague who had originally prepared the work up the line had been replaced. His successor was unable to position them correctly, or hadn’t known why it should be done, or might have still been thinking that the worker responsible for the ‘strengthening rear floor’ workstation was ‘paid’ to do that. The implementation of this suggestion and the consequences which followed brought into play a network of elements and operatives of different kinds in different places. The suggestions system itself had proved itself effective in two senses, both in detecting hidden reserves of productivity, small as these might be, and in ensuring acceptance of the suggestion that was made: it required the co-operation of at least one assembly-line worker and one améliorateur or ‘productivity improver’ from the organisation and methods department, and most likely the agreement of the AM1. In fact, this suggestion involved at least one of the assembly-line workers responsible for this workstation and one polyvalent from the same shift. It was aimed at the elimination of an interstitial moment of rest, a margin of ‘flexibility’ available to the operatives concerned, substitutes included, without properly considering the risks. It was two technicians from O&M who had drawn up the original operations sheet during the planning phase for the new vehicle, and had decided to ‘pay’ in full for this occasionally necessary gesture. In this they were compensating for a weakness in the work of the Design Department, which had necessitated this manual adjustment to the mount beneath the body. Beyond the workshop, the suggestion, which here tended towards a shortening of the operations sheet, has to be related to the productivity goals and the procedures for the regular monitoring of progress towards them. However, as the direct result of the organisation of work and the fragmentation of assembly operations, the incident brings into play the connections between two assembly-line workers from different teams. Cutting across the existing structure, their technical solidarity is of an informal

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order, something more in the nature of a complicity. It proves however to be a necessary compensation for the fragmentation of the complete task. Yet internal mobility within the shop, absence, and the limits of multi-functionality make such solidarities established along the line extremely fragile. In this example, the abandonment of the broaching tool involved relations between partners sometimes close and sometimes distant, of very variable normative powers. Travelling even further from the workstation, one could add even more members to the network thus revealed, other actors within the plant. This network is only very partially taken account of in the institutional systems, and is located at various different sectors and levels of the hierarchy. In addition to the persons involved, one also finds institutional arrangements such as those which govern suggestions or which implement productivity improvements. Finally, these relations are of various kinds, from respect for the basic documentation represented by the operations sheet to tacit agreement among workers. The network is established as it appears: it is through the demand for certain resources and the activation of certain relations in the course of production that network connections are formed as appropriate to the occasion. Hence the interest of the incidents, chance events and variations which reveal and compose the network as it radiates outward from the element brought into question.

The partially recognised network of multi-functionality Polyvalence or multi-functionality designates the capacity of a team’s workers to occupy several workstations. It depends in the first place on the multi-functional members of the team itself, and then on those attached to the shop (the supers). Despite their abilities, however, these polyvalents are not always in a position to immediately take up the place of absent colleagues: they need a period of habituation or training. These limits on the effectiveness of the official replacements obliges the team to construct and maintain another kind of multi-functionality – diffuse, protean and collective – which rests on assembly-line workers’ capacity to do the work associated with several stations. One particular case will make clear the importance of this diffuse form of multifunctionality. In the MV shop, the moniteur of the pit module cut his hand while attempting to remedy a defect on a car, and had to be replaced immediately. Someone who had earlier worked as the moniteur on this module came back from a neighbouring team, where he had been working

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for some weeks where the bodies are lowered onto the line. He himself was replaced by an assembly-line worker from the same team, who had recently himself been moniteur at the same station. All this was quickly arranged between the two team leaders. And what happened to the assembly-line worker’s position? It was taken up by another worker, who was himself replaced by yet another. In a few minutes, five people were moved about to cover the absence. The event reveals the network of multi-functionality, none of whose members is officially classified as multi-functional, testing its effectiveness – the skills of the assembly line workers and the supervisor’s ability to exploit them. This multi-functionality is treated as a fundamental resource by company management, line managers and supervisory staff, and it is the latter who are formally charged with maintaining it. Assembly-line workers are evaluated in part on the basis of their degree of multifunctionality. To formalise this goal and to facilitate its monitoring, the AM1s have to maintain a tableau de polyvalence, a multi-functionality chart. Along the X-axis are the names of team members, and along the Y-axis the stations to be occupied. The table thus shows the ability of each member of the team to occupy a workstation. Skills are assessed at three levels, represented by the sides of a square, in accordance with an old method still used (L’Art d’Instruire): L designates a knowledge of the gestures required; U the ability to occupy the workstation; while a completed square O indicates the ability to train another worker for it, a skill which has become uncommon, officially because of the existence of the shop’s own training schools. A multi-functionality chart is drawn up for each team every month, so as to show recent changes. These can happen in either direction, the organisation of work making official recognition of acquired skills rather fragile. By moving around within the team, an assembly-line worker can learn and master one or more additional workstations. But he can also lose his skills, through failing to work at a particular position for a certain amount of time. It is recognised, in fact, that a worker who stops working at a position for a certain time can no longer be considered as properly efficient in it, even if he is still familiar with the operations required; in addition to any assumed tendency to forget, he has failed to follow the gradual change in the composition of work, which may have gained or lost a number of operations. As one team-leader said, ‘Multi-functionality dies if you don’t keep it up.’ But there is a gap between the real and the officially acknowledged. Paradoxically, worker mobility between teams has a destructive effect: those arriving on a new team lose ipso facto all the gains in multi-functionality

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they have made, and every team leader taking in a new worker rates him as completely inexperienced, while waiting for him to prove himself. This was the claim of a worker in MV who was transferred onto another line while in the process of becoming multi-functional. The same misfortune had struck him before, and of course, as a result of these moves he became increasingly suspect to each succeeding team leader and his handicap only increased. The most spectacular example of such brutal loss following such a transfer is that of an ex-moniteur, rated U for nearly all the workstations of his module, and who, transferred to a regular assembly-line worker’s station found himself returned to the degree zero of multi-functionality, with just a U for his own single workstation. Yet he was able to take up his old responsibilities immediately when his colleague suffered the accident. Finally, the evaluation of attainment is itself to some extent debatable. This is a cognitive matter, but it is also linked to the changing requirements of production. For example, an AM2 in the MV shop was responsible for drawing up an assessment of multi-functionality, with a view to a reorganisation of production. The AM1 provided him with the numbers asked for, and the AM2 expressed his astonishment, telling him that levels were considerably lower than in the other teams. This was quickly explained: the team leader had spontaneously adopted as his standard the level U, the capacity to take on the station – which is what allowed him to count on the person concerned, while his superior, anticipating the point of view of the shop’s management, had settled for level L, which gave a picture of much more widespread multifunctionality. The team leader then came up with new figures, much more favourable this time, with only 46 per cent rather than 64 per cent shown as knowing only a single workstation. Following a team’s multi-functionality charts through a whole year, one could note a spectacular variation in the course of 1995, corresponding to the launch of the 406 and the associated individual and collective learning of the new workstations. In addition to the moniteurs and the polyvalents, the officially recognised multi-functional workers, several of the regular assembly-line workers were rated as knowing the work of between 1 and 7 stations during the preparatory period, a skilllevel that was brusquely reduced to one or two stations as production entered its final phase, with increasing line-speed and everyone being posted to a more-or-less regular workstation and becoming its regular occupant. The earlier qualifications formally disappeared, even though they could be called upon if need be. Moniteurs and polyvalents, by contrast, were rated U for all workstations of the module, without their having in

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all cases having had to prove in practice that they had truly maintained their skills. Here it was the title rather than the test which provided the proof. At the end of the day, multi-functionality constitutes a pool of resources – partially hidden but perfectly under the control of line management – which in the right circumstances can come to constitute itself as a network. This activation, however, is connected to other conditions. In fact, multi-functionality is the site of intersection of several different issues in the social relations of the shop: it is at one and the same time the main, hotly disputed, route out of work at a fixed workstation, an increase in effort, a testament to willingness and an element in identityconstitution and in the social relations of the shop.

Networks and horizons of variable scope Each operative’s autonomy is determined in part by the extent of his working space and in particular by the possibilities for wider movement that are offered, a fact which goes some way to explaining the social value accorded to multi-functionality. The assembly-line worker with a limited degree of multi-functionality may be called to act as a replacement at the two or three workstations whose demands he has mastered, thus changing surroundings and companions. In this case one will remain within a restricted group, limited to the module or perhaps the team. Then there are those whose working area goes some considerable way beyond the limits of the team. The polyvalent, the officially recognised multi-functional worker, can cover the work of the whole team, but may also be sent to help elsewhere, from one end of the line to the other, or be sent for training on new features in other shops, or to carry out anywhere in the plant the occasional missions entrusted to him by his team-leader. In the normal, everyday exercise of his functions, the moniteur has to patrol the line – not to mention entertaining diverse relations with the various departments supporting production, should the team-leader delegate his functions to any degree. Here one encounters the world of technicians and supervisors, but also of storekeepers, ordinary white-collar staff or quality-control workers, whose freedom of movement is a major distinguishing feature. There thus emerges a characterisation of posts and persons in terms of the scale of the space to which they give access and of the network-connections which they can make. The criterion of the space of mobility establishes a form of hierarchy which only partially corresponds to the vertical pyramid of functions and occupational classifications.

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Depending on their own horizon, their view of the network, workers develop, in an essentially empirical fashion, their own understanding of the system of manufacture. This vision develops in various ways. Along the line, upstream and downstream sectors entertain a relation of reciprocal dependence; work downstream depends on the quality of that done upstream, which is in effect subject to its judgement. This reciprocity dictates a co-operation whose scale and complexity are far greater than is generally recognised by the hierarchy. Certain workers go even further, being able to ‘read the entrails’ of a car: on the basis of clues offered by the arrangement of elements in the cars which come to them they can diagnose problems of organisation in an upstream sector of the line, or even in a different shop. One morning in MV, for example, an assembly-line worker and a moniteur noted the odd appearance of the electrical cabling in the cars and deduced from it the existence of staffing problems upstream in the HC shop, explaining this by the delay in the arrival of a works bus, due to snow that had fallen in the night. Such an ability to read is a considerable help in anticipating the hazards of production, but can also intervene in the interplay of reciprocal positionings in assignment to workstations and in the definition of the latter. The types of cars which succeed each other on the line and the order in which they come are another source of understanding for assembly-line workers. Some deduce from this the business’s strategy for the next three months, as a function of the current situation and the prospects for market demand. Differences in the ability to ‘read’ the line are related to lessons drawn from experience and to the horizon available to each individual. Finally, the network that spreads about the line is a particularly fruitful source of exchanges between production workers. For those who know how to take advantage of this, the various departments which intervene in the team’s work – in the fields of quality control, line-balancing and productivity, supply or maintenance – all help in the consolidation of knowledge, in the confirmation or refutation of hypotheses and in the elaboration of strategies. Alongside this spatial and relational horizon, variations in the perception of time constitute a second important field of reference. Operatives, in fact, live several temporalities, which may be nested or overlapping: mastering a workstation can take several days; workstations are rebalanced every month, with consequent changes in the team’s composition; assignment to a workstation may be for weeks or for years, depending on the conjuncture and on the established relationships within the group. Certain

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cycles are markedly longer – such as those associated with a manufacturing process, or with a particular model, with its associated methods of work, or finally with a type of equipment, which can last decades. These different temporalities provide for each person a framework of reference for the development of a particular organisation of work, or for the timing of changes that are to come. In a general way these perceptions and understandings of technical and social networks are largely empirical, and unconsolidated by formal structures of training or motivation. For example, a number of workers in MV remarked that in the 7 years of operation of HC, from which they received the car bodies, they had never had an opportunity to visit it. This kind of knowledge is only partially recognised as essential to the co-operative dimension of work on the line. Certain structures, such as the quality circles, the workstation study groups or the suggestion system, attempt to tap it; but the activities involved in these are unevenly integrated into work itself, and raise new questions for assembly-line workers. There very soon arises the issue of the material or symbolic recompense for their involvement, that is to say, the question of what is in this kind of co-operation for them. In the end, work on the line involves something very different from a simple juxtaposition of individual, fixed workstations. The basic unit the workstation seems to offer proves to provide only a rather superficial understanding, because it represents a more-or-less incoherent accumulation of operations that cannot be dissociated from others. The operative who occupies a workstation can only work by virtue of his insertion in a system of relations with other operatives and other elements, which allows him to restore the coherence of each activity. He calls on different groups of connections, then, depending on these activities. In a way, to each situation there corresponds the activation of a relevant network, demonstrating the essential complexity of the organisation of work. The strategic capacity of each operative thus resides not only in the margin of uncertainty he commands, but also on his skill in identifying, constructing and activating a relevant network to deal with a given situation. The relationships which constitute the network are constructed through this interplay of pressures, constraints and adaptations between its elements. It brings together people, machines and installations, combining both technical and social aspects. Some of these relations are extensive, covering the whole line or even the entire shop. Others, more limited, can involve only a few operatives. They may be constituted ‘horizontally’ between assembly-line workers, or may involve partners at another level and outside the line. Finally, all these vary in stability

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and duration, being to different degrees permanent, ephemeral or recurrent. Within this complex ensemble, certain networks are particularly important, by virtue of the numbers of relationships entering into them, and provide poles of identification corresponding to groups of various sizes, such as the company as a whole, the Sochaux Production Centre, the Carrosserie, the shop or the line.

Changes in mode of management As we have seen, assembly-line work still represents a very particular organisation of work, because from the very moment the worker accepts its principles,27 a rhythm of work is imposed by the advance of the track or the overhead conveyor. In a way, the role of front-line management can be thought of as purely technical, in avoiding any break in the flow: ensuring regularity of supplies, maintaining tools and machinery in good condition etc. In fact, however, continuity of flow in the ‘manual industry’ that is assembly-line manufacture is extremely vulnerable.28 In addition to those adjustments considered to be technical in nature, supervisors are continually acting on the workers, to motivate them, to arrange cover for absences, to avoid the accumulation of discontent and prevent the development of industrial militancy: the managerial dimension, even if it has changed over the last decade, remains an important element in the role of supervisory staff.

The moniteur The moniteur does not belong, properly speaking, to the hierarchical line of command; he is considered to be a manual worker responsible for the quality of work on a module. At a first glance, this form of organisation seems similar to what one finds in Japan and at Toyota, particularly as regards the role of the hancho or group leader: both motivate the group and ensure the smooth running of production, in terms of quality on particular. Neither the moniteur not the hancho form part of the line of command. The status and role of the moniteur and the hancho do, however, appear to be different. The group the hancho deals with at Toyota is made up of four or five workers, and the hancho is in charge of different aspects of the group’s work.29 At Peugeot-Sochaux, it is the AM1 who remains in charge, delegating only a few of his functions to the moniteur, who reports to him on the situation and any problems, without being responsible, in the strong sense, for the work of the module, and without having any great latitude in what he can do to motivate and mobilise

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his workers. Which does not mean that moniteurs are selected by the AM1 and the AM2 only on the basis of technical skills: beyond the knowledge and the know-how precisely recorded on the list, the management of the plant also requires an attitude essentially characterised by ‘willingness to co-operate’ and ‘adherence to decisions taken’. What is more, one of the criteria for selection is the confidence of the management and loyalty to the business, which tends to exclude sympathisers and activists of the CGT and CFDT unions. Finally, appointment as moniteur is the first step to possible promotion to AM1. After a one-week training, the moniteur is meant to be capable of taking on any of the workstations in his module, and to carry out his triple role of ‘Prévention, Amélioration, Surveillance’ (Prevention, Improvement, Monitoring). The moniteur then has an essentially ‘lateral’ rather than vertical relation to the group, in that he has no control over the organisation of work in the proper sense and acts only in relation to the quality aspect of work. Thus the leadership role is only exercised through the triple functions of Monitoring (quality control and defect repair in particular), Prevention and Improvement. Such a definition of the role consolidates the centrality of the titular team-leader, and management encourages the development of the moniteur’s role in precisely this sense. One AM1 says: ‘The moniteurs have more and more autonomy, and have become increasingly independent as technical supervisors [chefs techniques] (regulators or controllers of automated installations). Their autonomy in technical decision-making means that they have to look upstream for those responsible for non-quality. The AM1, their hierarchical superior, is there to back up the moniteurs.’ One assembly-line manager wanted to see them go further upstream than they did, believing that moniteurs should hardly ever repair defects: ‘Their role is preventive, to take steps to ensure the production of good-quality cars; they’re not there to work [on the vehicles] or to be always calling on the AM1, given their intelligence, but to ensure the quality of the cars in their module by tackling problems at source.’ Why is there this insistence on limiting the role of the moniteur to the field of quality? Through his almost-constant presence and the importance and extent of quality issues (see Chapter 3), the moniteur finds himself at the heart of many informal arrangements between workers. Observation of the moniteur’s concrete activities shows a number of ambivalences that Peugeot does not exploit in the same way as Toyota. The hancho may not form part of the hierarchy, but he does so virtually, by reason of the methods of recruitment and promotion and by virtue of the relative

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youth of shop-floor workers. Already chosen by management from among his peers, he aspires to real promotion to team leader (kumicho) and beyond. He thus conducts himself already as part of the line management (in respect of responsibility, leadership) though not yet belonging to it. To make progress in his career, he must demonstrate his personal capacities precisely by dealing with the ambivalence of the situation: behaving like an equal with his colleagues and as the lowest link in the chain of command with the management. What is more, this ambivalence re-establishes communication, in the person of the hancho, between the horizontal information flow (between assembly-line workers) and the vertical flow (along the line of command), so increasing the organisation’s efficiency of communication and thus efficiency of production. Why, in limiting the moniteur to his technical role, is Peugeot not doing as much as it could to take advantage of this ambivalence? The first reason must certainly have something to do with the burden of technical responsibility borne by the moniteur, the assembly-line workers themselves having much less responsibility and enjoying a far lesser degree of autonomy than in Japan (with no collective work, or at most very little), the result being the need for a sequential Stage 2 quality control which prevents any lengthy absence of the moniteur. The second reason, at least as important, is the desire of line managers and supervisory staff to restrict the scope of the moniteur’s functions. Given the size of the group represented by the module, nearly ten workers, the extension of this scope would open the door to consolidation of the position as the first rank in the chain of command, putting it into competition with that of the AM1. It is as a response to this possibility that one must understand the absence of formal delegation of the AM1’s responsibilities to the moniteur. From the point of view of the management, the AM1 is the last decisionmaker at the bottom of the chain of command, and he is the only one to be judged and assessed on his team’s performance; he alone is held to account for the defects for which his team is held responsible. Furthermore, the resources available to him in his dealings with them, and with the moniteurs in particular, remain very limited: promotions are rare, and he contributes no more than his opinion of the candidate, the decisions being taken at a higher level. By reason of this scarcity of resources to trade, the team leader delegates very little of his real responsibilities, because any serious degree of delegation of powers to young and ambitious moniteurs might sooner or later destabilise his own position. This explains the moniteurs’ persistent complaints that the AM1s do not keep them informed (or only too late) of their own intended absences, or of planned absences by other members of the team, etc. One moniteur

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believes that knowledge acquired through training is not passed on to the group, and also finds it ‘frustrating not to be informed of the content of the daily briefing by the AM2’,30 which reveals, he says, ‘a lack of confidence’ and hardly helps improve conditions of production. The moniteurs’ inability to exploit all their own capacities is perhaps also related to the traditionalism customarily associated with the cadre of supervisory staff: in the functions attributed to it, in its recruitment and in its mode of functioning, it remains here, to a greater degree than elsewhere, the backbone of the shop.

Overburdened team leaders At the time this study was undertaken, the hierarchy within the shop was as follows31: each shop, HC or MV, was managed by a head of department, and each had four assembly lines staffed by 100 workers per shift or a little fewer. Each line is the responsibility of a group leader, sometimes called the assembly-line manager, working office hours. On each line, the staff for each shift fall under the authority of an AM2, often still called the contremaître or supervisor, who has beneath him three or four AM1s (the old team leaders), each team being composed of between 25 and 30 workers. There are two main routes to the post of team leader (AM1): a technical diploma (usually a BTS or DUT) followed by a year’s work on the line, or promotion from the ranks, which can be faster or slower depending on the period. For example, P., who joined Peugeot in 1966, having failed to get his CAP in sheet-metal-work, worked as an informal replacement; then as a polyvalent (in those days called a dépanneur); then as a defectrepairer at the end of the line, then as a moniteur (in the sense of trainer) at HC0; and finally, was made an acting team leader before becoming a team leader in his turn in 1974. This kind of rapid promotion is hardly possible today, thanks to the scarcity of posts available and the low level of staff turnover today compared to the past. Today, the relative advantages of these two routes to supervisory status remain a subject of debate within the company, in terms of the necessary skills and the consequence for social equilibrium at the plant. If holders of the DUT or the BTS, relatively young, have a much greater capacity than the other AM1s for planning, organising and carrying out their work, most of them tire fairly quickly of a fairly monotonous role which they would hope to see lead to posts of greater responsibility. Furthermore, a cadre of supervisory staff recruited only from among the formally qualified would mean the end of in-house promotion and thus of any hope of a career advancement for manual workers. Such a cleavage would

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risk explosive consequences. What is more, the younger, more highly qualified team leaders do not have access to the networks constructed throughout the factory by those who have risen from the ranks as they have moved from one shop to another, and from one sector to the next. Though the AM1 has very few concrete technical concerns, these having been delegated to the moniteurs, it is he who is responsible for bringing the latter’s problems to the attention of the persons or departments concerned, so as to have them resolved as quickly as possible. As the official routes always take too much time, the calibre of a team leader is measured by his capacity immediately to identify the person to be spoken to upstream, or to mobilise his network of ‘acquaintances’ outside the formal structures to solve the problem or problems encountered. Here the technical function gives way to rather more informal management skills that exploit the team leader’s network, as established and maintained beyond the confines of the production line itself. In this area, the AM1 is judged in terms not of power but of his personal capacity to make himself understood. For example when P. by chance encountered an old work-mate who passed on to him a handful of ‘bonnet stops’ or ‘hood bumpers’ this was in response to an already longstanding demand which official channels had been unable to satisfy: the operations sheets did not at all provide for the possibility that these stops, fitted into place far up the line, could fall off later on – a state of affairs which prevented one of P.’s workers from adjusting the closure of the bonnet! The AM1’s role then seems to be essentially one of networking, not only within the team, as one might expect, but also beyond it. What is the real content of the AM1’s work? From the assembly-line workers’ point of view, the team leader seems to be the one who pulls many of the strings that govern the life of the team. Without overestimating the margin of manoeuvre available to him, they feel that he is in a position to affect the personal situation of each one of them, and to make his mark on the team in terms both of efficiency and the agreeability of work. He represents, then, a pole of coherence. How does the team leader see himself? The response to one question was both surprising and very revealing in this respect. If in fact one asks an AM1 to say what it is he does, he will take a sheet of paper and draw up a list of the different tasks he must carry out and things he must bear in mind through the day. The resulting document (see Box 3) is a large sheet, filled right across its width and from top to bottom, demonstrating the team-leader’s sense of never having enough time and of being overwhelmed by calls on his attention. The tasks enumerated are juxtaposed without an obvious pattern of coherence, and the whole gives

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Box 3

List of responsibilities, according to one team leader

Technical role – Briefing with AM2a. – Tool audit (checking proper use of machines, correct calibration of tools etc.)a. – Check list of cars removed from line for quality defects the day before, respond if team is involved. – Fill in quality forms. – Check orders for supplies.b – Audit defects repaired by moniteurs, deal with causes. – Inform quality-control technician (intervenant qualité) so that defects are dealt with at source. – Change screwdrivers when necessary (stores). – Weekly ordering and issue of consumables (gloves, small tools, etc.). – Monitor reject parts and reorder. Personnel management role – – – –

– – – – –

Report absences on computer and to AM2. Deal with pay complaints. Supervision of social relations within team. Fill in individual Health and Safety forms (for certain dangerous posts with ‘chemical’ risks, etc.) and Safety forms (indicating the workstations for which the relevant safety training has been received), with countersignature by workers concerned. Draw up training plan (when line rebalanced), and see to training for polyvalents. Calendar of expected absences. Progress interviews (2 per month) for individual assessment of assembly workers. GPI (management by interaction) disciplinary interviews. Proposals for award of personal points.

Supervision of production and team leadership functions – – – – – – – – – –

Open cupboards holding tools (morning only). Read daily report book (liaison with other shift). Post multi-functional staff (to cover absences). Check supplies delivered.b Monitor workstations not occupied by regular workers (initial and follow-up checks). Audit of safety/cleanliness/tidiness (twice a month). Monitor workers’ protective clothing etc.c Check position of protectors on cars (to avoid scratches and chips).b Process audit (1 workstation per week). Update Level 3 quality audit table (15 point penalties and performance bonus) posted in the rest area.

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Box 3

(continued)

– Oversee AQAP self-inspection (levels 1 and 2), and maintain staff awareness of instructions. – Establish and supervise of quality circles. – Prepare rebalancing of line with équilibreur. – Prepare talks on different topics laid down by shop management and line manager to be given during monthly 15 minute periods when line is halted for this purpose. – At end of shift, report to AM2 the results of Level 3 quality audit, problems of supply and problems with preparation of sub-assemblies; check cleanliness and tidiness of workstations; enter reports for next shift. Lock tool cupboards, put out lights, switch off electrical equipment and heating lamps (for softening rubber). a

These items, essentially technical, overlap to some extent with the supervision of production. b These tasks are the responsibility of the moniteur, the team-leader exercises a second-line control, because he is, as already discussed, held responsible by management for any stoppages or 15-point penalties. c These tasks relate to personnel management, but they also have an immediate day-to-day effect, while sanctions following entries on the personal record have effect only much later. Source: J.-P. Durand on the basis of interviews and observations. Headings and items are the authors’ own formulations.

the impression of extreme fragmentation. The AM1’s day seems filled with a multiplicity of highly heterogeneous tasks, from the various urgent necessities associated with the need to prevent a break in the flow to rather more long-term planning functions (individual meetings and personnel management) passing via the more medium-term concerns of line rebalancing or quality circles. The mental burden on an AM1 is thus relatively heavy, for all the preparations for action in the medium term are disturbed by the necessities of the immediate moment: the urgent need to arrange a replacement, the necessary powers for which he will not delegate to the moniteurs, the numerous audits to ensure that the conditions for high-quality production32 are met, etc. Like many AM1s of the old style, the one discussed here blames the sense of pressure and urgency on his own management, which for its part refers to a temporal framework that combines and controls the different temporalities, from the management of the immediate present (urgency being hardly recognised as a category) to the long term social and technical construction of a work collective. In any event, the plant management and the AM1s agree on the three principal functions around which the various tasks are grouped, including those identified on the list: quality control, personnel management, and co-ordination of production.

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From the sum of constraints there emerges the diversity of skills and qualities necessary in a team leader: the prime guarantor of the cohesion of his team, he must at the same time encourage each member to do better than before, playing on the ‘all pull together’ aspect of the workplace atmosphere, insist on a certain level of rigour in working practice, impose his authority, direct and decide when an emergency or conflict requires it, and in addition have the technical skills required to deal with all the problems encountered. The post of AM1 thus appears at first glance as one that requires great charisma, based on personal qualities, on wisdom, on past experience, on a conduct informed by right judgement etc. One can understand then how young AM1s have more difficulty in doing their jobs, being less close to their workers and more often found immersed in reading circulars and filling up forms, none of which is calculated to upset his superiors or the technicians who produce these audits and surveys. If the team-leader is first of all a leader of men, his success is measured essentially by the level of absenteeism on his team. In general, the AM1s succeed well enough in their task of day-to-day leadership to the extent that it is not formalised and institutionalised or structured by rigid and official methods. In particular, most of the 15- or 20-minute addresses during the monthly halts of the line33 seem relatively ineffective. The AM1 gives a speech based on notes provided by the management and the workers listen to him for politeness sake, knowing that they will adapt as they have always done to any changes that are made, or will try and get round them if need be. It is clear that the rest area at HC is not the ideal place for such communication: its associations with leisure and the poor acoustics resulting from the absence of a false ceiling come together to distract the audience from what is already a rather ill-assured performance, and the fact that this type of meeting does not take place at MV gives the whole exercise an even more debatable aspect. For the same reasons, the five-minute briefings at the beginning of the shift, lifted directly from the Japanese model,34 have been abandoned: neither the AM1 nor the moniteurs could hold the attention of the assembly-line workers, whose steadily worsening attendance demonstrated that the management’s problems (causes of rejects, new programmes) were not their own. Finally, the ‘individual progress interviews’ (one every two years) worry the AM1s more than they do the workers (who see them as an hour’s escape from the assembly line). Two weeks before the interview, the worker receives from the team leader a document with the same headings as the form the latter will have to fill in, which supposedly helps them to prepare for the meeting. Most workers, though, turn up

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for interview with the sheet still blank, or nearly so. Either they do not wish to make the effort of self-reflection required by the questions about the position occupied, or they do not wish to disadvantage themselves by enumerating their weak points – an act of self-incrimination that could be turned against them by being used as a basis for observations made by the AM1: assembly-line workers tend to feel rather that if they have weaknesses it is for the AM1 or the moniteur to find solutions to help them deal with them. The AM1 finds himself in all the more false a position during this interview in that he knows the people he is managing very well: he urges his interviewee to introspection, and then takes charge again when talking of mission and tasks. When he raises the topic of targets the situation gets worse: if the worker has seen several 15-point penalties inflicted on him, then there is the basis for discussion; if not, what targets can be set? For the AM1 knows that he hasn’t much to offer those who meet their targets: the supplementary personal points he has to distribute are few, and can seem like a feeble exchange, all the more as distribution policy for the line as a whole is effectively decided at AM2 level. Nor will the AM1 risk the promise of a career, for he knows that the number selected will be far fewer than the number of those among the young men who are interested in appointment as moniteurs; the older assembly-line workers, for their part, have already lost their illusions. There could be a discussion of potential, or more precisely of the potential rating (coefficient) the worker might hope to achieve by the time of retirement. Everyone is glad to know where he stands, for this potential seems to be the real concrete result of the assessment: it is quantified and corresponds to a significant element of future income. But after a while no-one entirely believes in it any longer: it is only a potential, and after a period of apparent generosity at the beginning of HC (1990–94), when high potentials were freely accorded, a good number of assembly-line workers, and of moniteurs in particular, saw their potential drop down again, because posts did not exist to which such high-potential workers could be appointed. The progress interview makes demands on the qualities most unevenly distributed among the team leaders: those needed for the conduct of a face-to-face negotiation when there is nothing to be negotiated. The formalisation of the interview tools only puts the team leader into an even falser position: while he knows how poor are any worker’s chances of leaving the assembly-line behind, he cannot admit this and must try and put across a hopeful message. The AM1 thus has substantial technical responsibilities, and a quite extensive management role. To do his work properly he must have

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charisma and authority, qualities that become evident on the job, beyond the documentation, the interviews and other formalised tools which have proliferated in the attempt to structure and regulate it. To the extent that he succeeds, the team becomes his realm, with all the positive consequences this has for his strategic power, not only there but at the level of the line and of the shop as a whole. Yet everything suggests that this last link in the chain of command will continue to occupy the most ungrateful of positions, precisely because it is the last: to live and to deal with the contradictions of a system which offers no prospect of significant change in work on the assembly line, while the economic conjuncture permits very few to look forward to any kind of career development. Can he come out of it strengthened by the experience? What do the AM2s have to say about it?

Contremaîtres as managers All the AM2s would say that their role is less technical than social and managerial: criteria for promotion to AM2 relate essentially to the managerial skills described above, identified in one AM1 or another. It is not the least of paradoxes that the promotion of team leaders who have demonstrated their abilities in the hands-on management of assembly-line workers relieves them of precisely this responsibility; this is the rule in every pyramidal hierarchy. From the technical point of view, the role of the AM2 is to act as a relay for information, flowing essentially from the top down. After the daily briefing with HC management, he informs the AM1s of changes in production programme, new versions of cars, planned rebalancings of the line, defects reported from further down the line the previous day, etc. In the opposite direction, he must provide explanations to HC management for any defects attributed to his own sector, and take steps to eliminate them: the tone at the briefings is sometimes quite brutal, as if to emphasise that certain quality problems should no longer be happening at all. Like the team leader, the supervisor has to manage two very different temporalities, but unlike the former, he focuses on the longer timescale and tasks related to the immediate present take up less than half of his time. These are: 1 on start-up, as soon as he is informed of the absences, he distributes multi-functional employees among the teams (polyvalents from the various teams, Carrosserie supers made available to him on a temporary basis); team-leaders never lend each other assembly line workers without the consent of the supervisor;

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2 arbitration of small-scale territorial disputes regarding boundaries between teams, persons etc.; 3 quality audit of each team, once a month; 4 monitoring and follow-up of the work of the quality circles, and participation in certain of their meetings; 5 monitoring changes in the balance of the line (in particular when major operations have been shifted from one team to another); 6 responding to problems raised by the team leaders (whose urgency he understands, from having been for a long time a team leader himself). The supervisor’s field of action seems much, much broader than that of the team leader, even though he maintains a close connection with the everyday concerns of the shop floor. He supervises the work of the line, maintaining oversight so as to anticipate and prevent any incident that would disturb production. The essential element of the role is in fact this aspect of anticipation; in particular the anticipation of recruitment and transfer. The AM2 must always have a number of temporary staff in mind for recruitment to the long-term workforce, when the always urgent request for nominations arrives, otherwise his neighbour will benefit in his stead. In the same way, when manning-levels are falling, every AM2 will have names to propose for transfer, those whom he considers to be the least effective workers. Here too, the secret of the good supervisor is the ability to keep a certain reserve of productivity hidden from the eyes of shop management: errors in the counting of workstations, exaggeration of the impact of medical restrictions, failure to report returns from absence etc. A margin of 2–3 per cent on the ninety-five or so hands allowed for 86 workstations per shift is enough to make the supervisor’s life much easier, enabling him to cover unexpected absences or meet some other more or less legitimate demand. Nothing suggests that the shop managers allocating men to the AM2 are as ignorant of the real state of affairs as is suggested by the weekly rosters. Here we have something like a reciprocal simulation, an interplay of false representations, with the one side disguising the reality and the other pretending to believe it; the whole being played out through the high degree of computerised statistical control demanded by the universal belief in the quest for industrial and economic efficiency. For us, this reciprocal simulation is the necessary mode of operation of a social organisation: it permits social play, the freedom of movement and manoeuvre indispensable to those hedged in by the rigidities of the manufacturing process (the assembly sequence, the operations sheet etc.) and of economic pressure (constraints on time).

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For similar reasons, the AM2 has a certain amount of ‘free time’ during the day to plan for the anticipated future. This isn’t entirely free time, but rather a certain time when he is free of everyday concerns (responsibility for these being taken over by the team leader), and thus able to go here and there to discuss recruitment, transfers and different kinds of reorganisation. This ‘free time’ is not spent on recognised, routine, concrete tasks; it is rather a time of watchfulness, observation and communication, used in the service of the supervisor’s prime objective: securing social cohesion and preventing the emergence of any tendency to industrial militancy. It might be said that among supervisory staff there exist two schools of thought regarding the establishment of ‘industrial peace’, neither one of which seems ever to gain the upper hand over the other; the ‘Sochaux model’, indeed, may well be founded on a subtle oscillation between the two. On the one hand there is the tradition established during the 1970s, which holds that the prime function of supervisors and team leaders is to break the CGT, and even the CFDT, strengthening the more consensual style of trade unionism by driving workers towards the CFTC, the SIAP or FO. This militancy, however, tends to have the opposite effect to what it intends to achieve, and one trade unionist explained the electoral success of the more militant unions as the result of ‘the workers wanting to piss off the supervisors, no more than that’. In this kind of situation, verbal confrontations are neverending, as are sanctions, and the atmosphere is hardly conducive to production! On the other side, among supervisory staff who have risen up from the ranks, the same trade unionist sees ‘an anti-CGT attitude from duty; you still get bollockings, but you can discuss things’. According to one of the supervisors of this school, his role is ‘to keep a finger on the pulse’, to avoid any challenge; this means private discussions, he says, with CGT, CFDT and FO representatives. ‘When there is a call for a national stoppage (in defence of social security, for example), we hold the boys back so they don’t end up on strike.’ The two schools disagree, too, on the distribution of the individual pay points that reward good conduct and efficiency. Management grants supervisors and line managers a certain latitude as to how these are shared out, imposing only an overall limit on the number of points awarded (each being worth 55 francs extra pay per month). Certain supervisors, anxious to consolidate a loyal following, give a maximum number of points (4 in general) to a minority of workers (members of the SIAP or the CFTC), who are to be an example to the young recruits

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whom the supervisors want to make the technical and social backbone of the line, and to whom they wish to afford rapid, irreversible and exemplary promotion. The others, looking for a more widespread consensus, very often distribute a minimum of points (1.5 in general) to the maximum number, seeking to reward work done rather than union or political sympathies, even if these don’t always necessarily go together. Lastly, there are also differences in the wielding of authority and in styles of discipline. Most supervisors are concerned to maintain a certain scope for negotiation with workers, before sanctions are applied. Furthermore, the seniority of most assembly-line workers and their habituation to factory discipline reduces the incidence and severity of disciplinary measures. Yet sanctions remain relatively frequent (with the non-attribution of personal points for absence, lateness, quality of work, etc.); if forms of authority have changed, and its exercise is less summary, some assembly-line workers still say that they preferred a ‘dressing down’ that was over and done with to the written reports that go on ones personnel file. Today it is usual for an unjustified absence of a day or two to lead to a report to the Personnel Department and a day’s suspension without pay for ‘disrupting production’; a measure which generally leads to a deterioration in the worker/supervisor relationship that can sometimes end in a sacking. That the debate between these two schools should be conducted more or less overtly in the shop shows the intensity of interference between the different issues at stake: production, legitimation and social control. It also demonstrates the political importance of the role of team leaders and supervisors, and of the AM2s more particularly, within the Carrosserie: the high incidence of social friction and of risks of stoppage makes a great demand on the supervisor’s time. The role of the supervisor cannot be understood in isolation from that of his immediate superior, the chef de groupe, the ‘group leader’ or assembly-line manager. With a status something between that of a sort of senior supervisor and that of a manager proper, he is the real ‘boss’ of the line, for whose activity he is responsible. Working office hours, he supervises the work of the two shifts, which gives him the opportunity to compare differences in practice and results among supervisors and team leaders, and to pinpoint the contribution that these may make to the appearance of a problem. It is the group leader, too, who often carries out the individual progress interview for team leaders, rather than their immediate superior, the supervisor, thus consolidating his dominant position. In addition, the group leader has authority over the three technicians responsible for the running of the line: the améliorateur

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(productivity improver), the intervenant qualité (quality technician) and the équilibreur (line-balancer). Unlike the supervisor, whose concern is only for social relations and the management of personnel, the group leader is also responsible for the technical conditions of work. His role thus involves intervention up-stream when there are problems of quality, and anticipation of problems with plant and the organisation of production. And lastly, he acts as the final arbiter in the case of dispute or the need for arbitration on the line. His role thus casts a certain shadow over that of the supervisor, especially as, with few exceptions, many group leaders get themselves caught up in the logic of present-moment management, behaving as super-supervisors, rather than as future-oriented agents of development.

Fragmented technical interventions The distribution of roles, tasks and powers in the organisation of production expresses a technical and social tradition developed through the particular history of the site and the business. Such institutions and the way they are put to work are the expression of a fundamental element in the culture of the business – something too often reduced to the discourse of the internal communications department. The three technicians under the direction of the group leader are in principle attached to the work-study office which essentially forms an integral part of each of the two shops – even though they also have some cross-cutting functions – headed by the shop’s organisation and methods manager (responsable du bureau des méthodes de l’atelier). Their connections with the supervisory staff are further strengthened by the normal career trajectory, which requires repeated transfers back and forth between supervisory and work-study posts. Manual workers, on the other hand, and assembly-line workers in particular, have very little opportunity to establish relations with these technicians, who, nonetheless, have a great deal of influence over their work. Sharing the same office are the work-study technicians (agent d’étude des temps), the successors to the time-and-motion man. Their primary function is to draw up and to validate operations sheets, that is, to analyse the work, to establish standards for the gestures, tools and preparation required, and finally to translate these into measurable times. They therefore provide the basis for all subsequent activity in the organisation of production35 in terms of establishing workstations, balancing the line and improving productivity. Supervisors refer to the operations sheets in case of need, and trade-union reps will bear the figures in mind.

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The work-study technicians’ claim to a certain scientificity is reflected in several aspects of their work. Attached to the shop’s organisation and methods office, they nonetheless belong to another department, outside the Carrosserie itself. This gives them a certain formal independence: they themselves like to claim to be neutral measurers of time, an attitude easily explained by the hostility they continually run into from the workers. This distance from the shop is also found in their methods of work. Every year, the work-study technicians are assessed against a standard to see how far their work departs from the company-wide norm. But for some years now, methods have been changing and the stop-watch is beginning to disappear, to come out only in the case of dispute, when it is the indispensable point of reference. Its place has been taken by MTM tables, tables of times to be allowed for standardised gestures. It can easily be imaged how in constructing their own view of themselves, the workstudy technicians should be concerned to limit the possibility of direct confrontation with the assembly line and its workers. When a manual stop-watch reading must be taken then, the technicians begin the process in the protected confines of the shop’s training school, using the trainers as model operatives for the first measurements, before verifying these on the line. In any case, standing some way back from the production process itself, the work-study technician works closely with the améliorateur and the équilibreur, who are careful to consult him in their own work in the organisation of production. If the work-study technician thinks of himself as a kind of neutral judge, the améliorateur or productivity-improver finds himself in the thick of things. His role, he will explain, is to achieve productivity gains to meet precise targets laid down by management. The améliorateur is chosen with great care, and his qualities combine solid experience on the shop-floor, a certain capacity to identify improvements on his own account, great technical finesse, and a certain firmness in the face of pressures such as those from the authors of suggestions. Furthermore, the améliorateur has something of a leadership role, especially in the groups to study workstations that meet on certain days when the line is stopped. Suggestions, in fact, are an important asset to him in his work, both in achieving productivity gains and in ensuring their social acceptability among a high proportion of the shop’s workers. The intervenant qualité is not directly involved in the organisation of work, his role being connected to other aspects of quality policy. His task is to ensure quality problems are corrected, and that solutions do

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not get lost among the arcana of administration and the strategic gameplaying of the business. Though their input might be fragmented and their roles overlapping, the work of these technical staff is mutually complementary. The fragmentary nature of interventions means that matters that would otherwise be highly contentious, such as the connection between technical changes and the intensification of work, are not given a comprehensive formulation by any of these actors. Each has a partial influence over matters in part determined by the others, and can push his own concerns as far as possible without in the least feeling responsible for the effects: the line-balancer is only applying the times provided by the work-study technician; the productivityimprover wins productivity improvements without being concerned with how these gains are shared; while the work-study technicians will ratify and perpetuate them, in complete neutrality, relying on the growing abstraction of their methods and their independence from the shop. This fragmentation, however, is kept under control through the supervision of the technicians by the chef de groupe or assembly-line manager, whose position gives him an overview of all these partial endeavours. What conclusions can one draw from this investigation of work at the Sochaux plant in the period under consideration? In the last analysis, the form of organisation is fairly traditional, like the team itself. Assembly-line workers are essentially executants, who may indeed have been made responsible in the sense of capable of being called to account, but are still burdened with repetitive and fragmented tasks in accordance with the Taylorist model of work. The only exceptions are the specific functions of the moniteurs, and to some extent those of the polyvalents, which serve to satisfy the distinct and sometimes conflicting demands of multi-functionality and quality. Despite the relative efficiency of this form of organisation, the team finds itself facing more robust forms of organisation, such as the line itself, which determines the rate of work, reunifies the dispersed operations, and underlies the formation of most working networks. For the assembly-line workers themselves, the effective organisation of work generates severe tensions. If each operation has a concrete goal, it is associated with others at the workstation in such a way that a merely additive conception of time and the maximisation of workload win out over any possibility of coherence. The meaning of production is constructed at the level of networks that go beyond the individual workstation. This recombination of the fragmented perpetually

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demands a personal and largely informal labour on the part of assembly line workers to compensate for the fragmentation, to form the necessary connections and to mobilise the relevant network on each occasion. Such work, largely implicit, unarticulated, requires a certain commitment of the self, bringing in its train a number of different and sometimes discordant feelings.

3 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity

In the previous chapter, work relations were related to the distribution of roles engendered by the organisation of production. This perspective, however, does not cover the entire complexity of relations developed within the plant. If one is properly to understand the degree to which the assembly line partakes of the nature of a social fabric – and what kind of society is being fabricated here – social relations at work cannot be considered in the isolation of the plant, nor only in the present tense of production. They must be connected to features external to these dimensions that also find embodiment in the internal articulation of the world of work: ‘relationships do not . . . exhaust themselves within the enterprise, which appears as neither their origin nor their end, but much rather as one of the moments of their construction and one of the surfaces of their actualisation’. 1 Applied to the operatives in the Carrosserie at Peugeot-Sochaux, this approach partly intersects with the work done with Christian Corouge by Michel Pialoux and Stéphane Beaud.2 Their research, however, derives its coherence from the notion of the ‘worker group’ ( groupe ouvrier), while our hypothesis requires us rather to travel the networks through the plant in order to examine the diversity of social constructions developed and renewed in the very course of production. These constructions are characterised by features making for cohesion or integration, and also by others making for difference, dissociation or indeed opposition. Observation within the shop shows how the technical components of the network mediate phenomena of homogenisation or dissociation among its workers. 87

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Leaving the group, escaping the workstation Though assembly operations carried out at the workstation might not always in themselves bear any meaning other than that given them by workers in their own subjective lives, does work itself not gain significance from the relationship to others that it implies? What is the meaning attributed to these reciprocal relations between operatives, and what is at stake in them? What identities and what groups (collectifs) are made, unmade and remade in and through these relationships? If one is to answer these questions it is not enough to consider relationships within the workshop alone; these must be connected to facts and situations outside the plant itself, which sometimes make their presence felt within the shop in the relationships that are formed there.

The working group, an outcome in permanent contestation First of all, is there really a collective life on the assembly line? This apparently incongruous question draws a range of responses. For one moniteur in HC2, there is very little collective life, if any, on the line: the workers no longer have the time for it. This position is relatively widely held, in varying degrees. A CGT trade union representative from the same sector broadened the claim, arguing that ‘The plant has shifted from paternalism to individualism, and workers themselves are becoming individualist as they join the system’. In other words, the current organisation of work is thought to have fragmented the collective life of the shop, leaving a mere juxtaposition of individuals operating each on his own account, encouraged in this by the new methods of labour management. This kind of observation runs counter to the most widespread managerial discourse, which sees in the ongoing development of the plant the emergence of a new community of work, coming to life in the shared goals of day-to-day practice. These notions imply two different conceptions of the group, but beyond their disagreement, both refer to an image of the group based on relationships established through work. Mutual assistance, the sharing of tips and tricks, learning by observation and imitation on taking up a new workstation, these are all sources of efficiency gains never formally reported by workers, being in any event impossible to formalise because they shift with time by reason of alterations in the tasks themselves. To a great extent, such resources can only be mobilised on a voluntary basis, that is, when a worker who has mastered a certain gesture or workstation helps his fellow by communicating his skills – while the other too must be willing and capable of adopting them. This voluntary

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basis for the diffusion and reception of know-how presupposes a durable working group 3 in which relationships between workers are marked by mutual confidence: the skills passed on must not be used against ones own interests or those of other workers (through individual ‘suggestions’ not endorsed by the whole network concerned, communication to more unreliable individuals, individual zeal leading to a reduction in the time allotted to the operation in question, etc.). In the same way, all must be convinced that in exchange for know-how passed on or for services rendered, they too will enjoy the same advantages when needed. The establishment of such a working group is a process of development through time, for members must all prove themselves in a multiplicity of situations, and more particularly in crises. Non-observance of these rules is sanctioned by exclusion or marginalisation. Here perhaps one sees Marcel Mauss’ theses on the gift at work: the risk of exclusion and ‘ill-fare’ leads each participant to return the service already provided (counter-gift) and obliges the first to perform the service to receive the counter-gift, so that a lasting gulf is not established between workers: the one who gives the first must agree to receive the counter-gift, under penalty of being considered proud or a social misfit. In the same way, the beneficiary has to return the service, otherwise risking being treated as a profiteer, an individualist, and being excluded from the group. This helps one understand one aspect of the behaviour of young recruits who have gained the status of polyvalent after two years of work at fixed positions on the line: they literally run from one workstation to another, holding down their own job while helping out others. This attitude cannot be explained simply by the hope of future promotion. One of these young polyvalents, a keen sportsman, told us that he found in the job a physical challenge very like that of sporting competition, and had no hesitation in saying that the work-load was not overdemanding. It might be thought that this kind of hyper-activity is compensation for a poverty of content, but that is not at all the whole answer. In helping his neighbours and relieving them of certain tasks (ensuring supplies, preparation, quality control, etc.) the young worker is giving of his energy and time. This gift, however, is also an investment which obliges the other to provide a counter-gift. Whether or not based on rational calculation, the gift/counter-gift structure inevitably leads to recognition by the other: there is the symbolic recognition of one’s skills, but also the acknowledgement of a debt. The older worker hardly has the capacity or the inclination to repay his due in kind; his obligation

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is performed through passive acceptance of the promethean image the energetic young polyvalent would like to have of himself. Furthermore, the older worker also repays his debt by accepting the transgression of group norms by the polyvalent, whose activities are intended to please the holders of hierarchical power. Here, the polyvalent finds satisfaction in the construction of this fragile equilibrium in the image he wishes to project to both sides: devoted to the enterprise and to its hierarchy, yet still attached to his group and to the image of himself that it returns to him. This unstable equilibrium derives from the ambiguity of personal perspective, suspended between the search for individual promotion and rootedness in a working group that maintains and consolidates itself through time. It is the passage of time, indeed, which allows the group to construct this ongoing exchange and the internal rules that underlie its cohesion and its efficacity at work. But from the point of view of supervisory staff and plant management, this cohesion has major disadvantages. The group that is formed tends to grow in autonomy and to take control of processes, even if supervisory staff and technicians also have their own means of gaining information. It may resist a reorganisation of work that does not suit it or which introduces changes into its own rules of operation. What is more, the strongly cohesive group tends to adopt common positions vis-à-vis other groups, institutions, or supervisors. The group, having developed an identity, may easily pass from autonomy to resistance, and from resistance to militancy or to shared trade union membership. This is the ambiguity of cohesion at work: it is an inexhaustible source of productive efficiency, through the ongoing exchange of know-how and mutual aid among workers, and at the same time the basis for a collective identity as workers. Hence the effort by supervisory staff and shop management to find a refined system of organisation that would maintain the advantages of group cohesion – that is to say, the sources of productivity – while eliminating what appears to them to be its disadvantages, that is, the autonomy, the resistance, and the everpresent possibility of demands being made by a tightly knit social group. Observation of managerial practice demonstrates a concern to ensure that highly cohesive groups should not encompass more than three, perhaps four workers in each module. After several years of operations at HC2, where the teams (made up of three or four modules) arrived ready-made from HC0, or even at Montage Voiture, where no large-scale disruption occurred, groups still do not enjoy the sort of cohesion described above: in many cases the durable

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core of a working group is deliberately broken up by team leaders and supervisors, who post workers to other modules, other teams or other lines. The effects can be seen in the back-and-forth of workers at breaks and mealtimes, with shattered working groups recomposing themselves in rest-area or canteen, maintaining a certain stability. This only goes to emphasis the intensity of this social relation as constructed through time and its resistance to management strategies. Simultaneous with this fragmentation of working groups, the great cutback in employee numbers in search of cost reductions has the same effect. The workforce assigned to each team or to each line being smaller and smaller, absentees are replaced by polyvalents from outside the team, or by longer-term loans of staff from shops working below capacity. Even greater degrees of disturbance are seen in periods around the holidays, or at times when a major rebalancing of the line is in prospect, when a whole wave of workers must undergo training (see Chapter 2). Structural mobility, too, contributes to weakening working groups, and despite the opinion of the majority of assembly-line workers of long standing, groups were not any more stable in the past, thanks to high staff turnover and the promotions that came with growth. The present instability, however, takes place in a ‘closed circuit’, which makes it more perceptible. Other types of social relationship may also be established. Some, for instance, the younger workers in particular, will have a radio or radiocassette-player near where they are working, which inevitably leads to all kinds of negotiations with neighbours about acceptable volume and the choice of stations, programmes or styles of music. These discussions, sometimes accompanied by shouting from one party or the other – or even from the moniteur – can reinforce generational cleavages, but they do in effect offer the group a shared and present object of discussion outside the work itself, which has nothing to do with the well-worn discussion of last night’s television, the football results, or of statements by one politician or another. In fact, local negotiations over the radio, or over music more generally, despite the tensions they can engender, help strengthen the social cohesion of the group. The present situation, however, is far from the sociability that characterised the assembly line until the 1980s. The warmth and social solidarity of the group used in the past to take on particularly festive forms, especially in the custom of the pot. The bottle of red with the meal, or the solitary consumption of wine are no longer to be seen, the latter tending towards a misuse which industrial psychopathologists have identified as a source of suffering and even of

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grave difficulties. Today, the bottle of one’s own, or one shared between two friends, is a very rare sight in HC, where alcohol abuse and drunkenness at work are far more severely dealt with than in the past. We are certainly far from the days, so often recalled, of the worker drunk on Monday morning, a member of a team of four responsible for fitting the windscreen to the 305. His workmates hid him away from five o’clock until eleven, doing all the work between the three of them, so as to protect him, while the team leader pretended not to notice. Today, such a situation is an impossibility: the workshop no longer has the hideaways it did (only the eating areas and the locker-rooms are left), the pressure of the flow makes it more difficult to hold down more than one’s own job, and the vigorous disciplinary regime leaves no room for such autonomy. Apart from such incidents, whose frequency should not be exaggerated and which partake of the nature of play and of social defiance, the intensity of social life was mediated by ritual drinks to celebrate birthdays, births, promotions, holidays, or quite simply the arrival of Friday. 4 There would be red wine, sometimes white, but a real celebration called for a bottle of pastis. Depending on the occasion, and depending on his character, the team leader would either make sure he saw nothing, or would join in the party, or even forbid it with more or less success. If suppressed, celebrations would nonetheless continue with even greater intensity in the neighbouring team. Today these events have become highly infrequent, as if continuous efforts at rationalisation have vanquished even the celebratory impulse: when they take place in the rest area, it is the moniteur who controls the bottle of Ricard in order to prevent over-consumption. Now legitimated by this control, having lost its more or less illicit aspect and thus its significance as a time and space won over from regulation, the current practice of celebrating the high points in workers’ lives has lost the sense of group solidarity in the face of the adversities of a machine-dominated time.

Multi-functionality: many are called, but few are chosen Ideas about the strength of the working group are not the only ones to be largely shared by assembly-line workers. The aspiration to escape work at a fixed station on the line also enjoys widespread approval. Despite a certain superficial talk about the rehabilitation of assembly work, the condition and status of the assembly-line worker is negatively evaluated throughout the hierarchy, though with more or less intensity. Yet a number of rapid comparisons will show that amongst jobs on the assembly line, that of the car-worker is not seen as

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the worst. Other jobs, in certain neighbouring businesses, are the subject of unfavourable comparison, being considered as second-rate, no more than temporary stop-gaps. At Peugeot-Sochaux itself, other jobs in other shops are worse thought of, such as those of the trimmers, but they are also though of as temporary. This raises the question of the continuing existence of a specific symbolic significance attached to work on the assembly line. In much of the plant it is considered normal to have left the line by a certain age, given the demands that it makes. Such expectations are derived from the practice of the past, when personnel officers arranged for the posting elsewhere of those assembly-line workers, who, having reached forty, had made but little progress on the ladder, and who could hardly any longer hope to do so. In accordance with an unwritten rule, after the age of forty-four these assembly workers would be assigned to sectors responsible for preparation and not subject to the demands of the flow. If need be, the trade union representative would intervene to push the process along. 5 The logic of such a practice coincides to some extent with the conclusions of a very large-scale study carried out on the effects of age on the ability to carry out work requiring gestural precision. 6 This concludes that the proportion of people having difficulty in carrying out such work increases with age, especially when gestures are connected with physical effort in the past or present and are subject to the pressure of time. It becomes more and more important for these workers to enjoy a good posture at work, a well-organised workstation, and finally, and possibly the most problematically, a margin of protection against time-constraint. Briefly put, age tends to reduce the adaptability of the operative. Now, however, the reduction in employment and recruitment witnessed at the Carrosserie since the 1980s has done away with these practices. Mobility is much reduced, and preparation has been hivedoff to suppliers. 7 Prospects of promotion or relief have faded, and workers no longer leave the line as they used to. It has become normal to carry on working on the line until the time for early retirement has arrived. Even more significantly, workers from other sectors or other parts of Peugeot-Sochaux see themselves periodically assigned to the assembly line, though often enough suffering medical restrictions which had made them relatively unsuitable for their sector of origin. Most serious, in the eyes of workers in the final assembly shops, and of assembly-line operatives more generally, is to see the return to the line of workers who had earlier escaped it: this amounts to a destruction of the occupational trajectory that was the equivalent of

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a blue-collar career, in what is a significant breach with the traditions of the plant. Despite this, the great majority of its workers live in hope of escaping the line, in one way or another. The two main paths are promotion to polyvalent and then to moniteur, or transfer. Both of these possibilities have now become particularly difficult. From the point of view of the management of production, polyvalence or multi-functionality represents one of the principal sources of flexibility, because it allows the assignment of operatives in response to the particularities of the situation: the pace of the line, levels of absenteeism, the requirements of training, the hazards of supply etc. This multifunctionality operates in different registers. On the one hand, the officially recognised polyvalents represent a broad spectrum multi-functionality, concentrated however in few workers. On the other hand, assembly-line workers are encouraged to acquire and to maintain a certain level of multi-functionality, for example the ability to meet the demands of a second or perhaps even a third workstation. This is a narrow-spectrum multi-functionality, but, more widely distributed, it provides the business with considerable margins of flexibility that help reduce manning levels: management thus seeks to develop it. By definition, multi-functionality makes significantly greater demands on the operative than simply meeting the requirements of one workstation, because it puts into question the process of habituation that adapts the worker to the post he occupies. Yet it attenuates the physical and mental ills associated with repetition, offering an opportunity to escape the straitjacket of the workstation and giving access to a more extensive space of activity and a diversity of tasks that breaks up the monotony of work and broadens ones frame of reference. Finally, multi-functionality operates above all as a field of differentiation among assembly-line workers. Here the young find themselves particularly advantaged by their vitality and their physical, nervous and mental resources. Old hands, on the other hand, for the most part reject multi-functionality: a reliable, quiet workstation is the general demand of the over-forties. This is connected in part with the desire to economise on effort. By increasing one’s ‘depth of field,’ the ability to take on two, three or even more workstations can lead to a form of recognition in the shape of individual points that give access to various grades. Above all, multifunctionality is, on the assembly line, almost the only way of making one’s mark and of gaining distinction when there are no differences in terms of assiduity, punctuality, willingness or quality. Such differences

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have tended to disappear under the pressure of the economic situation more especially, and as a result of the more selective nature of the recruitment over the last 10 years or so. Multi-functionality gives one the chance to distinguish oneself with a view to promotion to moniteur, still on the line, and then to polyvalent d’atelier or super. In this sense, multi-functionality is a promise. From another point of view, multi-functionality is a snare and a delusion, a source of disappointment. In fact, a great many of the old hands say they qualified as multi-functional in one way or another: as polyvalent, dépanneur, defect-repairer, occasionally as moniteur. They gave their all, and believed they had succeeded. In general it would seem that it was on account of a surplus in these grades that they were returned to the line. Whatever the case, they now believe that their chance has passed. This sense of regress and frustration weighs heavily in their rejection of multi-functionality, whatever might be their own capacities. This reluctance among some of the old hands is reinforced by an ambiguity in the status of the polyvalent, which reflects an issue of strategy at plant level. In fact, the personnel department refuses to institutionalise the role of polyvalent, as had been the case of the dépanneur of earlier times, rejecting the rigidities that would follow from it, in terms of industrial relations, pay and the organisation of work, fearing a return to the old logic of fixed occupational classifications. In this it finds itself at one with part of the supervisory staff, who would prefer to see multi-functionality maintained as a collective and general aspect of the ‘assembly worker’s job’. In the present state of affairs, the status of the multi-functional worker has no institutional sanction and remains subject to permanent reassessment. The other part of the supervisory staff, on the other hand, would see in such institutional recognition a way of establishing a body of particularly reliable workers within each team, and even more as a way of meeting worker demands. The workers are concerned with two things: first the recognition of a role, of a progress that is in some sense protected; secondly, the attribution of a distinctive role to the multi-functional worker would provide clarity, legibility and substance to prospects of promotion. Multi-functionality thus appears in a double guise: behind the instrument for the management of human resources in production is a fundamental reference point in the perspective of career, the first step in assembly-line workers’ personal perspectives on promotion. This connection between multi-functionality and prospects of development explains the often fiercely-held opinions that assembly-line

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workers have on the subject: it is not merely a technical arrangement that is being judged, but rather the largely illusory prospect of promotion. This does not, however, prevent a number of the old hands from accepting assignments calling on their multi-functionality, in concrete circumstances at times of pressing need: the team leader knows whom he can call on in a pinch. An atypical example makes clear some of the related diachronic issues involved in the organisation of multi-functionality. It concerns a team at HC1, whose very particular character can be seen in its ‘multi-functionality chart’ (tableau de polyvalence). Most such charts present three types of profile: the basic assembly workers, marked U for their own workstation; the polyvalents, marked U or L for a number of workstations, between 10 and 20; and finally the moniteurs, rated U, or O (indicating the ability to train a worker for the post), for all the workstations of the module for which they are responsible. This team, however, does not share the normal structure, with its division into three modules each with its moniteur and a polyvalent. It has four moniteurs, but only one polyvalent, rated as competent for five workstations. Instead one sees minor degrees of multi-functionality distributed among the basic assembly workers: three groups of two workers swap posts every two hours. A priori, such a dispersion of multi-functionality perfectly reflects the current inclinations of management, who aim to diffuse it among the regular assembly-line workers, making it part of their basic role, and doing away with the role of the polyvalent. This structure might then suggest a model form of organisation, with high flexibility and low manning levels, marked by a diffuse multi-functionality, flexibility of response, a high degree of worker involvement, even higher among the moniteurs. In fact, this situation was in part a conjunctural artefact, connected to the return to the team of one of the moniteurs, which had disrupted its internal equilibrium. Should a basic-grade assembly worker be absent, his place is taken by a polyvalent; if a second is also away, his post is taken by the moniteur, whose place is taken by the fourth moniteur. But what if there are three workers to be replaced? A request is then put through for a super – someone who is not familiar with the workstation to be occupied, and who cannot immediately take over the work. The team then adopts a paradoxical form of organisation dictated by the urgency of the situation: the moniteur takes over the workstation, while the super takes on the role of moniteur for the module. This arrangement is more effective in the immediate short-term: the moniteur can get on top of the job

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more quickly and effectively than any outsider, however talented. But this introduces serious weaknesses into quality control, however vigilant the two might be. Above all, it disturbs the social equilibrium. For the situation is experienced as a discreet threat by the moniteurs, who wonder if the supervisors will not abolish one of their posts. This anxiety was very clear in two of them, aged 36 and 38, one of whom seemed to be wondering whether he still enjoyed the confidence of the team leader. 8 Of the other two moniteurs, one was 49 years old, and out of danger except in the case of a serious fault, while the other, a young man who had only been promoted at the launch of the 406, was putting his all into it and doing everything he could to consolidate his position. The instability of the situation found expression too in the swapping of posts every two hours. Among the six assembly workers involved, three were young men, who hoped by doing this to counter their boredom at work and above all to distinguish themselves, to prove their abilities and so gain a chance of promotion. Of the three others, over thirty years of age, two of them were ex-polyvalents, recently sent back to the line. This was, according the supervisor, simply the result of having one moniteur extra, but they were concerned because they knew that their misfortune might last a long time, given the tendency to shed jobs. Worse, if they were to be permanently downgraded, they would be at a disadvantage in competition with the youngsters in any later competition for advancement. They therefore sought to preserve what they could of their earlier skills, so as to keep up their chances for whenever it would be decided to once again have a full complement of polyvalents. But time was against them and they had their backs to the wall. One guessed that the positive and constructive co-operation between young and old disguised an acute rivalry. 9

Virtuosity: hopes and challenges The various issues at stake in multi-functionality raise questions in turn about the practice of virtuosity on the assembly line. In the face of a rigidly constrained task, virtuosity is a style by whose adoption the operative regains self-possession, or rather discovers a path to self-realisation. This self-realisation involves restoring meaning to the moment, and requires both the staging and endangering of his working activity, justifying the double connotation of the phrase ‘arena of virtuosity’.10 Above all, the operative thus separates himself from and stands against a logic exclusively determined by the operation of the system of production, which robs him of his individuality for the sake of the system. This

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recovery of autonomy is the most important aspect of the practice of virtuoso labour. A favoured form of virtuoso performance is to ‘go up the line’, that is to say to accelerate one’s rate of work, to increase distance travelled and to reorganise ones working practice so as to regain control of time, but on ones own behalf (see Chapter 2). To make sense, the time gained must be put to private use: to drink a cup of coffee, to go to the toilet, to smoke a cigarette away from the line, or to go and talk to someone at a neighbouring workstation. Any reason is good, as long as it belongs to this private realm, to justify the effort that has been made and to give meaning to this parenthesis that everyone knows will be shortlived. There are certain times that nearly everyone tries to gain: the minutes that precede or follow breaks or meal-times, or those that allow one to get away early at the end of the day. Officially, the practice of going up the line is universally criticised elsewhere. Management talks of it as an avoidable source of fatigue that increases the risks of defect or accident, while trade unionists may see it as a pretext for the intensification of labour, encouraging the work-study technicians to investigate the reserves of productivity in the means used to gain time. But the practice is well-established, where the constraints of the job do not prevent it, and as long as the operative makes no mistakes in his performance. Hence the sight of the HC shop at the shift’s end, with the assembly line marching on through a semi-deserted space, the only workers left being those trapped by the impossibility of making headway (immobile equipment, the first workstation on the line) or by specific, onerous responsibilities. ‘Going up the line’, however, is a phenomenon that goes beyond the ‘technical’ space of the worker’s relationship to his station, whether this relationship be private or staged in public. As in the case of multifunctionality, perspectives are constructed on virtuosity, and it is given its significance through the relations the operative entertains with other workers, with the team leader or with the enterprise. If giving a virtuoso performance is primarily a matter of self-affirmation and selfrealisation, it is done in the context of this network of relations. For some, the most important thing is to compete with others, to try and escape ‘upwards’, that is to say as a polyvalent, then a polyvalent d’atelier, moniteur or super. In this case, paradoxically, virtuosity as it has been defined here – that is, as the affirmation of an autonomous self – passes by way of an even more marked acceptance of the functional logic. The operative’s approach is to show that he can do more than is required of him by the workstation he is assigned to, that he is

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worth better. It leads him to accept, and sometimes to search out, workstations that are recognised as difficult and demanding, and to treat changes of workstation as simply so many tests. Each of them provides a virtual opportunity, for the service rendered takes its value only from the indisputable nature of the obstacle in the way of its being carried out. Such an approach runs a double risk. First of all, the worker may not live up to his own expectations, and may be forced to back down in the sight of all: by accepting the test, he is putting himself at stake. An example of this kind of risk can be seen in the case of a disputatious young man in MV, whose team leader had given him hopes of promotion. He played the game, accepted posts in the pit and on the floor (as many as 23 workstations in one month, according to the multi-functionality chart, almost every one available on this team). It was only after this test that he was made a polyvalent, and then moniteur. Another young man recently recruited, wishing to follow the same path, agreed to switch from post to post, sometimes at a moment’s notice, and without having allowed himself a proper apprenticeship. He made a number of mistakes, laying himself open to veiled criticism within the team, and then found himself on one of the most difficult workstations. The other risk associated with this approach is of making all the effort for nothing, and finding oneself, as a result of a flattening out of the blue-collar hierarchy and the non-availability of suitable posts, still stuck on the line even after having given faultless service. In this case, the assembly-line worker will have lowered his guard for nothing and contributed to his own dispossession. There is a third risk too, the true danger of which becomes apparent only with the passage of time: and that is of avoiding the risk of public failure by using subterfuge or exploiting unfair advantage to gain the promotion desired. The shop will long remember the dishonesty, and remind the culprit of it whenever there is occasion. For others working on the line, the important thing is as much as possible to ensure their own protection, to increase their margin of autonomy within the system. In so far as the work no longer offers any great prospect of improving ones own individual situation, then the goal of self-protection and the conservation of energy by going no further than the normal requirements of the job becomes one of the legitimations of virtuosity. The latter then finds application in a different field: it is no longer a question of seeking out difficulty, but of avoiding it, which is why the skills required here are more especially those of evasion. The goal is to avoid a difficult workstation or to prevent the introduction of a threatening change, and it calls for the exercise of

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quite different aptitudes than does sheer performance. It presupposes an extensive knowledge of the network (see Chapter 2). In MV, for example, an older man, working in the pit, began to suspect the prospective abolition of his workstation a month before it was to happen, before the other workers. He had deduced this from the falling trend of production and the particular nature of his post, the only one in the pit not to involve a major operation requiring the use of mechanised equipment. In the case of a new redistribution of tasks, then, this post would be the first to go. He thus opened discussions with a colleague who had only recently been posted to the pit and who was finding himself in a difficult situation, and persuaded him to give him his own post, thus facing the team leader with a fait accompli that could only be avoided by confrontation. Here, the assembly-line worker was pitting his wits against those of the AM1. He has to grasp the trends in production, and predict ensuing changes in the shop and on the line; he must recognise which posts may become more taxing through an increase in the range of tasks, and those where the load may be eased by forthcoming changes; he has to know the timetable for the reorganisation of work on the line, to know when changes may be expected; and finally, he must always hold assets that allow him to influence decision-making. These assets may be medical restrictions, which may be deliberately exploited; or skills or flexibilities that make him a precious resource to his team leader in certain circumstances; or personal relationships that he can call on for support, in the union, in management, or in the shop more generally. Finally, he must avoid any particular weakness that might give his supervisor’s arguments any purchase. From the point of view of a blue-collar intelligence like this, going up the line is the moment of truth, the measure of the success of the tactics adopted, the occasion for the establishment of an informal hierarchy among the operators. To develop to the full, this presupposes the acceptance of the system of manufacture and its production techniques, within which the margin of autonomy is sought. Here, as in the strategy of gestural economy and efficiency, virtuosity enables the establishment of benchmarks of skill or performance that are shared by all assemblyline workers. But if the measures are common, each individual adopts specific techniques by which he puts himself to the test. Looking at matters from this point of view, work appears not only as a constraint, but also as a mediation in each worker’s construction of his identity: as well as being a reaction to work under constraint, the attitudes adopted by each worker represent in his own eyes and in the eyes of others a sketch of his strategic choices and a portrait of an identification.

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Identity and social play The constant fine adjustment carried out by the polyvalent, who treads the tightrope between his own aspirations and the possibilities offered by the working group and its norms, offers a fine example of identityconstitutive social play ( jeu social identitaire).11 The many instances of such social play in the shop deserve attention here, because they have a significant role in transforming labour and making it acceptable. Recourse to the concept of identity-constitutive social play exploits the polysemy of the word ‘play,’ some senses of which we focus on as reinterpreted in the context of the factory: 1 Play has first of all a ludic dimension, with connotations of recreation and amusement: it provides pleasure to the player, something we do not wish to lose sight of, given the problem we are dealing with. 2 Social play seems to us to be an intrinsic element of social life, except in cases of pathology or voluntary self-isolation. Man, a social animal, is a being with a project, and every human project involves several actors in a structure of play, a game with its rules. To overcome the incertitude in which he lives, man shares it, reassuring himself through social play. Man, because he is a sharing being, invents social games that construct communities. 3 In engineering, play also signifies the freedom that one component has in relation to another (as in the case of a piston, or a drawer). The play of the possible leads to a multiplicity of tricks to be won, points to be scored, possibilities for one side or the other. Play opens things up, encouraging initiative and creativity in participants even as they keep a sharp eye on ‘structural effects’ and the differences in resources allocated to one party or another. In other words, the freedom of play finds itself limited by the rules of the game, which are written, formalised and other to the actor (formal heteronomy). Actors must also respect the social rules of the group to which they belong: more informal in nature, these can be transgressed on condition that the transgression can be legitimised, or compensation offered. Social life, the life of the group, is always constituted by adjustments, each of which is an effort to maintain or restore the momentary equilibria of social play (to adjust is to fix the right distance; that is to say, too, to regulate the play between two elements; it is to control freedom of movement: in engineering one has tight, loose or sliding fit).12

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Finally, the examples of social play revealed by micro-sociology appear to us to be identity-constitutive in so far as they contribute to the construction of identity through distinctive composition on the basis of given situations and issues, as will be discussed later. This construction of identity takes place through conflict, with the employer, of course, but also with other categories of employee, between generations of workers, ethnic groups, etc. Every segmentation, every line of rupture increases the margin of play and initiates or revives internal conflicts of image and representation over collective and individual developments. The construction of identity is far from being unequivocal: the concept of social play takes account of this multitude of possibilities within the structural constraints.

Going up the line Going up the line involves working faster than is required by the time allowed, and thus beginning work on each car further up the line than the one before. This practice, often criticised and sometimes even forbidden, lies at the heart of the construction of identity through social play. At HC, it isn’t possible to go up the line from every workstation: those situated immediately beyond the elevators, or which make use of fixed equipment, or fixed timings (equipment for fitting the dashboard on the 306, on the one hand; or the hot-gluing of the lining of the passenger-compartment ceiling on the other) do not allow such autonomy. In the same way, the cables of the electric screwdrivers are too short, and cannot be plugged into a convenient socket, unlike compressed-air driven screwdrivers, which assembly line workers can generally connect without problems to the air-supply at a neighbouring workstation. To go up the line, then, one has to be given a ‘good’ workstation, whose first characteristic must be this freedom from mechanical servitude. The second feature of the ‘good’ workstation is that it does not require the handling of too many compressed-air screwdrivers, because they are all different (in the diameter of the screw, the prescribed torque) and one is endlessly connecting and disconnecting them (there being only one air-supply per post), operations on which no gain of time is possible. Nor is a ‘good’ workstation one that is made up only of manual operations (such as stapling, clipping, pre-assembly, fitting door and boot seals, etc.), because these tend to be so short in duration that they are high in number and the workstation becomes difficult to manage. In other words, the ‘good’ workstation enjoys a balance of manual and power-tool operations, escaping all the constraints described above.

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The ‘good’ workstation is negotiated when the line is rebalanced, that is to say at the monthly redistribution of tasks between all the workstations on the line: in fact, the team leader negotiates the composition of his team’s workstations with the line-balancer and the supervisor. It appears possible to classify the members of the team in terms of how ‘good’ a workstation they are posted to, or may be ‘constructed’ for them, an outcome determined by various factors connected with the history of the team and its internal relations through time. This hierarchy among the assembly-line workers, entirely tacit, though generally acknowledged, is based on a battery of informal and even unconscious criteria. These concern, first of all, the worker’s skills, and the proven capacity to do quality work (not to incur a 15-point penalty more than once a year, for example) in the time allowed while still retaining a certain margin. In the second place, and in addition to these technical abilities, the worker must be ‘straight’: for most team leaders he ought to be a member of a reformist union, though one does find members of more militant unions at ‘good’ posts: though they might be ‘loudmouths,’ they may be respected by supervisory staff for the care they put into their work. Given these criteria, the worst workstations go to the youngest members of the team, to the most recently arrived, to the most unassuming (who complain little or not at all), and sometimes to workers who are having difficulty in keeping up with the cycle. In conclusion, one can say that most ‘good’ workstations involve certain operations of importance (as regards safety, standards or quality) which less effective workers might have difficulty in carrying out successfully. To sum up, long-term observation reveals the existence of an entirely informal hierarchy among assembly-line workers, who occupy better or worse positions. Right are the top are a few champions:13 their economy of words gives them a reputation for wisdom; somewhat older than their companions, they are respected for their judgement. It is they, in fact, who organise the whole business of going up the line, in the first place because they have the greatest scope for it. Paradoxically, the practice of going up the line is brushed under the carpet, by both workers and supervisors, while all agree on seeing it as an inevitable necessity at the end of the shift, in the evening in particular, so as not to miss the bus. But no-one has ever missed the bus, and everyone spends seven to ten minutes waiting for it at the foot of the locker-room stairs. For our interviewees, this denial had two senses: for the workers it expresses a wish to forget the loss of autonomy in comparison with the old Finition shop, when the champions among the assembly line workers could

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gain tens of minutes, while the line stopped after a certain quota of production, and not as today, at the end of the shift; for supervisors, it means that everything is under control, because the rules have not been broken. One party among line management and supervisory staff even argues for a shortening of compressed-air lines to further reduce worker autonomy. One of the champions, who was very happy to talk about going up the line, justified it first of all by the need to catch the bus, adding that: ‘the ones who come by car don’t want to be left till last, which means that everyone who can ends by going up the line’. Himself, he goes five or six cars up (representing a gain of some 10 to 15 minutes): ‘it’s a game: but the next car left to be worked on has to be a car up the line’. There is a rule: the champion has to facilitate the work of his colleague on the other shift, saving him from starting work at the same time as the others because he has left him a car ahead. The champion imposes other rules on himself as well: from pride, he never causes work for the moniteur, for that would disqualify him. The work of the champion, or the caïd, diverges somewhat from the work prescribed. He will not hesitate, for example, to pick up two parts weighing 10 kilograms each, in order to save a return journey from the line to the stock for the next car. ‘You run around so you can get a few more cars done. Then you risk making the workstation look too easy, and seeing it end up overloaded. Everyone goes up the line. One of us goes 17 cars up, as far as the other module. Time passes faster if you’re struggling against yourself. And then, if you’re left behind after the others have gone it might look as if you’re not up to the job.’ Going up the line seems attended by a profound ambivalence, as are all the challenges that characterise the work situation; one the one hand, the worker cannot refuse to play the game if he does not wish to see himself marginalised or seen as lacking the resources needed to play – something that everyone avoids if they can. On the other hand, this competition draws attention to the capacities of the champions, who carry out the tasks required in a time far less than the time allowed, and this in the glare of publicity, because the essential point of the game is to make manifest one’s control over the situation and one’s invincible autonomy. There thus emerges another rule of the game: the need to show off the free time one has gained while enforcing on others (the team leader and the line-balancers) a respect for oneself and for one’s workstation as presently constituted. The winning play thus brings a double reward, through the symbolic capital it represents, and through the preservation of the situation which makes it possible. Which is entirely logical: for

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there are few who would dare attack the holder of such symbolic capital, or the interest he gains from it (the enjoyment of his work situation), for fear of collective reprisal.

The functionality of social play This identity-constitutive social play calls for several kinds of comment. Social play helps to pass the time while carrying out monotonous and repetitive work. By establishing rules within the team, it brings together the workers who take part in the game; by including the moniteur, the team leader and the line-balancer, it establishes a relative degree of community between actors whose positions might tend to separate them. Such shared rules and perspectives can thus extend beyond the class of assembly-line workers alone, so long as all concerned share the same objectives: quality production, without a hitch. Within this community, established through identity-constitutive social play, work becomes acceptable, one the one hand because it (partially) takes on the form of a ludic activity, and on the other because the assembly-line workers are themselves involved (partially again) in its development through their capacity to influence the composition of the workstations to which they are posted. To make assembly-line work acceptable by giving it other objectives than those prescribed (for instance, leaving early)14 is not the least of the functions of the game that is going up the line. In effect, the play tends to mask the work itself, with its difficulty and its repetition. In his book on piecework in a North American car-engine factory, Michael Burawoy is interested not in the conditions of work, or the short cycles, but rather in the reasons which lead the workers to accept them. 15 Payment by piecework gives an opportunity to develop a play around bonuses: to win bonuses or to get ahead and annoy their colleagues, workers have to construct privileged relations with those around them (storekeepers, fork-lift drivers, etc.) while supervisory staff tolerate any deviant behaviours so long as production targets are met. The whole culture of the shop is permeated by the drive for bonus: it has a whole esoteric vocabulary, while the ‘self-organisation’ of workers in the drive for bonus goes far beyond the regulations promulgated by management. The establishment of such social play explains why the wage-relation which constrains workers to sell their labour power every day is both acceptable and accepted under the conditions of work that obtain, work which here at Sochaux is difficult and monotonous. The thesis of social play recognises the mediation it effects between the structural constraints of waged work and the concrete conditions of productive activity, giving

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expression to the necessity for participation and recognition within and by the community. In fact, the great difficulty for the social sciences is not to describe difficulty and suffering at work, but to explain why they are accepted. The idea that identity-constitutive social play is a mediation which masks – at least for the moment – the structural constraints of wage labour so as to make them bearable, is a not insignificant element of a possible solution. There remains the need to catalogue the games and their functions in given working situations, to interpret the rules and their ongoing development – for the rules and their determination are part of the same game. The rules for activity at work are provided by the management, for the most part in written form. It is within the limits of this prescribed work, reinterpreting the rules taking account of the interstitial spaces the managers leave to the workers, that the latter invent new rules of their own. By definition, these rules are unwritten: they are the unstable outcome of tensions between manual workers,16 and between manual workers and other staff (supervisors, line-balancers, technicians, fork-lift drivers); they are constantly shifting and changing. The elaboration of the rules of identity-constitutive social play would thus appear to be more important than the play itself, which would rapidly become repetitive and monotonous. In the case of going up the line, the rules governing the composition and content of workstations and the posting of workers to them are subtle and volatile, adapting to environmental changes, the personality of the team leader and the practice of the linebalancer. The production, elaboration and adaptation of rules takes on more importance than the game itself because when these are established the margin of initiative remaining for winning new ‘tricks’ is much reduced: when the workstation has been made up and a worker allocated to it, it is too late; the possibilities for going up the line depend more on the workstation itself (presence or absence of electric screwdriver, nearness of the elevator) than on the skills of the worker. It is the capacity to influence the make-up of the workstation, then, that is the essential thing, at a point where the rules are fuzzy and volatile, a point where to have an effect on the rules is to have an effect on the result itself. Here we return, by an entirely different route, to the strong claim made by Jean-Daniel Reynaud, for whom ‘the elaboration of the rules is itself the issue at stake’. 17 On the other hand, the manual workers’ play around the rules of play for going up the line does not take place in virgin territory, a neutral socio-technical space. The management, through the mediation of the

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supervisory staff, constantly reminds them that they are the masters of the game, for example through permanent changes to the product or procedures (operations sheets, audits), through the redistribution of tasks (the rebalancing of the line)18 and through the constant imposition of productivity increases. In other words, the management reminds them that they too are participants in play, in as much as they control the meta-rules, those within which the workers’ play takes place. Historically, this returns us to the whole process of the rationalisation of manual work: here, more particularly, the meta-rules are those which restrain the organisational autonomy of play by limiting the possibilities of going up the line at each socio-technical reorganisation of production. The cords on the electric screwdrivers are too short, and when the mobile racks (servantes) are more generally introduced they too will tie workers more closely to their stations. In general, the reduction in cycle times (to less than a minute in some places) also limits workers’ ability to move from their posts. All these transformations of work have been carried out in the name of increasing productivity, but Michael Burawoy cannot avoid the thought that ‘the production of new rules, rendering the old ones obsolete, represents a ritual reaffirmation of managerial dominance’. The periodic introduction of new rules reminds workers of their subordination and of the limits to their autonomy. In other words, ‘ritual punishment by means of the imposition of rules serves only to reintroduce (to reactivate) hierarchical antagonism and to sap the organisation of workshop hegemony’. 19

The uncertainties of rebalancing the line From the point of view of the enterprise, and here of the management, the prime (and historical) objective of rebalancing the line, that is, of the redistribution of tasks among workstations, is to limit the play, the social slack, which would necessarily appear if workers were left to carry out the distribution of tasks among themselves. Briefly put, management wishes to control the process of rationalisation of labour so as to improve its productivity. A technical department independent of the manual workers, with powers delegated by the management, thus organises the distribution of operations between workers in the most neutral manner possible. This is the technical definition of the process of balancing the line. In actual fact, the function proves to be more complex, for it comes up against human beings in their physical and psychological diversity and the rules which govern their everyday social life within the team and the module.

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Line-balancing stands at a point where the work of the équilibreur (the line-balancer), the améliorateur, the work-study technician and the team leader intersect. The result is also more or less influenced by the qualitycontrol technician (intervenant qualité), by the AM2 who arbitrates in case of conflict, and by the assembly-line workers themselves, who intervene via the team leader, sometimes through the moniteurs, and sometimes through the invocation of medical restrictions. This multiplicity of actors increases the uncertainty that lies at the origin of fluctuations in the rules for the composition of a suitable and satisfactory workstation, and for posting to a ‘good’ one. From the management point of view, such redistributions of tasks are indispensable under existing conditions. In addition to adapting to minor modifications to vehicles or production process sheets ( gammes de montage), rebalancing allows production to be adjusted to changing market demand: an increase or decrease in the number of vehicles to be assembled per day leads to the recruitment or dismissal of temporary staff (and beyond that to a demand for overtime, or the imposition of short-time working). If the pas, the length of the workstation, remains the same (in this case 5 metres), a reduction in demand sees a reduction in the number of workers and in the speed of the line (and thus an increase in the time spent at the same station). For example, on 1 October one year, the production of 8 less cars per shift led to the loss of 5 workstations from the line (out of 86) and an increase of 17 hundredths of a minute in the time to pass through each station. The line-balancer had to distribute the operations from the 5 workstations lost among those that remained, taking account, of course, of the existing work-sheets and the necessary order of priority among operations. The launch of new versions of a recent vehicle (right-hand drive, or special hot-climate models) requires similar readjustments. Finally, and more generally, productivity increases frequently lead to the suppression of one workstation per line; the new distribution of operations engendered in the search for productivity is implemented at the monthly rebalancing of the line that responds to changes in production targets. The line-balancer’s work in preparing for this can be divided into two phases, necessarily intertwined: on the one hand, consulting all the actors involved in the course of the previous month, and then, on one or two Saturdays before the change, working only with supervisors and moniteurs. The line-balancer first of all discusses the ‘skeleton plan’ of production (the canevas – which lays down the number and sequence of special models or options allowed per unit of time – see Chapter 4, p. 162)

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with the cadenceurs who are responsible for setting production targets as a function of commercial demand. The line-balancer consults with the améliorateur and the work-study technician about the results of their own work, concerned with the reduction in assembly time. 20 On the basis of these ‘objective’ data the line-balancer constructs the new workstations around the nuclei of the old, which serve as points of reference for the overall sequence of assembly. This doesn’t mean that these nuclei are invariant, but as changes in them require major reorganisation, they are avoided. The good line-balancer knows most of the workers on both shifts, particularly the permanent employees, together with their preferences, and more importantly, their refusal to countenance one operation or another. Such refusal can be communicated directly to the line-balancer by the worker concerned, but is more commonly passed on via his representative, the team leader. Some workers, for example, reject workstations burdened with ‘special requirements’, where they must read the accompanying instruction sheet to determine which parts are to be fitted; because of problems of memory, they have to read the sheet several times to get it right, and run the risk of making errors incurring 15-point penalties. Other workers will have difficulties in making a particular movement: those with back problems can’t bend, and those with musculo-skeletal problems will be exempted from certain tasks, while tall men will not work inside the passenger compartment. In addition to these factors, which the line-balancer will try and take into account, there is also the question of limited capacities medically and officially recognised. On one line, for example, these affected 14 workers out of 72 (of the two shifts on the line in question), but the proportion concerned rises to something between a third and a half if one adds to these other medical counter-indications affecting working practices. Indeed, after spending 15 or 20 years on the assembly line, the majority of workers try and obtain a medical exemption from assembly-line work, or at least a medical restriction on the work they can do, and thus some control over the composition of the workstation. This is a strategy for dealing with time-constraint and the physical fatigue that comes with it after a certain age. Certain workers thus find themselves working at some 70 per cent or 50 per cent of normal capacity. Here it becomes clear that what is at stake is not just the elaboration of the rules for getting a ‘good’ workstation or for influencing its composition, but, for certain workers, and for all of them beyond a certain age, the defence of their physical integrity. Such is the complexity and ambivalence of life on the assembly line that leads to the explosion of

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inequality among workers, depending on their resources; such is the absurdity of the whole situation, at the very least of the national situation (where young people are without work while ageing workers wear themselves out on the job). At the heart of these contradictory constraints (with medical restrictions on the one hand and the management’s production targets on the other), the line-balancer has to put together 80 workstations21 that will satisfy 160 assembly workers – for the workstations created have to be acceptable to the workers on both shifts! According to one linebalancer, ensuring this acceptability to the two shifts represents 90 per cent of the difficulty. To all the constraints already evoked must now be added the high variation in workload between stations as a result of differences in the nature of the vehicles being assembled there: times vary between 1.8022 and 2.15 minutes on average for a cycle time of 2.30 minutes, with highs and lows of 3.30 and 1.10 (at the same workstation, to compensate). The line-balancer thus has to take into account the capacities and incapacities of workers on the two shifts: when he creates a suitably undemanding workstation (1.30 minutes) for a worker under medical restrictions on shift A, he puts an older worker on to it for shift B (in agreement with the relevant team leader). Although ‘women’s workstations’ find no official justification, the line-balancer will adapt workstations for women by not including the carrying of heavy loads, for example, and arrange to have these staffed on the other shift by older male workers or those under medical restrictions. As was pointed out by the same line-balancer, the work requires intuition above all, firstly to resolve difficult technical problems,23 but also to imagine and so provide what will prove acceptable to the workers concerned. Although hardly planned at all, there thus exist workstations for young people (involving getting into the car), for women and for older workers. The line-balancer brings about a complex socio-technical adjustment, taking into account the social rules that workers have created for themselves within the organisation and its constraints, which oblige a respect for certain characteristics such as sex, age, fatigue, and medical restrictions and counter-indications. Trades unions (the CGT and the CFDT in particular) ensure that institutional rules are followed (medical restrictions, health and safety, conditions of employment) and also contribute to the establishment of informal rules (refusal to countenance the overloading of workstations for older workers or others suffering difficulties). As was said earlier, however, another goal of this adjustment is to limit the play of the actors, that is to say to restrict the

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autonomy of assembly-line workers at their work, so that they respect the constraints of time and quality. To last effectively, this adjustment must also be accepted by the workers: hence the importance of the contribution of the team leader, who ensures that the adjustment proposed (the new distribution of tasks between workstations) is acceptable, for in the case of rejection by the workers he will find himself in the front line. On one occasion, then, when a draft redistribution had been made, the line-balancer proposed to a team-leader on shift B the recasting of a workstation that had already been agreed to by the team leader on the other shift. This second team leader raised the difficulties that it would cause to the man posted to that workstation on his own shift, for the operations were very scattered about the car. The line-balancer argued that he was constrained by considerations regarding the order of assembly as between different workstations. He showed too, that with the new physical postures proposed, the worker would need less strength to clip a particular part, and so would tire less. The team-leader resisted every inch of the way any proposal to require more moving about, to get in and out of the passenger compartment, a change of screwdriver etc. He argued, on the basis of the logical order of assembly, that the new operation should be assigned to another team. Here the shift B team leader was not fighting against an overload, because the operation in question and the moving about required fell within the cycle time; what he was defending was the subjective sense of the worker involved, who would not understand and could not accept the long distances to be covered, even when these were ‘paid for,’ who would believe them irrational and thus find them subjectively tiring. After these complex socio-technical adjustments have been made and the new redistribution of tasks hammered out with the eight team-leaders on a Saturday, with the two supervisors taking the final decision on any unresolved conflicts, the parts containers are rearranged alongside the line in accordance with the requirements of the reorganised workstations. The more serious the reorganisation, the more lively the disputes over the first few days: certain workers will find real difficulty in adapting to the new dispensation by rediscovering the economy of gesture necessary to be able to complete one’s work within the prescribed time; others will try and have an operation subtracted from their workstation, knowing full well that this is a trick very delicate to pull off: to refuse from the beginning without even having tried is to risk disqualifying one’s arguments, but to keep up the effort too long runs the danger of making the work seem doable enough. Supervisory

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staff know this, and for the first two days put temporary additional staff on particularly difficult workstations. Finally, if the operation is in fact removed, then it has to be added to the work of a near neighbour, which will harm the public image of the complainant, who may be thought of as having transgressed the rules of solidarity for the sake of competition and individualism. Trade union intervention, should it prove justified, has the advantage of bringing collective action to bear to resolve an individual problem; union representatives (from the CGT, CFDT and sometimes the FO) therefore find themselves much in demand during this period, to help deal with assembly-line workers’ complaints. Certain workers, unable to find satisfaction, will not hesitate to stay away from work: the doctor may then decide that they should be allocated to a physically less demanding workstation for a week or two, and they will return then to their own, which will sometimes have been improved as requested. When a workstation is too overloaded, the line-balancer will sometimes remove a number of operations, and then gradually restore them. The chef-de-ligne, the assembly-line manager, has overall responsibility for the smooth running of the line, and thus acts as the ultimate court of appeal for unsuccessful complainants; this is why he will not appear on the line until the second or more often the third day after the new redistribution, so as to encounter only ‘real’ claims. The manager lends an ear, and then organises a form of consultation and negotiation between the line-balancer, the team-leader and the assembly worker in question, under his own authority or that of the supervisor. Given official recognition in this way, the claim has some chance of success, at least in part. To think of this rebalancing as an adjustment or accommodation of the operational rules of the social group within the constraints of the capitalist enterprise allows one to understand how this adjustment can only be a matter of endless negotiation. For if it reduces the play (in the sense of slack or scope for movement) in the organisation and possible content of work, its outcome is permanently put into question by the new redistributions of tasks imposed by the market. Furthermore, between each redistribution, the limitations on play imposed by the new adjustment come to appear vain, with everyone attempting to exploit their own resources within the new relationship of forces: physical capacities, charm, trade union militancy or medical restrictions for some, promises or symbolic violence for others. The monthly rebalancing of the line is, indeed, the very issue at stake in the workers’ construction of the rules which regulate everyday life at the workstation. The front-line management, that is to say the supervisory staff, ensure that these

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unwritten rules, as they are elaborated or as they find application in the everyday life of the shop, do not enter into conflict with the goals of the enterprise.

Identity and reference: an interference field When operatives ‘lend body and soul’ to their work, 24 to that extent they have assented to being dispossessed of themselves. From this ensues a split between the state of the subject when active but ‘loaned out’, and in the state of self-recovery.

Work and rest: lending and recovering This double relation to oneself, general in waged employment, takes on different forms depending on one’s position within the enterprise. Thus one supervisor, radiant on his own territory, can seem dull and lacklustre once out of the shop. For assembly-line workers, however, this dualism takes on a particular intensity. This is one way of understanding, at least in part, the attitudes manifested when the line is visited by outsiders, a circumstance described by assembly workers as being particularly difficult.25 To be seen while not master of oneself, disciplined into submission to the rhythm and to the precise details of an activity robbed on all coherence, is a troubling indignity that results occasionally in some workers’ provocative behaviour towards visitors. In this respect, personal experience of assembly-line work gained in the course of this research is also significant: the fact of being observed, as a worker, by visitors, while imagining oneself precisely to be studying the other assembly-line workers, was a source of obscure discomfort – not shame at being seen in such a situation, but a sense of mistake, of misunderstanding, of not being the right specimen for examination. On reflection, this sense of discomfort has much in common with that experienced by the workers; the sense of misunderstanding is in fact the common effect of the confusion brought about by the gaze of the other, outside the line, between two aspects of identity which the operative wishes to keep dissociated in his mind: the one he believes he is lending to his work, for which he does not hold himself entirely responsible, and that of which he intends to remain the master. Consideration of such visits and of the impact that they have on operatives at their work brings out the importance for assembly-line workers of the distinction between these two kinds of relation to their identity. Other situations of duality could be evoked to the same end. In accounts of strikes, the relations between strikers and non-strikers,

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even when unmarked by animosity,26 or the aggressiveness of non-strikers towards supervisors at such times, both bear witness to similar divisions entangled with the actual issues of the strike. Given the unease that attends the shift from the work to the non-work situation, one can easily understand that the transitions between operatives’ two identities are particularly sensitive and significant. This is true of the transformation in the locker-room, where the change of clothes is accompanied by attitudes that highlight the moment of transition, an ‘in-between’ identity, while there is a sudden flourishing of conversational references to identities beyond the plant and the physical body, and this is also the case when breaks are being prepared for by workers going up the line. The intensity of this self-recovery in moments of rest, constructed as moments of autonomy, also finds expression in assembly-line worker’s efforts to control the organisation of time and relationships. Rest periods are occasions to be seen as one wants to be seen, a time to enjoy elective affinities – not to occupy the place assigned to one in the network of production. This notion is supported by another personal experience: the meal-break is a particularly tricky moment for the observer. Observation of the working situation, even from outside, is in fact more or less accepted by the majority of workers, whose attitudes will reflect the status and behaviour of the observer. But time out from work is not included in the same implicit contract, and it isn’t easy for an observer to find himself included in one of the groups that form for coffee, and even less so at mealtimes. To try and maintain the observation, to impose one’s presence, is in a way to deny this parenthetical autonomy. Acceptance by the assembly-line workers then has to come about through relations of a different kind, freely entered into: through a private understanding.

Rest and elective affinities Formed on a voluntary basis, meal-time groups are relatively stable. The particular importance accorded to the relationships that find expression here invites investigation of the logic behind the connections established and an attempt to sketch what one might call the social geography of the situation. On the MV team the meal-break is a dispersed occasion, being taken in places of different kinds. Alongside the line there exist a number of réfectoires. Here one finds two young moniteurs, making plain their attachment to the official discourse on hygiene and cleanliness. The greater part of the workers, however, eat elsewhere, mostly beside the

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line. Some have been able to provide themselves with tables, scattered between the parts containers like so many management concessions to the old tradition of taking your break where you work. These are occupied by recognised groups. Others are more dispersed, alone at their own workstation on the floor or in the pit, where sometimes they will have a chair, perhaps a little table; or again, like certain of the youngsters, inside a parts container. Finally, three workers from the team generally leave the plant, with a pass that sometimes requires some effort to obtain, and make for a nearby café. This takes some 5 to 10 minutes each way, but eating outside the plant represents a form of resistance to the discipline of the shop, a lungful of civilian life even if not a chance to take a glass of wine. On the whole, while the youngsters are all visible and easily tracked down, the old-timers tend to be more dispersed and many of them actually disappear during the breaks. And what of the team leader? He eats in his cabin, the most isolated of all, this being the price he pays for his post and for his authority, in an effort to maintain an image free of favouritism. In the same way, the moniteurs do not in general share their meal-breaks with the other workers on their module. Mealtimes are marked, then, by a high degree of dispersion among the team. The groups which are then formed are based on other connections. Young and old stay separate, 27 as do the French and the North Africans (though this is not the case on the neighbouring line). Structured by relationships that have very little to do with the team, these groups maintain a certain durability despite the endless shifting about of personnel within the shop. The connections may be old friendships, or personal relations established outside work, or the mutual sympathy among the strikers of 1989, the key conflict in collective memory. The relationships thus manifested are never anodyne, for the expression of affinity is also a claim, a self-identification. Finally, a remnant of older workers, mostly immigrants, maintain themselves in individual isolation, generally keeping close to the line, protecting themselves by this withdrawal from the consequences of identification: no partners, no problems. Whether in the form of isolation, or in the formation of groups without relation to the working group, the meal-break is a time of distancing from the team. It is a coffee-machine, paradoxically, that does something to keep some sense of team identity intact. Run by one of the moniteurs, it is a tolerated private venture, like a number of others in the shop. Much more of a ‘public space’ than the eating areas proper, this ‘café’ attenuates separations between groups and hierarchical differences

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between assembly workers, moniteurs, team leaders and fork-lift drivers . . . and also the separations between the lines. It is also the place where delicate negotiations between workers, team leaders and technicians are initiated. It represents a relatively open forum, although it is the outcome of a very particular history. For it was the team leader, who, on taking up his post, asked one of the moniteurs to establish the café, so as to create a centre that would act as a counterweight, within the team, to a nucleus of rural workers that was becoming too influential. The moniteur’s café was thus part of a strategy of reconquest, like the judiciously distributed hints of promotion. Unlike the so-called ‘social’ provision at HC, organised by plant management as part of the standard infrastructure, this coffee-machine planted alongside the line was a ‘made-to-measure’ management solution. In the HC shop, on the other hand, space has been set aside for a collective team life: this is the rest area placed alongside the line. The very creation of such spaces testifies to management’s growing attention to rest-time, to ordering it and staging it; it is testimony too to the growing importance of questions of ‘man-management,’ that is to say, the organisation, control and motivation of staff. This intervention marks the third stage of a development that may be schematised as follows: until the 1960s the company tolerated the autonomous organisation of rest-time by the manual workers themselves, who spent it mostly at the workstation. The 1970s saw the introduction of rest areas at the edges of the shop, in the context of the contemporary wave of improvements in working conditions, while autonomous interstitial spaces in the working area were tolerated. Finally the end of the 1980s saw the organisation of rest become an integral part of personnel management. Rest areas are now considered not only in terms of relaxation, hygiene, convenience and comfort, but also under the aspect of their role in the strengthening of relationships and the integration of the team. Sociability is taken as a goal, as an element of labour relations. The construction of the HC building at the end of the 1980s gave an opportunity to put these new ideas into practice. The rest area is laid out between two parallel assembly lines, and the ways in which this space is appropriated by those for whom it is intended are studied by managers. One of the assembly-line managers was thus able to point out different rest areas as illustrating the variety of relations established between team leaders and their charges, in the various ways in which the furniture was positioned: one isolated himself from his workers behind a wall of pigeon-holes, topped by a notice-board, while another allowed his office to merge into the relaxation area, without any visible demarcation.

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Whatever the communitarian hypothesis that underlies the establishment of these rest areas, the workers themselves exhibit a wide range of different attitudes. The occupants of one rest area in HC1, a small group of veterans, made up of men and women of French origin, are the only ones to have established a kitty to pay for their electric coffee-machine and their biscuits. They have made themselves at home here, although they do not belong to the team, coming in fact from nearby lines. This paradox is only apparent; they feel all the more free given that the resident team-leader is not their own. The AM1 in question is in fact rarely to be found in his office during breaks, doing what he can to find things to do elsewhere, recreating an opacity where planners had wanted transparency. Going down the line of tables starting from the office end, the team’s workers form several successive groups, all more or less distinct: a handful of youngsters, irregular users; a Portuguese and number of North Africans; finally at the end, a heterogeneous group of older workers, mainly French, Yugoslav and North African. All in all, some 15 or 20 assembly-line workers, hardly one in two of the members of the team. Nearly half the team’s members hardly ever come here, disappearing as soon as the line comes to a halt. Despite the difference in conditions, here one rediscovers many of the features from MV, especially the challenge to the original project of collective transparency represented by manual workers’ marked attachment to autonomy in the organisation of rest-time, whose private character is thus reaffirmed.

Multiple identificatory points of reference In somewhat differing ways, assembly-line workers in HC and MV exhibit a similar range of identificatory possibilities. Permanent Peugeot employees distinguish themselves from the temporary workers taken on for the launch of the 406.28 The latter are looking to be taken on permanently, in accordance with the hopes that have been held out by their recruiters and with a tradition now established for some 15 years.29 Though they might have a different status, they hope to lose it, and in the hope of this they will do what permanent staff might refuse. They are always on trial, labouring at complex, tiring, sometimes over-burdened workstations, and they practically never make mistakes. They are generally more willing than their established colleagues. Nowadays thought of as youngsters, the temporary workers might once have been regarded as ‘settled-down’ adults, being around 25 years of age and sometimes the fathers of families. They are regarded with some ambivalence by Peugeot employees. On the one hand, the latter

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can see in them the hope of the plant’s continuation as a source of employment, in manual work in particular, and this is often linked to a sense of intergenerational solidarity: temporary workers may be the children of veteran assembly-line workers. It is thus generally accepted that temporary workers should make the most of the opportunity, which includes a willingness to endure situations that others would not. 30 On the other hand, it is thought to be completely normal that the temporary workers should be landed with the very worst workstations, as part of the need to prove themselves. Their specificity is constituted by their legal status, which derives its legitimacy from outside the plant, and is acknowledged if not accepted by the great majority of the plant’s permanent employees. There is another distinction: that between the French and the foreigners. This often evoked difference is superimposed on that between those born in France and the immigrants. Such distinctions are all the more sensitive as the Sochaux plant has from the very beginning, in varying degrees, represented a powerful pole of attraction for migrant labour. The manual workers at the plant thus present a type of stratigraphy by period and by catchment area. Among the French, those from the Franche-Comté and southern Alsace have been joined for more than half a century by workers from Burgundy and northern Alsace. Recruitment was then extended to regions with a surplus manual workforce, Lorraine, Brittany and the South, to fill first skilled and then unskilled positions. Among the immigrants, waves of Poles and Italians came before and after the Second World War, afterwards becoming largely integrated. Then the late 1960s and 1970s again saw massive recourse to immigrant labour, recruited en bloc in its country of origin. The ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ of post-war growth also saw the recruitment of Algerians on an individual basis, and at the same time, the children of previous waves of immigration, themselves generally of French nationality, also began to work at the plant. That is to say, the history of the Peugeot factory at Sochaux, like that of other major industrial enterprises in France, 31 is indissolubly linked to the absorption of successive waves of migrants of various origins. For about 15 years, the recruitment of foreign workers has more or less come to a complete halt. What is more, among the plans for job reductions implemented in the 1980s, two32 encouraged the return to their own country of 2,000 recent immigrants. Those who remain are thus workers who came some 20 years or so ago, now well-established at the plant whatever the nature of the welcome extended to them when they arrived. Many of them have in fact left, and those who remain

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have more or less found acceptance, their specificity being attenuated with time. Today they represent 15.6 per cent of manual workers, a proportion that is slowly falling with departures into retirement and early retirement. Among them the most numerous are the Moroccans (30 per cent of all foreigners), followed by the Yugoslavs (19 per cent), 33 the Turks (18 per cent), the Algerians (13 per cent), the Portuguese (11 per cent) and the Italians (4 per cent). The curtailment of growth at the plant has thus seen the end of the massive employment of immigrant labour on insecure terms which in the past had helped disorganise worker groups and networks. Although it never reached the level seen in the factories of the Paris region, the recruitment of immigrant labour did lead to defensive and hostile reactions among sections of the French workforce, making the distinction between French and foreigner a major line of cleavage in the assembly shops. In any event, the immigrant worker does not go unnoticed. Though it was in fact the arrival of the Yugoslavs from the late 1960s onward that represented the greatest shock to the life of the assembly line, workers of North African origin suffer from a diffuse and of course unevenly distributed racism on the part of some of the workers and supervisory staff. This racism is directed at the Arabs, and sometimes, by extension to Muslims in general, at the Turks, though the latter are very often thought of differently. The North African workforce is nonetheless a fairly disparate group. Many of the Moroccans, who represent the most numerous foreign nationality, arrived through direct recruitment in their country of origin ( through official French and Moroccan channels), while the Algerians have been taken on as individuals in France. Such differences are repeated to some extent in relationships to the enterprise and to work, their managerial superiors finding the Moroccans far easier to deal with than the Algerians. Always subject to a specific form of stigmatisation that varies in explicitness and degree and which essentially originates outside the workplace itself, the North Africans often adopt a discreet attitude and avoid forming any too obvious groups. One might speak, perhaps, of a constrained disengagement. We have been told that co-operative behaviours on the part of some of them, such as participation in the quality circles of the 1980s, was seen by some workers and supervisors as an illegitimate attempt to gain advancement, and was thus stymied. In any event, there are very few North African moniteurs to be found on the line, though there are a number of ‘first generation’ French of North African extraction who hold this position. Living accommodation also presents differentiating features, equally present in all the teams studied. Of the whole, some hundred people,

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almost a half, lived in the conurbation known as the District Urbain du Pays de Montbéliard, within a radius of some 5 to 10 kilometres. The most populous constituent communes have major housing estates built in the 1960s, such as Grand Charmont, and especially Bethoncourt and Valentigney, or a little later, such as Audincourt, which provided accommodation for workers who wanted to live closer to the plant. Among the French, a section of these families then took out mortgages to buy houses on new private developments, sometimes situated alongside the massive public housing projects. Among those left living in the ‘blocks’ the proportion of foreign workers is sometimes very high. The other half of the workforce lives within a radius of 50 kilometres: they may come from the valley of the Doubs, or from the foot of the Vosges or Jura mountains, or even from the nearer part of Alsace. A substantial number of these take advantage of the company bus service, sometimes doing part of the journey by car. Some may spend two hours travelling a day. Whether the journey is long or short, the company buses impose their own timetable, leading to waiting times on arrival and on departure, and to quick naps being taken when they can. Travel together helps maintain networks established outside the plant, maintained within it by reciprocal visits and coffees taken together. Among these workers from the wider region, the worker-peasant of the old days is becoming rare, just as the proportion of country-dwellers, in the strict sense, seems to be falling. Yet the countryside is never far from local life, except perhaps for the inhabitants of the big public housing projects. On the other hand, there are very many employees who engage in the supplementary occupations encouraged by the shift system, though this varies enormously in scale and regularity. Cutting wood for fuel is a classic, and there are many who do odd jobs. Translated into another context than that of the car-plant, technical know-how and facility often finds expression in such activities. In the final analysis, these different forms of life outside the plant provide its ‘regional’ or rural employees with alternative centres of interest which relativise the importance of relations at work. There thus exists, with many complex and subtle nuances, a broad palette of styles of life, from that of the country-dwellers to the denizens of great decaying public housing projects. The affinities expressed at work are generated, then, by a number of different identificatory references whose effects may interact in combination or contradiction, these references being assembled and rearranged into identity positions as a function of the demands of the situation. Here we wish to draw attention to the importance of such references in the relationships elaborated within the shop.

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The factory, a productive and porous space for the construction of identity The team, like the plant itself, thus represents a porous milieu: workers come to it with their identities from outside, which provide the foundation in part for their nexus of relations within the plant, both within and beyond the team. Their attachment to these elements of identity manifests itself in the everyday life of the line, as soon as its constraint is removed, during halts, ‘gaps’ or meal-breaks. This external identity can also be glimpsed in the visitors who come to see certain workers, making evident the connections that they have with employees in other categories. Sometimes these visits embody old working relations now undone by the hazards of career, but most often they have their origin outside the plant, being the expression of neighbourly or familial relations, or less often, of shared activities or of cultural, religious or national affinities. These points of reference outside work do not necessarily gradually attenuate to give birth to a new, essentially occupational identity, and indeed their resistance to the social segmentation represented by the system of occupational categories is a sign of the robustness of external identities. Nonetheless, the identificatory characteristics generated by the plant cannot be neglected: they combine the roles occupied and the solidarities proclaimed. The most obvious features derive no doubt from the function exercised, whose importance is underlined by the solitude of the team leader at meal-times and the ‘semi-detached’ position of the moniteurs in relation to their colleagues on the line. For assembly-line workers themselves, it is a matter of their position in the networks of the team or shop, or of their rank in the team. The posting of a team member to a particular workstation, to a position of trust or advantage, affects the beneficiary both in the attitude he adopts towards the team leader and in the recognition he receives from the team in terms of the post occupied. Finally, identificatory characteristics also derive from commitments: this is the case with members of the militant CGT and the enthusiasts for employee involvement, the ex-strikers and the nonstrikers, those who will respond to an exceptional appeal on behalf of the enterprise and those who will not. How are they combined, these characteristics from within and without the plant? Their combinations follow no single logic and vary in their significance. Internal identificatory references put employees into positions which the very issues at stake in them tend to keep fixed. In this respect, external reference may attenuate the tensions between reciprocal positions and relativise the importance of the issues

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internally at stake, inserting these into a mesh of relations of another order. In this respect the outside world can offer identity-compensations that help one to accept frustration and other difficulties at work. One assembly worker, for example, once recognised as a skilled worker but now back on the line for the last years before retirement, makes no bones about his weariness of work, yet spends his meal-breaks with a hard-line CGT member while occasionally taking the team leader with him for some leisure cycling. There is then no single, exclusive identification, and each employee has recourse, depending on the circumstances, to a particular combination of identificatory facets or features taken from different social spaces, some based in working relations while others come into the shop from outside. A grasp of this is essential to understanding the relational play established between employees within the shop. At the same, the mode of combination between internal and external reference can vary. Sometimes external reference acts as a last resort, an identificatory refuge in the face of difficulties encountered with the enterprise or in the shop; sometimes the two registers converge, and identificatory particularities derived from outside find mediation through the plant and its life. These differences of articulation are very clear in the comparison between younger and older workers in the shop.

Youngsters and veterans: an unprecedented polarisation The age difference between assembly-line workers, sometimes considerable, has not only become a primary criterion of distinction, but more especially an essential component in the structuring of relations between operatives in the shop and even the plant in general. The disagreement presented in the box below, between two assembly-line workers of different generations from the same team in HC1, illuminates the situation. This is simply one example, involving not ideal types but two individuals with their own personal characteristics, and there are always differences of view. Their argument, however, is not untypical. Hence, during a break taken in the rest area, a young moniteur from the same team, a team-player by definition, could not help but exclaim, irritated, on reading the plant newspaper: ‘There’s nothing but old-timers in it’. Such oppositions have been observed in all three teams observed; in them one finds three intertwined themes, presented in the interpretative table below. In this dispute, the oppositions bear on the national and regional situation, the economic position of the enterprise, on social relations within it and on the relationship to work – a whole range of fields.

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Furthermore, the arguments combine into two more or less contradictory systems of explanation that are constituted in the course of the ongoing confrontation.

Box 4

Youngsters and veterans: construction of an opposition

A dispute between assembly line workers, reconstructed from contemporaneous notes, followed by a tabulation of the arguments advanced Between 5 and 9 in the evening, there was a great discussion between Didier, a worker in his forties, and Gabriel, a younger man at the next workstation up the line. The breaks in discussion enforced by the succession of cars gave an opportunity to develop and refine the arguments to be put forward when discussion again became possible. According to Didier, a lot of youngsters like Gabriel are damaging their own interests by allowing themselves to be used on several workstations, which allows a reduction in the number of polyvalents. They are deluding themselves in their hope of climbing the ladder of promotion, because they are, in fact, going to stay on the line. He is irritated by Gabriel’s indifference to the fact that the advantages workers do enjoy are the fruit of struggle and solidarity: ‘Who was it paid your dole when you were unemployed?’. Or: ‘Working the way you do, getting up on the cars so as to be able to work your way up the line, you’re going to have an accident, like so-and-so.’ To which Gabriel replies that he isn’t going to have an accident. That if Didier has ended up in the same place as he started, that isn’t what he’s going to do. He’s not going to stay on the line. If you asked him, if there were only young workers the business would work better; the old-timers sabotaged the launch of the 605 with their strike in 1989 (‘That’s what they say in the media’, he says to justify himself, because he wasn’t there). No other business in the region offers the benefits that Peugeot does, even in Switzerland, where he’s worked; he’s had plenty of experience before coming here. The old-timers don’t realise, because in their day it was easy to find work. A significant example of the difference in point of view: Didier mentions that after the holidays Gabriel won’t enjoy the same bus service as now, because the company is continuing to reduce provision by shortening routes or abolishing services. For Gabriel, even if it proves to be true, he’s still better off here, so great are Peugeot’s advantages over other businesses in the region. According to him the union reps are just lazy, taking advantage of the time allowed to them to sit about on pallets. As for him, he’s not the type to ‘sit on his arse’ and never will. The discussion becomes more heated. Gabriel accuses Didier of being intolerant. He in turn replies, in the crudest terms, that Gabriel’s ideas aren’t worth anything, and accuses him of flirting with the SIAP, the ‘independent’ union. To join would be to lose one’s freedom. According to Gabriel, this union, now called the CSL, will soon be the only union at the plant.

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Box 4

(Continued)

Two representations of working life Didier, the veteran

Gabriel, the young worker

– everyone has his own workstation, with polyvalents to cover them all – respect working methods, ensure quality for a quiet life

– logic of virtuosity: it’s not given to everyone to work fast

The other age group

– unaware of the need for assembly-line workers to defend themselves – threaten historic gains – naïve and hyperactive

– unaware of the needs of the business and the demands of competition – egotistical old men – a dead weight and a threat to the business

Working conditions

– improvements won from the bosses – improvements imposed by State and by joint employer–employee bodies – being worn away at Peugeot

– improvements granted by the company – better at Peugeot than elsewhere

Type of solidarity

– workers’ solidarity – protective role of public authorities

– solidarity with the company

Trades unions and strikes

– the necessity of militant tradeunionism, yet joining a union is a loss of individual freedom – the ‘independent’ union is a tool of management and acts against workers’ interests – it is strikes that bring gains: the 1989 strike allowed the recruitment of young workers – paralysed by austerity policy

– militant unionists are just lazy

Views of work

– only the clumsy have accidents

– for a responsible, non-striking unionism that protects the company – strikes endanger the business; that of 1989 sabotaged the launch of the 605

Source: Based on a document provided by a team-leader and confirmed by interviews and observations by J.-P. Durand.

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The trade unions are aware of this generational rupture, and are making efforts to attract younger workers. In the course of the election of workplace representatives in 1996 the CGT newspaper published the testimony of a young activist, reproduced in the box below, which takes young workers as a particular category which needs to be addressed by specific arguments. Box 5

A young CGT candidate argues from his experience

YOUNG . . . AND STANDING FOR ELECTION You recent recruits, if only you knew! Before I came to Sochaux, I had known what poverty was, and I didn’t want my children to go through what I went through. So when I was taken on by Peugeot in September ’92 I was determined to climb the ladder to make sure that my family would never have any money worries. At the time I was ‘advised’ to join the CFTC, to be ‘productive,’ and to do everything I was asked by management, so as to speed up my ‘career progression’: I became a polyvalent. I saw other young recruits like me, before whom they dangled the prospects of a career. And once having become moniteurs or polyvalents, they found themselves stuck on the line, because of shortages of manpower. Very quickly I realised that my work wasn’t enough for Peugeot: my managers asked me to keep an eye on certain other workers, and to report to them if necessary on their discussions and activities. I wasn’t willing to trade solidarity and fraternity for a few more francs at the end of the month. Because every man worth the name ought to respect his fellows, I refused to sink into individualism, to betray my workmates. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I don’t want to stay silent in the face of injustice. I don’t want my children to be ashamed of me. In standing as a candidate in these elections, I want to take action against injustice, to press for better working conditions and higher wages. But more than anything else, I want to defend the dignity that belongs to all of us. The dignity that the management wants us to forget, in return for the carrot it promises. Now it’s time for you, too, to make up your mind. Source: Le Métallo, newspaper of CGT Peugeot-Sochaux, election special, 1996.

The rhetoric of the text lies somewhere between self-introduction and conquest. What is interesting is the way it refers to the young, of whom the author is still one: part of the same generation of recruits, more or less, with its hope of ‘climbing the ladder’, the acceptance of supervisors’ demands as regards work and advice as regards unionism, the beginnings of promotion. None of this, which is shared by most of

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the younger workers, is challenged in principle. The break comes with seeing other young people’s hopes collapse, and is developed through the idea of the price that must be paid for ‘climbing’: the abandonment of one’s dignity as a worker, understood as human dignity, as fraternity and solidarity, to founder in denunciation, petty treachery and individualism. The penultimate line shows a hardening of the argument on the theme of promotion that is central to the debate: the promised promotion not only comes with strings attached, but is actually an illusion, a mirage that leads to dishonour, and implicitly, to ostracism by one’s fellows. The article is intended to deconstruct from within, and by argument from experience, the young workers’ system of reference. In the way that this is done, the idea of promotion is central. Only when the shift in perspective on this has been effected are the other themes evoked (injustice, working conditions, wages). They have an explicitly secondary place. In a certain way, this is almost an account of a conversion experience, the story of one who has left behind the world of the young, with its frame of reference, to adopt the values of the veterans, which are presented as those of the community of workers as a whole. This shift confirms the strength of the opposition between two incompatible frames of reference, dominant in the sense that they tend to organise, in hegemonic fashion, the other distinctive elements examined above, either by integrating them, or marginalising them. Finally, it also raises questions to which one will have to return about historical, conjunctural character of the polarisation, that is to say, about its appearance and about its future prospects of development.

Strategies and trajectories: the present in perspective The difference in attitude between young and old is itself very old. What is significant in the present situation is, first, the way this distinction between youngsters and old-timers tends to prevail over others and, secondly, the particular positions and arguments that underlie the cleavage.

The force of the conjuncture As a group the youngsters share a number of characteristics. They are French citizens, they have school-leaving qualifications, and they tend to highlight the relative advantages of working at Peugeot, taking up the plant management’s ideas on the need for mobilisation, adopting

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a non-striking position and rejecting militant unionism. This distinctive attitude among the younger workers can be explained to a great degree by the age structure of the manual workforce and the particular history that it reflects. This structure can be observed in the workers in the Carrosserie’s two assembly shops, shown in Figure 3.1 below. The population here shows an atypical age-distribution, in which the younger generations are but poorly represented, with numbers in each age-group increasing into the late forties: the age-cohort reaches its maximum size at 45 years of age in HC and 48 in MV. The decreasing size of the younger cohorts reflects a fall in recruitment over some twenty years to a level much below that required to compensate for departures from the workforce. Beyond the late forties, the numbers fall away rapidly: there are very few workers older than 55, thanks to periodical efforts to encourage early retirement. Furthermore, this general pattern is modulated by dips at the ages of 30–33 and 39–43, seen in both shops. The ‘young’ part of the workforce is thus composed of two groups: the 34–38-year-olds, and the 26–29-year-olds, the latter forming a distinctly smaller group. These marked dips suggest moments of drastic reduction in recruitment, moments partly disguised by the age-spread on entry. What is more, the distribution only really begins at 20 years of age, which suggests a relatively late age on entry for unskilled manual workers. Finally, older workers represent a higher proportion of the total in MV than they do in HC, a feature which reinforces the differences between the two shops. That the proportion of older workers is exceptionally high becomes even clearer when one compares this age-distribution to that for the years 1960–70, years when the plant was in rapid expansion and when the young found themselves in the overwhelming majority. For all occupational categories taken together, in 1963 no less than 62 per cent of employees at Sochaux were less than 35 years of age, while retirement was taken at 65, and not between 57 and 60 as it was in 1994. This distribution has now been reversed, with those under 35 representing only 18.2 per cent of the workforce in 1994. The peculiar features of the age-distribution and of its development through time are explained to a great extent by the history of recruitment, which collapsed in 1979, then remained at almost zero from 1980 to 1988, and then again from 1991 onward, although 1989 and 1990 did see a weak upturn in recruitment, reflecting the coming into service of the new HC shop, and perhaps even more the launch of the 605. In this history one can see the radical break that resulted from the crisis that Peugeot underwent in the early 1980s, and which led to the

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Montage Voiture 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Figure 3.1

Habillage Caisse 1 1 6 7 5 8 9 16 9 20 15 6 10 9 5 17 30 36 43 45 35 31 30 28 38 42 56 58 65 66 56 39 46 48 31 36 34 9 3

1 1 4 6 8 13 13 16 27 28 26 32 21 22 16 9 24 42 64 67 66 61 68 65 44 66 89 100 85 93 86 70 57 66 41 43 38 38 12 3

58 56 54 52 50 48 46 44 42 40 38 36 34 32 30 28 26 24 22 20 18 0

20

40

Montage Voiture

60

80

100

120

Habillage Caisse

Age distribution of workers in HC and MV, January 1996

Source: Automobiles Peugeot, Carrosserie Sochaux, 1996.

energetic productivity policy pursued since 1983. While the earlier logic had combined growth and mobility, Peugeot now more or less closed its doors. In breaking the continuity of recruitment, this long period of non-recruitment created a gulf between two generations. These statistics demonstrate the particular nature of the cleavage between youngsters and old-timers. Not only are the young very much

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in the minority, but they are all the more separated from the rest of the workforce by the paucity of workers in the 30–34 age group. The circumstances of recruitment also go to widen the gap, for while the old-timers were recruited in annual waves of thousands, the youngsters got in only after a number of years of difficulty. Employment at Peugeot still represents a great hope, in that the business has retained, in the region, the reputation for strength that comes from its hegemonic position, but also because it has a name for its concern to save employees’ jobs. But it isn’t easy to get in. For years, now, in fact, young people have first entered the plant as temporary workers, and may well have retained this status for a year or longer. Their relation to assembly-line work is then different from that of their elders: it represents the hope of long-term employment and then its realisation. Equally importantly, for them this generates a direct, lived connection between their own situation and the productive activity of the business: in the three teams studied, more recent recruitment was almost entirely connected with the launch of the 405 and the 605. This is how it is that one finds one of the youngsters, like Gabriel, lecturing an old-timer like Didier, accusing him of never having experienced hard times, of knowing nothing of the difficulty of finding a job, and so of having no excuse, in a way, for accepting assembly-line work when jobs were still relatively easy to come by. This difference in experience gives a different resonance, in the two generations, to the management’s discourse on the theme. Once in, the youngsters enjoy many advantages: their education, the selection they have undergone, their freshness at work, the very fact that they are few, and finally the encouragement of team-leaders and supervisors, which has seen some of them already established as polyvalents or moniteurs. Furthermore, there are few of them to go after the posts that do become available. These conditions, particularly favourable to them in the early stages of their careers, may well not last very long, for in a few years’ time assembly-line workers will be taking retirement in massive numbers, and even if productivity increases are maintained, with the reductions in the workforce that this will entail, recruitment will begin again. The proportion of youngsters will then increase, youth will lose its scarcity value, and its ‘competitive advantage’ will be diminished.

The present: a moment in a career This examination of distinctions between youngsters and old-timers gives occasion to return, once again, to the question of the long term. One has seen that differentiation between young and old is constructed on the basis of elements that go far beyond the present. This observation

130 Living Labour

then leads one to a more specific study of the role of this long temporality in the construction of identities and of relations between operatives. Issues in the organisation of work, of operatives’ relationship to their work or to each other, are indeed often seen as ‘present-tense’ systems, systems whose play takes place essentially in the present moment, or in a relatively stable manner. Until now, our own presentation has also relied on this synchronic structure: the space of work, the organisation of production, the technical layouts and the network of operatives have all been construed in the present tense, or in a time corresponding to that of the development of organisation or of the networks. This hypothesis of the stable present sustains a point of view which in considering the interaction between actors and systems, takes its departure from the latter. Yet on several occasions, and more particularly in connection with the composition of identity, or social play between operatives, or the effects of the conjuncture, one has seen another point of view emerge amongst operatives themselves. This involves not only seeing systems and networks from their own point of view – in exploiting them, for example, to gain strategic advantage – but also seeing them in terms of a ‘journey’, on the basis of their own diachronic time, of their life at work considered as a trajectory. This is a point of view that brings together the problematics of identity and strategy: operatives’ interpretations and representations of their own course through systems and networks are essential measures for coming to judgements on these systems and networks. Such representations help determine the roles and the actions that operatives define for themselves within the network. That is to say, if organisation determines and delimits a field of possibilities and constraints for the operative, the latter operates within this organisation in terms of the vision that he has of his own trajectory within it. The example provided by the members of the two teams studied allows this question to be examined in greater detail, using two tables (on pp. 132ff.) that give a synoptic view of the career paths of many of them, the data being drawn from investigations in the shop and from the records of the plant’s personnel department. Among these data, the employee classification and employee potential require some explanation. Assembly-line workers are currently recruited at 170 points on the scale, and 200 points is the ceiling which the directorate of human resources at the Sochaux Centre intends to apply to those workers who remain assemblyline workers to the very end of their working lives, with any breach of this limit requiring exceptional justification, the restriction being intended to

Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 131

help control the wage bill. This means that the ordinary assembly-line career starts at 170 points and ends at 190 or 200. Employee potential, to simplify somewhat, is the level the employee may hope to attain by the end of his career: it is a target, and not a commitment. This potential is established by the employee’s hierarchical superior, and is updated on the occasion of the regular progress interviews between the two. A potential above 200 points may be the result of a certain exaggeration by supervisory staff in the futures they hold out, something that seems fairly frequent and is to be explained by the constant pressure for future prospects exerted by assembly-line workers. It may also be the last trace of exceptional prospects previously but no longer on offer. In any event, supervisors are directed to ensure that in the last few years of work the potential actually matches the current occupational classification. This often results, in these later years, in the downward revision of the potential ascribed, with a particularly demoralising effect on those concerned. The potential is one of the most visible elements in the mechanism for the individualisation of manual pay, a mechanism which brings the whole of the workforce under a similar career-management system. What is more, this also embodies a rejection of the features which dominated remuneration systems until the 1970s, which were based on occupational categories, on jobs, which is to say on characteristics that did not depend directly on the person who was doing the work. Another key element in individualisation are the arrangements for individual pay-increases. The potential and the individual points attributed are wedges inserted into the logic of occupational classification, or, to put it another way, ties which strengthen a logic of shared enterprise. They are indicators of prospects, and in addition, testimony to earlier expectations – memories of prospects held out in the past. In this way they help one to grasp the inflections and distortions undergone by the career trajectory of the workers concerned. Trajectories are not limited to a simple alternative between stagnation for basic-grade assembly-line workers and promotion for polyvalents and moniteurs. A significant proportion of ordinary workers have already seen a stymied progression, with promotion followed by demotion, or an ascent halted before its expected conclusion: for both teams taken together, no less than 12 of the 42 workers over the age of 30 have experienced such disappointments – as many as did in fact finally gain the promotion they had hoped for. In the majority of cases it is difficult to divorce more individual reasons from the effects of the generally diminished opportunities for promotion, or indeed for the ordinary

1989

1989

I/v

1992

1989

27

1994

N’bour

I/v

26

1995

I/v

32

31

29

23

22

1995

I/v

22

1995 27

22

21

1994 1995

Age

Entry

1995

(?)

Trajectory

Career trajectories

I/v

I/v

Source

Table 3.1

Personal problems; contact with CGT?

Well set for promotion to polyvalent but after repeated transfers stopped making progress. Anxious

Moniteur, ex-militant

? Atypical youngster, an enigma, transferred from other workshop, easygoing but a glutton for training

Recent recruit, already Polyvalent

Problems with difficult workstation, fearful of being left there

Confident in future, patient, with a relative in management

Temp., hoping for permanent job

Temp., hoping for permanent job

Temp., hoping for permanent job

Temp., hoping for permanent job

Post and attitude

180

190

200−

215

215−

190

170

190

190−

200−

Potential

170

170

170

170

170

170

170

Points

CAP Turning

HGV

BEP Bodywork

Voc. Bac. Engineering

CAP

Voc. Bac.

CAP

CAP

Educ. qualifications

132

1975 1977 1978

I/v

I/v Meal

I/v

1970 1970

I/v

N’bour

1977

1978

I/v

(?)

1976

I/v N’bour

45

45

44

42

42

40

40

40

39

39

1974 1977

37

1978

Meal

37

1978

Meal

34

1979

N’bour

Ex-moniteur on other team, asked to return to previous job after conflict with foreman

Moniteur; Yugoslav immigrant

North African immigrant

Would like variety of workstations; striker in 1989

Polyvalent, hoped to become moniteur; now doubts he will; works on the side

Asks for nothing, hopes for nothing: committed CGT member

Wants to become polyvalent to some degree, and to rise one grade; Moroccan, active outside work

Wanted to become polyvalent, but no longer; part-time agriculturist

Prioritises life outside, no ambitions for work

Moniteur

Had promising future; problems with work and with foreman; Algerian immigrant.

Polyvalent; recent take-off.

Career drifting; personal problems.

200

215

190

190

190

180

180

190

180

200

190

190

200

240+

240

200+

200−

215

190

200

200−

190+

240

215−

215−

225−

Bac. Equivalent

Brevet

CAP Fitter

133

1975

54

54

54

53

Turkish immigrant

Was off-line defect repairer; wants to take early retirement

No ambitions; Moroccan immigrant

North African immigrant

Disorganised; personal problems

Does not wish to become polyvalent, wants unproblematic job in pit; but a promising past

Yugoslav immigrant

Post and attitude

190

200

190

190

190

190

180

Points

200+

215+

200

190+

200−

215+

190+

Potential

Educ. qualifications

(?) denotes uncertainty as to the career trajectory concerned. Source: Carrosserie Sochaux, Directorate of Human Resources, formal interviews (I/v), and discussion with colleagues at work and at mealtimes.

(?)

1967

I/v

1969 1969

(?)

47

1966

46 47

1972

(?)

Age

1970

Entry

Trajectory

(continued)

N’bour

N’bour

Source

Table 3.1

134

20

22

24

24

26

32

LF

AM

DO

AC

P

Age

7

2

2

4

2

2

Years at Peugeot

190

180

170

190

170

170

Points

200− (215)

200

190−

200−

200−

190−

Potential

CAP eng.

CAP eng.

–

–

–

BEP non-eng

Educ. qualifications

For/against 1989 strike

Attitudes of manual workers from the two teams at MV and HC2

IM

Name

Table 3.2 Trajectory

Finds workstation overloaded (acknowledged by moniteur). Assembly-line work has no future. Conflict with foreman. Looking for work elsewhere.

Trained as defect repairer, then put on line. Very embittered at the work and at unkept promise of 190.

Polyvalent

Polyvalent (28–30 posts). Productivity welcome, but thought to lack real ability. Ill thought of by old-timers, who await his discomfiture.

Very positive and enthusiastic. Has learnt 10 or so posts to become moniteur.

Young recruit. Bought a big bike, lives with parents. Very energetic, hopes for promotion. Old-timers hope to calm him down.

Attitude to business and to post occupied

135

Age

37

36

38

41

44

39

38

UC

ID

ED

UO

UD

ID

AM

21

21

20

18

21

17

17

Years at Peugeot

(continued)

Name

Table 3.2

215

200

n.k.

200

200

190

200

Points

240+

225−

n.k.

225−

215−

200−

215+

Potential

–

–

–

–

CAP eng.

–

CAP eng.

Educ. qualifications

Against

For

–

For

For

For

For/against 1989 strike

Trajectory

Moniteur (stands in for AM1). Foreman’s ‘blue-eyed boy’. Younger than other moniteurs, has every chance of success.

Polyvalent. Worried on arrival at HC2 because of faster rate of work. Abandoned strike of 1989 because of union division.

Doubtful about assembly-line work and of his own position within it.

Complains of difficult workstation. Explains how workers come in, even when ill.

Sees an increase in stress over last decade. Regrets inability to go up the line. No resources to get himself off the line.

Non-unionised but militant. Keeps company with ‘mates’ from old team. Gets personal points and good workstations (‘Champion’).

Medical restrictions. 1981 strike.

Attitude to business and to post occupied

136

44

45

43

44

46

46

AP

AB

ED

RB

OK

OM

23

24

24

23

27

21

180

200

180

200

215

190− (190+)

225− (240)

200−

215+ (225+)

240+

240+ (240−)

–

–

–

–

CAP eng.

–

Against

Against

Against

Against

Against

Against

Frustrated at inability to go up line. Refuses over-burdening of workstation. Involved in Portuguese Association.

Long-standing SIAP member. Backache, eczema on hands (no medical restrictions). Easy workstation, often seated. Vain requests for transfer to defect repair.

Very sympathetic to management. Often absent (backache, no disability). No bonus on account of absence.

Very sympathetic to management, SIAP member. Champion at going up the line. Never any problems with the foreman!

Moniteur. Enjoys working at Peugeot. Understands strikers of 1989. Thinks individual interviews are pointless.

Moniteur. Believes work here is easier than at HC0. Presenteeist. Frustrated at not being favoured moniteur.

137

Age

46

47

48

49

50

51

OS

AM

AR

AL

ED

OB

18

23

27

26

25

18

Years at Peugeot

(continued)

Name

Table 3.2

180

190

200

180

180

190

Points

190−

200+ (215−)

210= (215−)

190+ (190−)

190−

200+ (220=)

Potential

n.k.

– n.k.

n.k.

Terty CAP

–

For

Against

n.k.

For/against 1989 strike

–

–

Bac. Equiv

Educ. qualifications

Trajectory

Non-recognised medical restrictions. Used to say his prayers on the line before foreman asked him to stop. Does not complain of racism in France.

Accepts the way things are.

Seems not much liked by colleagues, as he has an easy ‘woman’s’ job (so theirs are overloaded).

In bad health, complains of work rate. Foremen more rigorous than they used to be. Risks the sack. Complains about youngsters.

Medical restriction ignored. Individualised conflict with foremen: the union is useless.

Rather isolated in shop. Complains of increasing rate of work. Was striker, under pressure from others.

Attitude to business and to post occupied

138

career progression halted with long-term stagnation (as in the case of polyvalents who have returned to fixed workstation rather than becoming a moniteur. long-term levelling off of career trajectory in comparison to expectations permanent career stagnation

on the ascendant

ascendant but uncertain

ascent followed by recent fall

Source: Carrosserie Sochaux, Directorate of Human Resources, formal interviews and participant observation.

Legend

139

140 Living Labour

degree of internal mobility within the shop. Three examples are typical. The first is a 31-year-old assembly-line worker, taken on in 1989, starting at the same time as another youngster: while the other became a moniteur, he remained stuck at his post. Having been transferred three times from team to team as a result of changes in production and manning levels, he lost every time the capital of goodwill he had built up with the foreman concerned, and on each occasion had to combat the unfavourable prejudice from the next foreman that is invariably encountered by those who are transferred from another team. The second case is that of a 37-year-old Algerian, who having been well-rated by other foremen then began to complain of pain in the hands and carpal tunnel problems, and is now considered to be a grumbling malingerer by his current boss. The third example is that of a 54-year-old ex-P2 (skilled worker), who used to be an off-line defect repairer, who, following staffing cuts in his sector, refused to return to the line as a moniteur/defect repairer, for fear of not coping in a post that made such demands, and was thus made an ordinary assembly-line worker instead. It would seem that for the immigrants this question of promotion is often not very relevant in any event: on the MV team one Yugoslav moniteur has risen from the ranks with his 215 points, and on the HC1 team two of the basic-grade assembly-workers used to be polyvalents in HC0. In the case of the others, there is a very close correspondence between their position on the scale and their estimated potential, within the fixed limits of 170 and 200. This situation leaves the field free to the native French, some of whom are the children of earlier immigrants. In the tables, the ranking of workers by age confirms the existence of the groups whose existence was earlier discussed. At the top of each table we find the ‘youngsters’, all looking towards a future off the line. Some of them, indeed, have started already to get away, 34 and the arrows are still horizontal or rising. Lower down, the trajectories of the forty- and fifty-somethings are marked by stability or decline in recent years, leading many of them to doubt their prospects and to look on their past with disillusion. Between the two, it is the thirty-somethings who exhibit the most diverse range of career trajectories, both in their general tendency and in their recent development. Beyond these immediate observations, the interpretation of the data in terms of career trajectory is a matter of some delicacy. One cannot in fact simply gather together the different cases and smooth them out into a kind of ideal-typical trajectory: promising beginnings in the early years, the first progress, the first distinctions, polyvalent, moniteur,

Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 141

with everything looking rosy; then coming difficulties, and often retreats and disappointments with a return to the line, before the last years of employment bring the fall in ascribed potential that puts a seal on failure. In this were the case, one would have, transposed into the world of modern work, a trajectory in the form of the gendarme’s hat of the kind so grippingly described by Émile Guillaumin in his study of the 19th-century share-cropper (métayer).35 Every link in this chain is to be found in our own sample, but in the absence of historical research on the careers of assembly-line workers any such generalisation would be unjustified. These links, in fact, are sections of longer journeys, each worker on the team only going ‘some of the way’ with the rest. There is an other interpretation, according to which the old-timers amongst the basic-grade assembly workers, though they may be numerous, represent only the small, least dynamic minority that is left behind by every cohort, while the others have made their own way, and therefore, of necessity, no longer appear here. 36 To assess the validity of such a suggestion it would be necessary to take account of the different kinds of mobility at issue: new arrivals on the team, on the line more generally, departures, transfers, resignations, promotions. Finally it would be necessary to determine trends in the development of these different kinds of mobility, and to relate these to the considerations of period previously discussed in relation to recruitment, and to compare the situation in times of growth to that in times of retreat. Whatever the case may be, the assembly-line workers under consideration here, that is, those who remained basic-grade assembly-line workers at the time of the research, still have recourse to prospects and to interpretations of their past in constructing a legitimating coherence to which they refer in making their own choices and in attempting to adjust to their situation or to give an account of it. Consideration of manual workers’ situations and points of view suggests a certain picture of the trajectory as it unfolds. Looked at pessimistically, this unfolding leads very frequently to failure; considered optimistically, to the selection of the best, the elect of the promotions system. If one sticks closely to such a schema, then representations play only a secondary role, following in tow behind the opportunities that open up or close down, to produce a system of representations that corresponds to operatives’ positions. Fundamentally, in fact, one would remain within a play of strategies and opportunities, and in so far as strategies are motivated by one single logic of career advancement, within an ensemble

142 Living Labour

determined by the possibilities offered by the enterprise. Relationships between work relations, strategies and identifications, however, are not as simple as that, as two examples will make clear (see Boxes 6 and 7 below). The first is that of a young man on the MV team promoted to moniteur, and the second that of a moniteur who has now returned to being an ordinary assembly-line worker on the same team. Both stories involve a double reading, each side with its own objectives, the worker concerned stressing continuity, his foreman insisting on rupture and transformation. However this may be, under either of the two presentations, the course of events described is such as to lend no comfort to a static, essential conception of identity. For if the man in question doubtless undergoes no fundamental change in personality, that is to say in a certain form of identity, his social identity is considerably modified through and by relationships and representations, in his relation to the enterprise, to the organisation of the line, to supervisory staff, to other workers and to family. This modification appears as a radical change to other persons with their own modes of institutional identification, such as the father committed to the CGT, or the supervisor who asks the team-leader what he has done to turn around the ‘trouble-maker’, while trade union discourse would often apply to this kind of development the notion of turning one’s coat. The history of labour relations has, indeed, often adopted this kind of radical representation, ascribing a class character to the worker milieu, that is to say, an identity essentially based on the contradictory relation to the bourgeoisie, punctuated by individual ruptures that take the form of rejection, and indeed denial. The two chief actors involved, however, both reject this image of the ‘turn’. The team leader, for his part, denies having had any intention of ‘turning’ the youngster in question. As far as he is concerned he did no more than to create an opportunity, to untangle relationships and give them the chance of developing positively. He believes, in particular, that the overtures came at the right moment, as they coincided with a certain maturation in his interlocutor: he had reached the age of reasonableness. For him then, the change took place when personal development met with opportunity; but he also emphasises its legitimacy in remarking on the high scores Bruno achieved in his aptitude tests. Bruno himself makes light of the transformation in his own way: in his account it is another team-leader who wanted to ‘break’ his group, and it was his unhappiness that had led to his requests for a transfer, not any identification with a CGT-type militancy, while his relations with his father remain good.

Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 143

Box 6

An inflection of career trajectory: the case of young Bruno

In two successive interviews, the team-leader referred to the case of Bruno, whose attitude had undergone a transformation. Before, Bruno had been a belly-acher, and had a tendency to react badly to the supervisor’s comments about quality, using hard-line language typical of the CGT. He had been altogether prepared ‘to organise a group of strikers’. The supervisor could never get over the way that he, the team-leader, had ‘turned him round’. But he didn’t think he’d done anything of the kind. He claims to have been honest with him, to have made clear to him the possibilities for advancement, without making any promises, and to have left him to think it over. And then, with his agreement, he had rotated him around the workstations, with success. Bruno had fallen in with it, accepting low work, high work, had become a polyvalent in the pit, notwithstanding his height. An occasion had recently arisen, with the departure of the moniteur. It was when he put him forward to be moniteur in the pit that management had noticed that this youngster had scored outstanding results in the aptitude tests administered on recruitment. Such an appointment, favouring the more dynamic candidates as against the more senior, was unusual in the Carrosserie. The team-leader explained: ‘It has to be said that when I arrived here, two-and-ahalf years ago, the team wasn’t at all what it is now. Bruno was part of a group that ran the team as it liked, quite capable of giving someone a really rough time if he wanted to, and of influencing the moniteur. I set about changing that. People have seen a youngster becoming a polyvalent, and then moniteur, they’ve seen another become polyvalent de ligne. And in the case of Bruno, I talked to him to try and get him to think, without promising anything, That almost led to a family crisis. His father is a keen CGT activist, in fact. It has to be said that it was the right moment: he’s married, he’d just had a child, he had decided to settle down and had taken out a mortgage. He was coming round anyway.’ In the interview with Bruno, the latter got straight to the point: of course, it might be a bit shocking that youngsters like him should have progressed and become moniteurs so quickly, when someone else, at 40, had been polyvalent for 11 years and was expecting the job himself. But that was the approach that had been adopted by the supervisor, and he couldn’t see why he should refuse. In any case, the business needed to rejuvenate its methods and its personnel. And then, he owed this promotion to his work: everyone said that he had worked well. Looking back further, what had happened was this: he had been employed on the line as a temporary worker, and had then been taken on as a fork-lift-truck driver. There was a reorganisation and he was returned to the line. Furious at having been sent back, he made requests for transfer, one after the other, all the more as he didn’t get on at all with his old teamleader, who seeing the group he was part of, had said, ‘I’m going to break it.’ Then the current team-leader had arrived. One day, he had suggested trying for polyvalent. Some people complained of being stuck at the same workstation, but refused to qualify as polyvalent. It was hard sometimes, three or four workstations in the same day, sometimes you didn’t know what you were doing. And then there was being polyvalent in the pit. In the ordinary way of

144 Living Labour

Box 6

(Continued)

things he was too tall, and shouldn’t have been sent there. But nowadays, when something was suggested, he tried it out before refusing. In the pit, you have sore shoulders for the first week, and then it goes; and he never had backache any more. If they asked him to come in on Saturday, he went, something he never would have done before; the week had been enough. On the other hand, if someone had tried to dissuade him – using tradeunion arguments – he would have rejected them. While his father was CGT through and through, he thought there was good in all the unions, but that ‘it’s not properly organised’. He hadn’t even voted, even though he knew it was wrong.

In the process of gaining promotion respect for forms is important. A trial visible to all is necessary for legitimacy. The trial being passed, the promotion was legitimate, and he did not have to deny completely his former identity and had thus been able to ‘save face’, that is to retain respect within the system of social norms. Finally, opportunities don’t just arrive like that. Our example is not typical: the team-leader broke with the prevailing, traditional promotion practices of the shop and shook up its social structure. By favouring the promotion of youngsters, he broke up a group that was a focus of conflict and left older workers to stew. At the same time he produced a more vigorous ‘rising current’ than in most shops. This shows, a contrario, that with another team-leader, or at another moment in Bruno’s personal development, or if the supervisory staff hadn’t wanted to deal with this oppositional group, then this personal transformation would not have taken place. Factors entering in here are the personality of the team-leader and his chosen approach to man-management, the assembly worker’s state of mind, his decision to breach certain limits, to give up certain ties and finally his ability to emerge victorious from the trial to which he is subjected. All this suggests that there was nothing preordained about the outcome. In other words, to understand the positions adopted by employees, and the relations they establish among each other, one has to attend to the course of their life at work and the events that have marked this. The second example, although representing a trajectory that is the mirror image of the first, is also characterised by a rupture, an event that leads to an inflection of trajectory.

Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 145

Box 7

An inflection of career trajectory: the case of Patrick, the old-timer

Patrick is in his forties. He seems well-known and well-liked, and lots of people drop by to have a word with him. He’s often asked how it is that he’s there, and whether he will be staying. He is indeed a particular case: the team-leader described him as a moniteur who had wanted ‘to go back to being an assembly-line worker’, in particular because of all the paperwork that comes with the job. It was simply a personal choice that had to be respected. Then, on another occasion, the team-leader said a bit more about it. Patrick had been a moniteur on the crucial sector where the body arrives and is ‘married’ to the chassis and all the mechanical elements. And there the lads ‘made life difficult for him’. Nothing more definite other than two vague allusions to the need to be able to impose one’s authority, that his workers had quickly got three cars pulled off the line, and that in the event Patrick had not received the support that he was entitled to expect from his team-leader. Questioned a few days later as to what had happened in his old sector, Patrick replied that he had himself asked to return to the basic grade. He got on well with the lads, that wasn’t the problem. But he was shocked by an injustice done to him by his team-leader: he was stuck on 200 points, while someone else had been rapidly promoted.

Though this may have been a personal matter, as the team-leader had it, it was also intimately connected to work relations. In a way, this case provides a pendant to the one we have just considered, the fall of an old-timer as opposed to the rise of one of the youngsters. But it also calls for other observations. First of all, it highlights the ambiguity of the moniteur’s function. Strictly speaking, this involves the motivation of the men under his responsibility and the monitoring of quality, yet with no hierarchical distinction of rank. The story told by the team leader to whom Patrick was sent, however, suggests that he was unable to stamp his authority on the workers of his module. This ambiguity seems to have played a role in the disagreement between the team-leader and his moniteur. Above all, this episode leads one to wonder about the substantive content of the logic deployed by the actor concerned, which brings us back to the weight of identificatory reference. Patrick is acting against his own interests in asking to be returned to the basic grade. In doing this he is running a particular danger: not having left the 200-point level behind, he risks not being picked up again, especially as his decision to return to the line can seem like a judgement in his own favour in his dispute with his old team-leader. At the same time, there is no lack of serious competitors, and young ones at that. Did he attempt a bluff and

146 Living Labour

fail? It may be that he did his calculation, but had overestimated his hand. On the other hand, is there only ever calculation, and is one never moved by anything but strategic logics? The incident suggests rather the force of the recognition implied in the individual bonus: the refusal to grant extra points expresses first of all the team-leader’s dissatisfaction with the way in which the moniteur is doing his job. This refusal was properly understood by the man concerned as a sanction imposed by the team-leader on account of his own practice. It was all the more important in that it occurred at an important stage: it is only in going beyond 200 points that one begins to gain some protection against being returned to the line. But if that is all it was, Patrick might have decided to take note of the disagreement, or tried to meet the expectations of the team-leader. At a more profound level, however, he felt that his supervisor’s attitude put his own value into question in a quite iniquitous way. Notions of justice and dignity take us very quickly to powerful elements of identificatory self-representations. And here, unlike in the other case, career progression comes up against these representations and is undone. Their resistance is too strong to allow accommodation. Hence the rupture that is characteristic of a problematic of honour. Beyond the inverse relationship between the two trajectories they represent, these two cases also show two different modes of combination between career expectations and identificatory references. In both cases, career expectations play a decisive role, in terms of an opportunity to be grasped or a stagnation to be disputed. For Bruno, the hopes of advancement win out through a reorganisation of values that brings about a ‘turn’ in relations of identification, with the young militant of CGT inclinations becoming the energetic youngster devoted to the enterprise and somewhat indifferent to trade-unionism. For Patrick, on the other hand, the combination of identificatory values rigidifies when faced with a crisis of perspectives with regard to professional recognition, leading to the deliberate and sudden abandonment of the promotion that had been achieved. Finally, these cases remind us of the importance of the event, in that characteristic situations which arise within the shop require that actors make a real choice among various possibilities. Their deeds and the effects that they have, however explicable they may be, nonetheless retain an element of contingency and mystery.

Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 147

Young pretenders, disillusioned old-timers, and 30-somethings in-between With the succession of issues in play, the stream of events, combinations of relational fields are established between operatives on the assemblyline and around it. Through their renewal, these interactions engender poles of identification which tend to perdure in time and to agglomerate different levels of relationship. However, in the way workers see work in its proper sense, in the sense of labour, the identificatory references are not necessarily the same. More particularly, the relationship to the enterprise cannot be identified with that which operatives have to work proper. This type of differentiation makes a striking appearance, for example, in the election of worker representatives, or on the occasion of strikes. In these situations, certain operatives demonstrate a relationship to the enterprise that one would hardly guess from the nature of their relationship to their work. Elections of employee representatives, for example, are taken by many as an opportunity to manifest their dissatisfaction by expressing a degree of support for the CGT or CFDT that is hardly visible in the day-to-day life of the teams in question. The discordances that appear between the three fields of day-to-day work, elections and strikes show how it is impossible to pin down, or to systematise to any great degree, the groups which are formed among assembly workers or the personal identifications or strategic goals which serve as their cement. Furthermore, assembly-line workers’ attitudes to and degree of involvement in their work are determined by a combination of factors all of which bear a different weight for each individual. In an occupation which remains defined by physical labour, it is age (but also sex37 ) which is the prime predictor of fatigue. It modifies perceptions of the workstation, or of its significance in terms of the career trajectory expected on the basis of ones qualifications and abilities, whose course is nonetheless determined by the enterprise. On this basis, each may then adopt an attitude that may be resolutely positive, or determinedly militant, or else indeed remain indifferent to the management of the enterprise and its local representatives (the supervisory staff ). Finally, within each of these general positions, each worker may adopt different attitudes towards their work proper. It is significant to note that negative behaviours in relation to work – mild or moderate incidents of sabotage, for example – are hardly ever witnessed at Sochaux these days, a change in comparison with the 1970s in particular. 38

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Nonetheless, the distinction that emerges between operatives’ relation to their work and their relation to the enterprise should not obscure the very strong reciprocal relations that obtain between these two registers of relationship and representation. The tables showing the career profiles of workers from the two teams, the one from MV and the other from HC2, allow one to construct three main groups, whose coherence, and hence whose specificity, depends in the final analysis on criteria of age and seniority. These groups, and the sub-groups within them, are graphically represented in Figure 3.2.

Disillusioned old-timers There are first of all the old-timers. The term refers in fact to two characteristics. Their seniority, with more than 16 years employment at the plant, derives from recruitment before 1980, and sometimes even before 1970; they therefore came in at a time when there was much mobility, with massive turnover of staff, even if unemployment did gradually make its mark in the course of the Seventies. Their age is another distinguishing factor: they have all passed 40. Once past this age, no assembly-line worker can expect to be promoted to polyvalent. Those who looked forward to a whole career on the line have got it; those who hoped to escape it are stuck, being unable to look forward any longer to a more ‘sheltered’ job in preparation, for example, as thanks to increased subcontracting these are disappearing more rapidly than jobs on the line itself. Somewhat disillusioned, these old-timers tend to employ techniques of withdrawal and distanciation. Such withdrawal finds expression in a marked attention to securing less tiring workstations, through defence of the current workstation when the line is rebalanced, through the refusal of multi-functionality (polyvalence) and of mobility more generally, as well as by emphasis on signs of infirmity such as pain and discomfort, and by recourse to the occupational medicine service in the hope of obtaining the certification of medical restrictions that would entitle one to a less demanding workstation: because the chance of promotion has disappeared, everyone attempts to enhance ease and comfort at work, so as to be able to last longer and to adapt to the increased tiredness that comes with age. Here too one finds many different strategies. On the HC2 team there are three old-timers who occupy workstations more or less adapted to their physical incapacities: one because he may no longer carry heavy weights, the second because of back pains, and the third because he cannot bend down. None of these problems is officially recognised, but the team-leader, supported by the supervisor, insists that the linebalancer finds appropriate solutions. It is all the easier for them to do

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this, given that they themselves have the support of their workers. Another worker informed the team-leader of a medical restriction while making it clear that he did not insist on it being put into rigorous effect: this is another strategy, which makes manifest the worker’s resources but accompanies this with the offer of a negotiated solution. In a climate of latent tension connected with managerial insistence on productivity, however, such flexibility came to nothing, the worker in question failing to receive the spontaneous support of the more militant trade unions by reason of his past preference for the SIAP. Such withdrawal also manifests itself in the distance adopted towards efforts at worker participation developed by the enterprise, overtly targeted at harnessing workers’ subjectivity, in the field of quality assurance particularly. This finds expression in the search for a straightforwardly contractual relationship to the enterprise that formalises the worker’s autonomy. Many of the old-timers seek to limit their involvement with the plant, increasing their investment in foci of interest and self-valorisation outside. Such distanciation is also encouraged by the working patterns that have become most frequent since the return to short-time working: the working week of production workers is often enough no more than 4 days, which entirely reorganises their relationship to work and to the enterprise, especially when it is worked in double-shifts. Yet this disengagement does not lead to any particular relaxation of standards at work. For example, a breakdown by individual of the quality failures encountered on a whole line in HC1 over the period of a year showed no relationship between operatives’ age and their achievements in terms of quality. From the results of observations of all three teams studied, the oldtimers as a whole may be broken down into sub-groups with their own distinct atmospheres, on the basis of attitudes to the enterprise, to supervisors, to the unions and to work. First of all, and somewhat apart, is the small group of old-timers already promoted to moniteur. They know that their career trajectory has flattened out; at the very most they can expect jobs of equivalent rank away from the line, as for example in training. In relationship to the basic grade workers on the line then, they may be thought of as the senators, always careful not disappoint the expectations of their superiors, to make a good job of everything and to go along with all the changes, so as not to suffer the disfavour into which one can always fall. Of the old-timers still without promotion, a minority goes about its work without reservations, accepting workstations as they come

150 Living Labour Relatively positive attitude to work

Lively youngsters

Committed

Thirty-somethings

Promoted

Disillusioned old-timers

Senators

Faithful Anxious Expectant Recruited more recently

Conciliators Disappointed

Recruited longer ago

Militants

Embittered Discouraged Shipwrecked Relatively negative attitude to work

Figure 3.2

Assembly-line workers’ relationship to work

and generally supporting the discourse of the enterprise in issues of constraint, obedience and authority. Among these is a remarkably high proportion of the Moroccan and ex-Yugoslav immigrants remaining at the plant. They are systematically faithful to the company, with rare exceptions not having gone on strike in 1989 or on any other occasion. Their supervisors are aware of their debt to them, and if they are occasionally rewarded with good workstations they will also put up with a bad one, as long as it’s temporary. Good workers, they can gain considerable time by going up the line at the end of the evening shift. They are an essential element, part of the backbone of the Peugeot system, forming an important channel of communication between supervisors and workers, at least as much as the moniteurs; if the latter are responsible for technical functions (quality, worker-replacement, monitoring of control panels), the unconditional commitment of these older workers gives them an important ideological and political role. The largest group is made up of workers in search of some discreet accommodation with their work. They tend to maintain a low profile

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and stand back from significant disputes. They rarely openly reject the demands that are made on them and are quite happy to work their way up the line. Some of them count on their apparent goodwill to negotiate more difficult situations, to obtain days off or a change of workstation, while others will get out of difficulties, in relation to work, for example, by turning to the occupational medicine service. It is among these conciliators that the distance taken from the enterprise is clearest, stronger in their case than any logic of resistance proper. Others, a minority whose presence is signalled in different ways, depending on the nature of the investigation, will quite openly confess to an attitude of opposition to the line of command, or to the industrial imperatives transmitted by their supervisors. They also reject anything that might suggest work overload when the line is rebalanced or a change of workstation is suggested; finally, they no longer give up, for money, any of the days off to which they are entitled. They make hardly any effort to disguise their alignment with the CGT or the CFDT, the so-called ‘oppositional’ unions, or their history as strikers in the conflict of 1989, discreetly maintaining their affinity networks. Making no effort at all to hide their hostility to multi-functionality, they rarely gain much in the way of individual bonus. These are, on the whole, the militants, whom the supervisors must treat with a certain care, who must, however, be careful in their turn not to give too much cause for dissatisfaction. Behind the façade, the militants are not as different from the conciliators as one might imagine. First of all, their work is just as reliable, in quality terms, if for different tactical reasons. And secondly, from the results of the elections (with 70 per cent of votes going to oppositional unions in HC2), it would seem that both groups must generally often agree in voting for the candidates of the CGT and the CFDT. Another small group are what one might call the embittered. These are not so inclined to ally themselves with the unions, they hardly ever cause problems for their foreman or moniteur, and they rarely have any history of involvement in strike action. What they do share is the experience of having been in a better position in the past, in the same shop or elsewhere, and the conviction that their fall is unjustified. They are no longer looking forward to a new chance, and to the extent that they suffer physical infirmity, they fear for the future. Reluctant to get over-involved, they are often posted from one team to another and have but weak connections with the working group. This results in an attitude of more or less systematic withdrawal.

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Finally, the most tired, the ones who have already undergone one or more surgical operations or who are periodically certified as sick by their doctors, who complain of the increasing speed of the line and the growing demands of the work . . . sometimes complaining too of the youngsters who put up with it. They are threatened by a spiral of rejection that may lead to them losing the jobs even before the arrival of the age for early retirement: their absence from work and the conflicts this leads to have made them the shipwrecked. To sum up, though the group of ageing veterans may seem very homogeneous from the point of view of career trajectory, it is much less so in attitudes towards work. The differences derive for the most part from individual trajectory or from aspects of identification: geographical origin (immigrant or not), qualified, isolation (recruitment to the SIAP on joining Peugeot), external compensation (involvement in voluntary organisations in particular), networks of relations, etc.

Lively youngsters The youngsters are between 20 and 34 years of age, more recently recruited as part of much smaller intakes chiefly connected with the launch of recent models: of the 405 in 1987, the 406 in 1995, and above all that of the 605, linked to the opening of HC1 in 1989. Their joining the workforce has in each case been connected with a forward stride by the enterprise. What is more, they are the children of economic crisis: they have often had difficulties in finding work, and think of their employment at Peugeot as a piece of good luck. They have most often proved themselves in the course of a long period of employment as temporary workers, which often lasted more than 12 months. The majority of these young men on the line have chosen a career path, and they adopt those behaviours which will maximise their chances of success. They work quickly and well, they’re not afraid of hard work, and they are always ready and willing to do as they are asked. Lively in spirit and in action, they compete against each other to do even better than is expected of them. They want diversity, mobility, and evident difficulty, fearing boredom and immobility above all. If their boss asks them to, they will take up the role of polyvalent or moniteur with enthusiasm and but little concern for their colleagues’ attitudes. Skilled, qualified and energetic, these young people are in a hurry. Sure of themselves, they do not hesitate to acknowledge their ambitions, accepting the expectations that come with them and making common cause with the company, and this all the more willingly as they see their

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own prospects as tied to the success of the firm. This identification, then, is more a matter of hope than of experience. If, as a result of cut-backs in employment, supervisors are sometimes late in satisfying their expectations, they nonetheless encourage them in their attitudes. These youngsters hardly ever join a union: never the CGT or the CFDT in any case, as this would run counter to their career plans, but sometimes the SIAP or the CFTC, though this runs the risk of isolating them in their team, if this has any tendency towards militancy. What is more, many of them do not even bother to vote in elections for the Works Council or for employee representatives, because to vote is to take sides and sooner or later to say something about it in informal discussion: to take sides means either to cut oneself off from one’s fellow-workers, or to lose one’s credit with foreman and supervisor and to damage ones career. This group we call the committed. There is another sub-group, the expectant, who have a higher qualification than the BEP, such as the Brevet de Technicien or the Bac Professionel. They believe – and in this they have the agreement of their fellowworkers on the line – that their place is elsewhere, in a more appropriate job. In this sense, they do not really belong among the others. They are patiently waiting for someone they know, or some other person in authority, to give them the sign and to help them off the line by posting them to another shop or into an entirely different department. They are not over-enthusiastic, contenting themselves with being beyond reproach. For some, of course, the wait may be several years, and for others again, it may never bring its rewards. Finally, because the assembly-line is still the most labour-intensive element of the plant, it isn’t at all uncommon for new recruits intended for another shop (press, paint, etc.) to find themselves posted there. Very often these young workers will have made a dazzling start in their shops of origin and been made promises (such as 190 points within 3 years) that simply can’t be kept on the assembly-line. Their frustration with their work, given the prospects that have vanished, has made them the discouraged, who no longer expect to make a career within the enterprise. No more than the old-timers, then, do these younger workers constitute a homogeneous group, despite their being few in number. Far from it, indeed: depending on the significance for their career plan of their current job on the line, they may adopt a position of passive expectation, or they may make an active effort to demonstrate involvement and commitment, competing with their peers to win a place of favour in the eyes of their supervisors.

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Thirty-somethings Between these two poles, the mass of old-timers on the one hand and the minority of youngsters on the other, a first glance reveals nothing. As one proceeds with the analysis, however, there do appear a number of individuals who fall into neither category. There are in fact a few more of them than there are of youngsters, and they all share certain common features. They are older than 34, which is to say not much older than the eldest of the youngsters; but they are radically distinct from them in terms of seniority, having been recruited before 1980. Between the two groups, then, there lie ten years of work at the plant, often on the assembly line, a real gulf in terms of references and behaviours. In fact, recruited as they were at a time when staff turnover allowed a high degree of mobility, these thirty-somethings had very often expected promotion in their turn. Some who have achieved this, as polyvalents or moniteurs, go about their work with decision, energy and dexterity. In HC2, one of these, a moniteur, often substitutes for his team-leader, and his trajectory thus continues to follow an upward path, while another, who has maintained his status as polyvalent, is hoping for promotion to moniteur. Yet while they are still ascending, their situation remains vulnerable, as is demonstrated by the ease with which polyvalents and even moniteurs may be returned to the ranks. They are always at the mercy of a possible change in economic conjuncture, in the organisation of production, or in their own relationship with supervisors. The others who remain basic assembly-line workers are unwilling to believe that they have had their chance, and often grasp at the opportunities offered by the team-leader when he is in a position to offer them. At the same time they can sense the youngsters at their backs. What they have gained in experience, they have lost in liveliness. Anxious, they have still not given up yet, but they hardly have any margin of manoeuvre or any new resources. Their talk, dominated by a high degree of uncertainty, can swing from basic agreement with the favoured themes of the enterprise to a radical criticism of them. Among them are a high proportion of discontented, who say they are disappointed by the failure to honour promises of promotion, to moniteur more especially, when they may often have very rapidly qualified as polyvalents. This is a multi-dimensional discontent which very rarely finds expression in a sentiment of betrayal by the supervisory staff (who by definition are the only umpire and the arbiters of promotion – so there’s no point talking about it any longer), resentments being most

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often directed at working conditions. In HC then, everyone agrees in criticising the increase in work-rate compared to HC0, or at each change of model, or in detecting increases in line-speed intended to increase the productivity of labour. One complains of difficulties in meeting the demands of the workstation, another says the same thing in his talk of increased stress over the last decade. A third benefits from medical restrictions, and so has a post that is less demanding and so more tolerable. All of them are aware of the fact that they haven’t the resources that would take them off the line. Given this, all of them have developed strategies to withstand the work, some passively accepting the conditions, regretting for example their inability to go up the line, and looking on every new rebalancing of the line as a kind of fate. On the other hand, other assembly-line workers of the same age, aware of their destiny and professionals at their job, get themselves respected, and sometimes feared, in order to obtain a good workstation that allows them to go up the line. Located in the zone of greatest uncertainty, the thirty-somethings then swing between these two poles of reference, not daring truly to cut themselves off from either, which explains the lack of coherence in the group as such. Alongside a minority whose career is still on the up, the majority of assembly-line workers in this middle age-group share a doubtful attitude and negative feelings towards the enterprise which are essentially the result of promises not kept, as can be seen in their career profiles. These are the disappointed. Yet these thirty-somethings are still conscientious workers who produce quality work and are acknowledged as such. One of these in HC2 is a ‘champion’ capable of many subterfuges in order to negotiate a workstation well down the line. Though they may still be very receptive to the hints of hope that are put their way by their supervisors, they are fundamentally much closer to the old-timers than to the youngsters, in both career prospects and vulnerability: long years spent on the line and physical ageing have had very similar effects on the situation and lived experience of both groups. In the composition of these poles of identification and in the relationship to work which finds expression in them, age and seniority have a direct effect, through the inequality of physical, nervous and mental resources, through the relationship to the present and the weight of the past. They also have indirect effects, through differences in perspectives on the future. Operatives are not constituted simply by what they are and the function they play, but also by what they see as their future within the enterprise.

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On both levels, two factors play a determining role: institutional organisation and demographic composition. On the one hand, from the fragmentation of work to the monthly rebalancing of the line, via the emergence of distinctive functions such as those of polyvalent or moniteur, the institutions of work fix the rules of the game in their essentials, through the constraints that are imposed in the course of production. But these institutions of production are not sufficient to entirely determine the society that is the shop. If the youngsters show no sign of the unruliness that has marked the attitude of their generation for decades, if the old-timers show a marked propensity to detachment, and even an eagerness to find short-cuts, at an age when in those same decades they would have been concentrating on making a success of their career, this is not connected only to the pressure of unemployment. The demographics of the plant are also something new. The lasting halt to recruitment has brought a fall in turnover and a freeze in career progression for the old-timers. What is more, it has changed the agecomposition of the workforce and brought about a situation in which the youngsters are in the minority, thus creating a circumstance in which promotion, if not to be expected by all, is still much more likely than it was for the old-timers at the same age. By consolidating the youngsters as a confident group, more or less predestined to promotion, management are going along with the demographic conjuncture. They are taking a gamble on the future: the thirtysomethings whose promotion is threatened have another 20 years to go, and a good chance of joining the discontented. At the same time, there is the danger that the young moniteurs have no further prospects of progress in the decades that remain to them, and will in this way simply block the road to promotion for those who succeed them, the young workers to be recruited in the next ten years.

4 The Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment

The shop, like the enterprise as a whole, is a place of inherent conflict; and of the compromise ineluctably associated with it. By looking in detail at the day-to-day life of the shop and at its relationships with its environment, this chapter shows that theories which either consider only conflict, or on the contrary presume consensus, fail to grasp the realities. Production is the result not of a single logic, but of the combination of several. There are in fact three major clusters of factors that influence the organisation of production within the enterprise. First, there are the issues connected with what managers have traditionally called industrial profitability, that is to say the most effective exploitation of resources employed. This is a matter of organising labour and the flow of production, and of ensuring the reliability of the process. Here one is dealing with questions about mechanisation and automation, the standards that govern work and employment, about stocks. On the other side are issues connected with the industrial quality of the product, here a question of invariance, with the standardisation of parts and tooling, the establishment of quality-control departments and of appropriate instruments and rules, and the creation of dedicated facilities for defect repair. Finally, there is the matter of the flexibility of production: its capacity to produce different types of the same model, or even different models, which is to say, its ability to deal with different kinds of product diversity; and at the same time, the possibility of varying the volume of production. The relationships that exist between these different sets of requirements are sometimes negotiated, sometimes conflictual, but are in either case ever again put into question within the plant itself. Changes in the orientation or organisation of a production plant always entail changes in these relationships. Furthermore, these three major 157

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logics penetrate the whole hierarchy inside the plant, from senior management to the worker on the line, and at all these levels the urgency of production requires the settlement of conflict. These settlements form the constraints imposed on the plant through the force of hierarchical relations, the layout of installations, and the discourses which legitimate them. To attain the goal that has in this way been set for the shop, assemblyline managers, supervisors and workers organise a productive compromise, as durable as it is ever-fragile. This productive compromise appears to be all the more powerful for its always being put to the test by a conjunction of ever-renewed conflicts. To the macro-social conflict over the distribution of value added, and more particularly of the fruits of productivity increases (12 per cent per annum in the Carrosserie at Sochaux), are added the multiplicity of technical or social conflicts over the means of achieving goals. These are conflicts between the logics of different departments, as for example between sales and production, leading to debates on the organisation of just-in-time production. The suggestions system, for instance, may find itself diverted from its original goals. The concern for quality, too, will bring heterogeneous points of view into an opposition that must be resolved in a way that satisfies both productivity criteria and the final customer. These conflicts, apparently technical in nature, have in fact extremely significant social and organisational aspects. The physical wear and tear on manual workers becomes an issue through the certification of medical restrictions on their work. Trade-unionism crystallises different kinds of discontent which it aims to transform, with more or less success, into mobilisation; but it is at the same time marked by contradictory tendencies, company unionism winning the allegiance of a not insignificant proportion of the workers. Finally, the management makes use of a whole battery of tools to encourage social integration and to reinforce worker involvement. This chapter therefore concentrates on a number of technical and socio-organisational matters to show how, on the basis of divergent interests, the shop is a prime locus for the interaction of a multitude of regulations, an interaction which constructs a system of production which, in the last analysis, has indeed proved effective. From one place to another, from one field of activity to another, stepped negotiations lead to an overall coherence: the single centre (company management) no longer has the means to directly control the whole edifice, so complex has this become. What is more, the negotiations that are thus made necessary take place at multiple sites which partly escape managerial

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control, and their outcome cannot therefore with certainty be determined in advance. The goal of management, then, is not to control the process of negotiation, but to ensure the coherence of its outcome. Hence, for example, the methodological changes in certain areas, to ensure that the regulations governing them lead to results that contribute to overall coherence; this was the case, for example, in quality control, the suggestions system, and in the acknowledgement of anti-union discrimination. This chapter thus underlines the double nature of the enterprise and of the shop: places of inherent conflict (if not contradiction), they are just as much places of permanent negotiation and regulation, necessary to ensure coherence, the condition of survival.

Just-in-time production and the ‘skeleton-plan’: necessary adjustments Without going too far into the technical aspects of just-in-time production, one has to understand how it is organised through a series of negotiations between production staff in the shop, the organisation and methods department, the sales staff and the production control department (service du flux), the latter being responsible for ordering the physical production of the different models in a way that ought to be acceptable to all. The logic of just-in-time production is intended to ensure the fluidity of the whole process of production, aiming for harmony and overall economy rather than a discordant aggregation of part-productions. Cost reduction is a global objective for the process as a whole. This means that criteria of profitability are not any longer established on a workstation by workstation basis, a practice that had tended to encourage long production runs and the holding of large stocks of finished articles. Compared with the post-war tradition of industrial manufacture, production must now be ‘thought backwards’: it has to begin with demand. It is pulled from downstream, rather than pushed from upstream. Finally, if it is to be improved, what doesn’t work must be brought to light and not patched up in secret; problems have to be forced into the open, so that they may be studied in detail. Works on just-in-time production1 generally have a normative function, laying down criteria that businesses should adopt. Their conclusions have an irresistible dialectical force: just-in-time production and ‘downstream’ control are good for mass production, because they make it possible to sell more.

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This logic of just-in-time production spread through Peugeot during the 1980s2 with the gradual switch from systems of periodical supply to just-in-time or synchronous systems like Recor, comparable to the Kanban system. This tendency was intensified at the Sochaux site with the creation of the new HC facilities (the HC1 shop followed by HC2) from 1989 onward. Thanks to computer co-ordination and a network of conveyors linking different sectors of the plant, production could be controlled on just-in-time principles, from the press-shop onward, including preparation shops such as the trim shop, Habillage Moteurs and Groupe Avant. But a rigorous examination of the logics at work in the organisation of production shows that the logic of the flow does not enjoy undisputed supremacy. The sales people are still there.

Production and sales: two distinct logics Within the enterprise, two powerful logics are at work in the organisation of production. On the one hand we have the logic of the Sales Department, which prioritises the satisfaction of demand. Given the relative saturation and volatility of the market, Sales want the widest range of variety in terms of supply, and so the fastest reactions and the highest degree of adaptability on the part of the productive apparatus: they want the widest range of choice, in the fastest possible delivery time, at the most competitive price. For them, the limits of production are so many obstacles to be overcome. The argument for downstream control of production therefore has great weight within the enterprise. But just-in-time is not the only logic, and production also follows other rules. In fact, the organisation of assembly-line production presupposes a certain stability to which it tends to return as a result of the interaction of its constituent elements. The progress of the line, which imposes the constraints, also entails a regular cycle, while staffing levels are fixed between any redistributions of tasks among workstations. The maximisation of individual workloads is all the more effective for repetition’s generating and maintaining co-ordinated gestural automatisms. To exploit its advantages, the assembly line requires stability in both the volume and content of work. This Fordist logic, however, enters into contradiction with the pressures for variety. The diversity of types, for example, necessitates thoroughgoing vigilance, a longer period of training, and thus a increased ‘mental load’ which the evaluation of the workstation must take into account. What is more, the differences in the volume of work among cars that range from ‘costly’ to ‘cheap’ in their requirements for labour, and the reorganisation of operations between one type to another,

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enter into contradiction with the search for a regular and maximised load on the workstations. If the two approaches associated with Sales and Production are distinct, and often mutually contradictory, they both have their part in the strategy of the business: to remain a contender in an increasingly competitive and ever-more-rapidly changing market. Production and Sales Departments therefore negotiate, making compromises and adjusting their practices. There is, however, no one site where this happens: what one has rather is a succession of steps at which there take place the successive negotiations and adjustments that allow the promotion and convergence of both logics to the benefit of the company’s overall strategy. At the heart of these adjustments is the plant’s production control department, responsible for the movement through the plant of vehicles in construction, up to the point at which they are despatched to the dealers. Its mission, then, has three major aspects: the co-ordination of production between different shops, and the organisation of their supplies; monitoring production times to ensure that production plans are met; and on the commercial side, to receive orders and to despatch cars. To carry out these tasks, it has powerful computer resources. Just-intime production is organised at two different levels: one being planning, the other day-to-day production. The second level, that of day-to-day management, does not present a problem as long as orders fall into a regular pattern; but the real flow differs to a greater or lesser extent from that of the planned programme, and orders never quite agree with forecasts. It is these deviations from the norm that are difficult to deal with. Through the whole process, the execution of the production programme requires attention to more than a hundred technical limitations related to manning levels and lay-out, etc. The real flow comes up close to some 10 or so of these limits, creating threats of blockage in the sectors concerned. Furthermore, the through-put of orders follows a monthly cycle. If volume is determined by Sales, which has committed itself to an overall level of demand for the month, it is variable in its variety: at the beginning of the month, actual customer orders play a predominant role, while later on the emphasis shifts to dealers’ restocking requirements, which by their nature call for the production of more middle-range, ‘every-day’ and less labour-costly models. Upstream and in parallel to this real flow, a flow of information and decisions initiates and governs the production and transport of parts, from engineering shops and outside suppliers, in such a way as to

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ensure general production amidst the multiplicity of constraints. Finally, regulation at several different stages allows flexibility to be introduced into the logic of just-in-time. Such a concern becomes clear in the idea of ‘lungs’, the term used within the plant to designate the spaces allowed for stock-holding and regulation that allow the productionprocess to ‘breathe.’ The most important of these regulatory spaces is a mechanised warehouse for the bodies coming out of the press shop or the paint shop before being sent to HC. This warehouse, called the satellite, can hold some 700 items, roughly equal to a good half-day’s production. This gives a good idea of the scale of respiration. The satellite is a decisive location from which bodies are sent to the Carrosserie in accordance with the sequence (cadencement), the order established by the production control department, determined in real time. On the screen at the control position appear the bodies arriving from the paint shop, which are automatically found an appropriate place in the stream making its way to HC, and also the bodies that are waiting. The art of sequencing is to intervene ‘manually’ as necessary in the automatic integration of bodies into the flow, so as to avoid waiting bodies backing up and causing a bottleneck at the satellite while gaps appear on the conveyor and then on the assembly lines. But the production-flow department runs up against a rigorous scheme for the regulation of the sequence called the canevas or skeletonplan, insisted upon by the Carrosserie and monitored by technicians from the shop’s organisation and methods office called pilotes programme or programme controllers.

The skeleton-plan as defence for the shop From the point of view of the shop, the main concern is the workload, which is the more difficult to organise the greater the diversity of production. There is variety in models, but more significantly in choice of engine or trim. This theoretically gives the possibility of thousands of different combinations, but in reality these are relatively small in number, especially as choices tend to be governed by the offer of ‘limited editions’ and of set groups of associated options.3 Among vehicles of the same model, there are what assembly-line workers commonly call ‘costly’ and ‘small’ cars, the first more extensively and the second more meagrely equipped. To accept complete randomness in the succession of vehicles on the line would lead to undesirable effects: either a fall in productivity brought about by having to allow sufficient margin in the workload at each station to deal with all possibilities in the succession of vehicles, or an

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increase in stress at work as a consequence of unfortunate successions of ‘costly cars’. This dilemma has led to the development by the organisation and methods department of three rules regarding the workload at any particular station. Under the first rule, applicable to 70 per cent of workstations, theoretical working time is less than or equal to the time it takes a car to pass. The second rule says that working time may sometimes exceed the time it takes a car to pass, but this must be followed in such a case by a car that requires less work (25 per cent of workstations). The third rule, which applies to 5 per cent of workstations, provides that when some cars require excess working time which cannot be compensated for by the need for less time on the next car, then assistance as necessary will be provided by the moniteur. These three rules which govern the work of the line-balancer mean that the sequence must be strictly organised. For each line, the skeleton-plan provides a cycle of 24 ‘slots’ for cars. 4 Over these slots the Carrosserie – MV and HC together – imposes a ban on certain kinds of succession of types, calculated on the basis of the overloads that they would impose on certain workstations. The overall sequence worked out by the production-flow department brings together the skeleton-plans for each of the four lines, each one of which has its specific characteristics determined by the types of car produced and the prevailing distribution of tasks among stations. Once the cycle has finished, it begins again. The skeleton-plan thus represents a constraint on the sequencing, and a given for the distribution of operations along the lines. To be viable, a skeleton-plan has to leave as much flexibility as possible to the flow; but to be effective, it must allow the maximum stability to the given balance of the line. It is here that compromise becomes necessary between production workers and the production-flow department. The people responsible for this compromise are the so-called pilotes programme, the programme controllers, who represent the interests of the shop to the production control department, and provide a focus for the demands of the assembly lines. Together with the équilibreurs, the line-balancers who are their hierarchical subordinates, they consider what bans on succession are really imperative, on the basis of which the balance of the line can be worked out. When they see the emergence of a skeleton-plan that is too closed, they press the line-balancers to look for alternatives, and in particular to increase the degree of acceptance on the line. The risk is then that an excess of slots left open to infrequent vehicles can then by filled by a sudden rush of them that will overwhelm the workers. On the other side, the programme controllers ensure that bans are respected by production control managers, occasionally

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negotiating with them a temporary breach of the provisions of the skeletonplan. This last possibility, in the final analysis, depends on the Carrosserie. Such arrangements usually call for extra workers to be assigned to the line concerned, with the posting of available polyvalents and moniteurs. In addition, the programme controllers attempt to introduce, where necessary and possible, implicit prohibitions, described as ‘social’, on certain successions of vehicles, which although conforming to the skeletonplan create great resentment among workers and threaten to generate tensions on the line. Here one has a multi-level field of negotiation between the production control department, the programme controllers and the assembly-line managers with their line-balancers and supervisors, and at the two ends, the sales people who get the orders coming in and the assembly line workers who get the cars to produce. This means that all the intermediate links know they have to negotiate, while the two extremes are concerned with the formulation of demands in more or less absolutist fashion, generally complaining about the production programme actually adopted. Hence the traditional reaction of assembly line workers, who say that the sequencing isn’t working and that the skeleton-plan is not being respected. In general, the reality of the organisation of production is but poorly understood, especially by assembly-line workers. For them the skeletonplan has something of the Ten Commandments, offering justice and protection. Assembly-line workers’ problems always arise from infractions of the Law slipped into the succession of vehicles. Furthermore, there is a gap between what is felt to be unacceptable by workers on the line and what the technical criteria for flow management define as impermissible. This therefore poses the problem of the transparency, for the assembly-line workers, of the criteria that underlie the determination of the sequence. In one month, for example, at HC1, a line-balancer and his assembly-line manager felt that the production control managers had taken them for a ride in sending great clusters of right-hand-drive 405 estates, the most ‘costly’ model of car, which hadn’t been expected and which had provoked a mini-stoppage by the assembly workers, to whom it had not been possible to offer sufficient assistance. The following month the shop reacted by including in the skeleton-plan prohibitions relating to this type of car. In sum, then, examination of the organisation of production reveals a long chain of functions, each linked to the next, from sales to flow planning, and from flow to manufacture. At each step, the actors are both controlled by rules and engaged in a game in which margins of negotiation are available to them. Overall, the logic of the flow is

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important, supported as it is by the power of information technology; but in the shop, conceptions derived from the earlier dispensation survive and continue to have their effects.

The suggestion system, or the recomposition of a social relation Suggestions are an old tradition at Peugeot, antedating the spread of Japanese models in the course of the 1980s: the suggestion box emerged in the rationalisation movement of the late 1920s. 5 After the Second World War, they were a central element in the productivity drive that followed the return of the missions sent to look at the automobile industry in the US. By frequently publishing encouraging examples, the company press publicised the system, based on the granting to the workers making suggestions of bonus payments proportional to the gains made. Suggestions were being rewarded on an individual basis at the end of the Eighties, and according to some, at a level too low to be effective. This explains, at least in part, the recasting of the system in 1988. To promote the production of suggestions the enterprise involved the moniteurs, who are particularly well-placed to assess the organisation of work at the level at which it really takes place. To encourage them, they were provided with training in gestural analysis and in the MTM method. The participation of the moniteurs brought a steep increase in the number of suggestions and in their contribution to direct increases in productivity.

The 1988 suggestions system The suggestions system established in 1988 accorded great importance to real cost reductions. Payment for suggestions was restricted to permanent manual employees, excluding managers, supervisory and technical staff and temporary workers. Nor were groups such as quality circles or ad hoc groups established to tackle a particular problem entitled to participate. Yet the collective character of suggestions was acknowledged, and indeed recommended as an instrument for the development of a spirit of participation in the shop. More radically, the managers responsible for the HC shop gave more explicit and more systematic recognition to the collective character of suggestions made, a fact which makes for one of the distinctive features of social relations in this shop. In the case of suggestions intended to reduce costs, only those that were put into practice led to the attribution of bonus, whose amount was proportional to the resulting gains made by the enterprise, which had to exceed a fixed threshold. A regulatory framework governed the

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question of precedence, so as to avoid dispute, for the same idea might be put forward by several people. Finally, in order to avoid the kind of bonus-hunting that might harm relations among workers, suggestions which related only to the operations sheet could ‘only be put forward by a person or persons responsible for the workstation or workstations’, that is to say, a person who had occupied the workstation for a month at the time when the suggestion was made. It was the améliorateurs who were responsible for dealing with suggestions, except for those relating to safety, which were treated by health and safety staff. The améliorateur recorded each suggestion in a computer file and examined it for its operational viability. If it was found to be acceptable, the suggestion was then passed on to the department concerned, to Organisation and Methods (usually represented by a technician attached to the shop), Engineering, or sometimes Purchasing. The rate of reward for suggestions is crucial. In the system developed in 1988, a safety suggestion was rewarded on a point scale from 1 to 10, depending on the seriousness of the risk prevented; quality suggestions on a scale of 1 to 100, depending on the seriousness of the defect avoided. A suggestion that led to a reduction in costs was rewarded by a bonus more or less equivalent to the monthly saving made as a result. On the 1988 scale, this bonus could in record cases exceed 100,000 francs. Taken as a whole, the system offered substantial financial incentives. It encouraged a substantial participation which was, however, very uneven in its distribution, according to the lists kept by the personnel department. Though there was a real participation among the team studied in MV, it was concentrated among moniteurs and polyvalents – those, indeed, who by the nature of their jobs had the greatest opportunity to circulate and to draw comparisons, and who, more particularly, were the first to come into contact with the new model and its initial problems. This inequality of opportunity was reinforced by the specific training courses followed by some among them. On the HC1 team, the numbers were even greater, but this may correspond to a higher level of motivation on a module led by a new moniteur wishing to prove himself. What is more, a rule specific to the shop, intended to encourage a sense of involvement, insisted that all suggestions were collective and attributable to a module as a whole. As in MV, there remained great inequalities, to the advantage of workers who were mobile and multi-functional. The existence of this inequality is confirmed by the améliorateurs, who in order to achieve their goals in terms of increased productivity, turned to networks of ‘suggestion-makers’ who were particularly productive as a result of their position, their inventiveness

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and their skill at detecting the existence of major reserves of productivity. Effective worker involvement in the suggestion system was therefore less extensive than might be imagined from the figures. Another source, an améliorateur’s personal record book, covering only the suggestions that he was responsible for looking at, shows 100 suggestions made on his line in the course of 1995, relating to tooling, the suppression or simplification of operations, or savings in materials. Taken as a whole, this evidence shows how well-established the scheme was, and also how extensive was its influence: investigation, calculation and discussion were more frequent than submitted suggestions, and submissions were more frequent than rewards: people played more often than they won. For example, one single idea was on average put forward in five distinct suggestions: and only the first, identified by means of the rules, would be examined by the améliorateur. Such a degree of participation had significant consequences for the social relations of the shop and of the enterprise. To submit suggestions is to express solidarity with the quest for productivity increases in the various domains concerned (materials, labour, tools). Productivity gains in terms of operations sheets can touch a traditionally sensitive spot, sometimes the site of conflict between workers and work-study technicians. For while the suppression of an operation does not intrinsically entail an intensification of labour, as it removes the gesture at the same time as subtracting the time allowed for it, it may in fact entail only the formalisation of a simplification that has already been put into practice, thus removing moments of relaxation which workers’ practical know-how had won for them. Operatives’ engagement with the suggestions system thus represents, to some extent, a renunciation of this kind of margin of manoeuvre at work. Another sign of this mood is the fact that the améliorateur responsible for productivity is in general a welcome visitor to the line. Furthermore, to submit suggestions is a way to stand out from the crowd, to escape the blue-collar world of manual labour and to compete at the level of the technicians, or even the managers, challenging the hierarchy even as one subordinates oneself to the goals of the enterprise.

PARI – a change in the rules, a different ball-game 1996 saw the introduction of a new system – Progrés par l’Amélioration et la Réalisation des Idées (Progress through [Productivity] Improvement and the Realisation of Ideas) – which made changes in the mode of submission, treatment and remuneration of suggestions. These now became an individual matter (except for the suggestions emerging from

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formal groups, such as quality circles, which were not rewarded in any event), and which give blue-collar workers only, on acceptance of the suggestion, a single payment of 150 francs. A committee of technicians and supervisors looks at suggestions and accepts or rejects them, choosing 1 in 10 to go through to a second round of assessment, carried out by a Unit Committee, chaired by the Unit Manager and made up of the heads of department and the PARI organiser. This second committee in turn chooses 1 in 10 of the suggestions that come to it, these to be rewarded by a payment of 10,000 francs. In addition, challenges are organised on various occasions, for which a variety of prizes are offered. For management, the advantage of the PARI system is the simplification of procedures and the extension of the fields to which it applies, which now include the organisation of the workstation, communication, organisation etc. The new system is presented as a tool for participatory management, rather than for raising productivity. A number of managers have suggested that the old system was open to abuse. For them, real active involvement in the suggestions system was too restricted, far more so than was evident from the figures; the requirement for the involvement of the occupier of the workstation – and a fortiori of the whole module collectively – was too often no more than a formality. The old system encouraged the exploration and submission of ‘big’ suggestions, especially in terms of economy of materials, to the detriment of gains in other fields and on other scales. It encouraged the emergence of bountyhunters who might neglect their own work. It motivated mainly those workers on the more technical side, working in maintenance, tooling or methods for example, or trainers who came into contact with the workstudy staff, as well as the moniteurs already discussed. Informal networks were established to think about suggestions, particularly on days of short-time working,. And all this was attended by a certain profit, with some ‘suggestion-makers’ regularly receiving more than 1000 francs a month for their proposals. Even before the PARI system came into effect, the fixing of the basic reward at 150 francs was a disappointment to many. In their opinion, the aim of the whole exercise was to reduce the amount of bonus paid. Some of the more significant players announced their intention of giving up the game, saying they weren’t ‘interested in charity’. Here one sees at work the characteristic, aristocratic logic of these committed suggestion-makers. From their point of view, the PARI represented an abandonment, for the unilateral benefit of the company, of the ‘win–win’ logic of the earlier system, and hence a form of injustice.

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Many améliorateurs were equally critical. Their networks of productive suggestion-makers had provided them with a significant proportion of the productivity increase they were expected to find each year. For them, then, this reform ill-treated a favoured working tool. Furthermore, the PARI system seemed less rigorous, as the registering of suggestions became more doubtful with records of submissions being kept for only 1 year; the individualisation of the suggestion mechanism, hindering more co-operative approaches, neutralised one of the dynamics in the formulation of ideas. Criteria for acceptance were unclear, and their application by committees whose proceedings were not transparent risked laying the procedure open to accusations of partiality, at the same time as encouraging a flood of suggestions more intended to manifest a willingness to participate than to effect technical improvements. Finally, the fact that suggestions were to be submitted to and recorded by the team-leader, not trained in the techniques of the améliorateur’s work, would lead to information-loss, and hence to increased difficulty in establishing priority and in dealing with suggestions by the améliorateurs: a situation which might even lead to parallel payments for the same suggestion. The most critical of the améliorateurs feared that in the hands of managers and supervisors, the system would turn into a simple mechanism for the distribution of bonus. By allowing suggestions to be subjected to a logic of man-management, the new system might strip them of their essential function as a tool for cost reduction. The new arrangements overturned a social complex composed of carefully formalised rules and of the informal networks of employees who followed them. The great sensitivity to these reforms among different sectors within the shop indicates how well-rooted the suggestion system was. It involved one part of the production staff in cost reduction, and legitimised this as a principle among blue-collar workers. The connection put on weight as one might say, combining technical mobilisation, supplementary remuneration, the formation of specific social networks, and the emergence of distinctive elements of identification at the same time as an enhancement of formal integration within the logic of the enterprise.

Quality: normativity and autonomy The growing importance of quality in the life of the enterprise and in that of the shop makes itself evident first of all in the relatively strong consensus around the discourse of quality itself. A great many of the operatives thus agree, more or less completely, with the reasoning that

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seeks to connect commitment to quality to the prosperity of the business and to the availability of employment, a reasoning that has served, as it does still, as a mobilising principle when confronted by difficulties. Beyond the discourse, however, assembly-line workers as whole seem disposed to produce quality work, even if they take few initiatives in actually improving quality. To a large extent, subject to the precautionary qualifications entailed by the scale of observation, manufacturing practice seems to have changed profoundly since the late 1970s, more particularly with the introduction of self-inspection in the mid-1980s. According to numerous witnesses, the sense of obligation as regards quality was in those days much less pressing, in that it was often felt to be the domain of the ‘quality-control people’. 6 Nowadays the company has a general quality policy which finds application through different aspects at each hierarchical level, as for example in training, prevention, fixing of standards, inspection, exclusion, warnings, etc.

Self-inspection: defect-repair, explanation or accountability? The commitment to quality on the assembly line concludes the gradual integration of quality-control into manufacture itself, at the level of the shop, the line, the team and then the individual assembly-line worker. Until the 1970s, in fact, quality control was separate from production. It was carried out at the end of the line by a dozen or so controllers, who belonged to an entirely different department from the assemblyworkers themselves. In this situation, the controllers were unable to detect certain defects, masked by later operations. Furthermore, the majority of defects detected inevitably required correction that was costly in labour for disassembly and reassembly. This was followed by a system that required two people, a quality-controller and a defectrepairer, for each team, which allowed defects to be detected much earlier but required large numbers to do the work. The current system of self-inspection was piloted on one line in 1981, and gradually and cautiously generalised in the period to 1986. It resulted in a significant reduction in the number of defects and in the number of quality-control posts per line per shift. It represented a real change in production, with the introduction of quality at the heart of the social norms governing work on the line. The current arrangements for self-inspection operate at three levels. The first level is that of the assembly-line worker, who checks his own work. This check is the crux of the matter, and it must have consequences: for every operation that could give rise to a serious or very serious defect (15 points for a risk of breakdown, 55 points for a safety

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defect, in the old language of penalties still used in the shop) the worker either warrants his work’s conformity with the norm, or he notifies the existence of the problem. This is done by signing one’s name in the appropriate place, or by applying an individualised stamp known as a ponce. The crux of the system is this personal commitment that makes the assembly-line worker accountable for his work. In addition, for each operation on a car that is incomplete or inadequate, or if he notices any other defect, the worker must inform the moniteur, who is to resolve the problem if this is possible, to avoid the need for the car to be ‘derailed’, pulled out at the end of the line and handed over to defect-repair. The moniteur is informed by means of an electric sign: above the line near his workstation he has an illuminated panel, on which the assembly-line worker concerned causes the number of his own workstation to appear by activating the remote control nearby. With this new system, the rapidity of communication allows a speedier and more simple intervention, shortening distances travelled and thus increasing efficiency. But shouts to attract the moniteur’s attention may still be heard. At the second level of quality control, the moniteur checks the work of fellow-workers on his module in accordance with a very precisely defined randomised procedure. Should he discover a serious defect that has not been notified, he must note it on his sheet in the section for ‘missed’ defects, and then recheck all the cars downstream of the worker responsible that have been produced since the last check. This is called rattrapage, or defect retrieval. The moniteur carries out whatever repairs are possible on defects notified by the workers on his module, marking any defects on his weekly monitoring sheet, where they are represented by scores. Every step thus leads to a record being made on some kind of document later to be examined by the Carrosserie’s quality-control department. Finally, the third level of control is exercised by this specialised qualitycontrol department, separate from the management of the shop, whose mostly female staff, the contrôleuses, posted two to a line, also carry out randomised checks. When one of them identifies a defect not notified by an assembly-line worker or his moniteur, she initiates the defect-retrieval process, filling out a form which prompts the moniteur to carry out the same procedure as when he identifies a defect himself. This arrangement represents a further instance of direct control, but also acts as a form of pressure on the two other levels: significant discrepancy between the results of inspection by the shop and by the controlleuses shows that something is going wrong: in the event, most likely a lack of rigour on the part of the moniteur. In addition, there are still the fixed permanent

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checks at the conclusion of assembly which identify certain defects, as do the trial drives to which the cars are subjected. The notification of defects has three essential functions: to ensure the elimination of defects by carrying out the necessary repairs, to allow the identification of the cause, so as to prevent recurrence, and finally to hold workers accountable for what they do. The first function makes use of the record-sheets that accompany each vehicle. On these are shown any operations that could not be carried out to a satisfactory standard, and also the record of corrective measures taken, either by the moniteur or by a defect-repairer at the outgoing end of the Carrosserie. Also assignable to this function are the systems for alerting the moniteur and the defect-retrieval forms addressed to the moniteur by quality-control staff. For this first ‘path’, the evidence of work done is thus fundamental, hence the importance accorded to the checking-off of operations by assembly-line workers. As part of the struggle against inattention, and to emphasis the principle of workers’ accountability, the shop management in principle treats an operation not recorded on the sheet, carried out properly as it may be, as seriously as the non-notification of an operation unsatisfactorily completed. The second function involves the analysis of the process that led to the defect. This also makes use of records kept by various parties: the moniteurs, the quality-control staff, the defect-repairers. Returns of defects noted are made every day to line management, who then send them back again to the supervisors responsible for learning the lessons from them and passing these on to assembly-line workers. Most often, serious defects are the result of disturbances to production, such as a new redistribution of tasks among workstations, a problem of sequencing, cover for absence, one worker training another, and so on. This kind of defect rarely recurs in identical form, which makes action aimed at improvement difficult. Other defects often have complex explanations, and the response is typically to try and find a material means of preventing repetition. Such are the détrompeurs, the physical guides that prevent certain kinds of inversion of assembly, or the automatic printers that record the execution of an operation. These tools and other equipment embody a tendency to reduce the direct human sources of uncertainty, and so the human quality of the activity. Other cases are approached as presenting problems of operative attitude. The third function of the checks and reports is precisely to act on the employee, to increase accountability. Such action may take several forms, already suggested by the vocabulary usually used to designate

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defects: the official word défaut, defect, evokes a technical sense of fault, and is intended to neutralise the problem without reflecting on the person responsible for it. But in practice the words erreur, mistake, oubli, omission, or faute, fault in the blameworthy sense, are often used, reflecting far more strongly on the perpetrator. Accountability – responsibility – can have positive or negative connotations. Certain particularly deserving assembly-line workers win the esteem of management. In HC a complex remuneration system recognizes the achievements of the line by means of a collective quality bonus, though nothing of the kind exists in MV. Finally, each worker is assessed in terms of quality of work, a topic addressed in the individual progress interview and one of the criteria for the attribution of individual points. If a worker is responsible for a defect, his supervisor will in principle have a word with him, if not a longer interview; if there are several in a certain period, this leads to his being sent a management letter, to draw his attention to the problem, and he may be sent for retraining. Further measures may include sanctions such as a formal warning, or a day’s suspension. Quality control is thus organised through several nested loops of identification, analysis and pressure: the loops of assembly-line worker, moniteur, contrôleuse, of permanent checks on the line, and downstream checks such as those effected at the outgoing end of the Carrosserie (including a trial drive) and by the plant-wide Quality Control Service (Qualité Sochaux). This nesting of quality-control systems has a double effect. On the one hand, each element makes its contribution to the detection and elimination of defects, and while doing this acts as a source of pressure on the systems that it encloses. On the other hand, each system leads to the formation of a space of negotiation and adjustment between actors which represents a space of autonomy in relation to the system above.

The play of transparency and opacity The three functions of the system of self-inspection do not always easily harmonise, a situation that complicates work relations. The analytical function requires an approach that prioritises maximum transparency, so that the problems of production may be clearly seen. This can be found in the work of the quality-control staff, who every week get together to consider a line as a whole, from the start of HC to the end of MV, to monitor responses to the defects observed; or in the working parties convened to deal with particularly important problems; or again in the quality circles, which are becoming less and less evident, perhaps because of their cost and clumsiness of procedure.7

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The same cannot be said of such systems’ role in encouraging accountability. The fact that the detection of a defect can entail problems for the person responsible has its effects on attitudes, all the more as the method of dealing with defects can often treat in isolation causes which are in fact frequently combined with others. 8 For example, the repetitive and constantly demanding nature of the work leads to workers acquiring a repertoire of automatic habits to keep up with the job. This makes it harder to react to variations, which act as disturbances and so increase the incidence of defects. Corrective interventions, however, tend to abstract such a fault of attention from the whole complex which engenders it, appealing to such partially external factors as self-respect, goodwill, fear, interpersonal relations, identification with the company and so on. This rather selective attention to the worker’s behaviour can lead one to think that the whole game is biased, reinforcing an inclination to hide defects and their causes. The penal element in the system of accountability promotes a number of behaviours that take place before a defect is formally recorded: assembly workers will inform each other of defects occurring, so that they may be corrected before they come to the attention of the next level of quality control, and such informal feedback systems will also operate between moniteurs and assembly-line workers, even on different modules, and also between different teams. Such behaviours are not seen as obstacles to the efficient working of the quality-control system, but rather as basic, ‘natural’ expressions of solidarity and goodwill. Failure in this respect is seen as a clear sign of animosity between workers, between teams or between foremen. ‘You don’t do that, we’re all in the same boat’, said one foreman after a downstream team had not informed him of a visible defect, leaving it to be picked up by the quality-control staff. On another occasion the same foreman had lent one of his workers to his colleague in charge of the team next up the line, in order to correct a defect on a car that was coming down. If this is accepted, then quality is in fact connected to a solidarity between ‘producers’, a solidarity in the face of, and against, the quality-control system and the principle of systematic defect notification. This tendency towards occultation through solidarity puts the moniteur in a tricky position in relation to the worker in his charge, as it does also to the quality-control staff in relation to these two. On the one hand, they are subordinated to their role of formal control, which represents in a sense their raison d’être, while on the other it is difficult to escape entirely from the logic of solidarity discussed above, except by risking the loss of all sympathy. As a result, in carrying out this aspect of their

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work both moniteur and controlleuse find themselves obliged to bend the rules somewhat, to steer a path between the benevolent, informal and invisible correction of a defect and the formal reporting procedure. Does this undermine self-inspection? In fact, line management is very much aware of the problem, which it makes efforts to suppress, monitoring the ratios of defects reported by moniteurs and those reported by qualitycontrol staff: if the discrepancy becomes too great, that is to say, if the moniteurs report too few in comparison to the controlleuses, this is a sign that they are being too indulgent towards the workers on the line. It is no surprise that relations between quality-control staff and production staff, from assembly-line workers to supervisors, are equally ticklish. It is interesting to note that the shop-floor quality-control staff are generally women – a situation one finds in a number of fields ancillary to production. The gender divide formalises and objectifies the division of solidarities, at the same time as it displaces it: impartial, the controlleuses have to supervise the ‘producers’, and if need be report them on discovering their defects. They will not give in to the illegitimate solicitations of the men, for they recognise and accept the legitimate higher authority of the company. At other Peugeot plants, such as Poissy, the quality-control function is carried out by men, it being said that most Muslims have difficulty in accepting the authority of women. Whatever the reason, this difference highlights the variation between plants within the same company. The competing pressures on the contrôleuses are not at all imaginary. One of them said that there were sectors where her work was difficult, and where she was glad of her independence from the shop, which helped her resist the pressures and anger she encountered, from assemblyline workers, but also from moniteurs and supervisors: all of them were concerned with their statistics for defects. At the end of the day, the controlleuses, nearly all of them ex-assembly-line workers themselves, also maintain a certain margin of manoeuvre, and will for example prove themselves a little more understanding on the last days before the holidays, allowing defects to be corrected without noting them formally. But not too much: they themselves are monitored by their own managers, who are very much aware of their vulnerability to social pressure and keep up the pressure on them to make rigorously accurate reports of defects detected. There are thus created, around the rules which govern the operation of the system of self-inspection, and as a product of their very polysemy, on the one hand a play of actors all creating for themselves a certain margin of autonomy, and on the other the tools to ensure the transparency

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of the instances for whose supervision they are responsible. This play, grafted onto the different loops of the quality-control system, generates sectors where these contradictory logics of transparency and opacity encounter each other in relations of conflict and complicity.

The training school, guardian of the gestural norm If the instruments of self-inspection are the prime supports of this social game, another example is offered by the training schools established within the Carrosserie in the early Nineties. Located near the production areas, but within distinct, enclosed spaces, they include offices and workshop areas provided with many cars ‘in construction’ for the purposes of training. The establishment of the training schools coincided with the reform of quality policy, and represents a desire for standardisation, for a control of gestural practice, which had earlier been learnt strictly ‘on the job’. As in a game of Chinese whispers, with each successive transmission of know-how, the gap between prescribed model and actual practice became wider and wider. With this cumulative slippage it became more and more difficult to turn to the operations sheet to resolve a working problem, and workers’ autonomy was increased and reinforced. The occupiers of workstations were the possessors of a more and more exclusive practical competence which increasingly escaped the supervisory possibilities of foremen and technicians. Now every workstation or operation is taught from the written documentation, and not, as previously, from an operative’s version of it, an adapted version that might itself have derived from a previous adaptation; it is the theoretical standard, and not individual practice, that serves as the norm. The most visible activity of the training school, then, is the training of workers in any task that is new to them, which they may have to master as a result of a transfer or of the introduction of a new part, a new engine, a new option or indeed a new model of car. The procedure followed by the trainers, who are often ex-defect-repairers, shows the force of standardisation at work: the learning process starts each time with the operations-sheet, and not with its practical implementation by the moniteur or assembly-line worker. Each operation is described by an operation sheet which often has one and sometimes two ‘key points’ presented as the decisive features of the operation. The process of learning the action is in principle gradual: a demonstration, accompanied by commentary, several times repeated, then attempts by the trainee, with each key feature explained; the stop-watch comes into play when the succession of movements has been grasped, and the operation is repeated until the time required has fallen and is stabilised at a satisfactory level.

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The dangers of getting it wrong are explained, together with its consequences: ‘derailment’,9 the nature of the repair required and how much time it requires. Yet the training school is not possessed of absolute authority, even in the field of training. As many operations can only be carried out on the line, part of the training is carried on there, often by the operative responsible for one of the workstations, or by a polyvalent, under the eye, sometimes, of the moniteur. On the line, the training process has become more or less fixed in form, making use of traditional blue-collar means for the transmission of knowledge: the practising of one operation until it is mastered, and then of another, the combination of the two, and then three operations, and so on until the whole has been acquired. One then progresses from doing one car in two, to doing two out of three and so on. However, from respect for the worker in post, or from fear of laying himself open to ridicule, at this point the trainer from the school passes the responsibility for training to the assembly workers in the shop. He returns only later on, to formally certify the newcomer’s aptitude and thus to render him fully accountable for his work. Over the whole of this part of the training, the norm will give pedagogical ground to practice. Formal certification is certainly an occasion for discussion, for the confrontation of the training school method and the ‘shop-floor’ method, but it leaves scope for a certain autonomy of practice, for the development of a double repertoire, of gestures ‘for the moniteur’ and of gestures for the real business of production. As a result, the training school appears as the instrument of a practice of normalisation that runs alongside another practice, that of the shop, which also has not insignificant resources at its disposal. The training school, however, is not at all restricted to the forming of assembly-line workers. As an integral part of the quality organisation of the plant, it also has other roles, more discreet, which are nonetheless highly characteristic of its regulatory function. On the one hand it is responsible for carrying out studies on individual workstations called process audits. These are carried out in principle at least once a year by ‘auditors’ who like the contrôleuses are generally women. At the same time, they check whether operatives are sticking strictly to the prescriptions of the operations sheet, and whether these requirements can in fact be met in practice. Where there is a discrepancy between actual practice and the operations sheet, the auditors simply take note. This record, neutral in principle, is then dealt with by others: by the améliorateur, where the workstation’s operations sheet must be rewritten so as to formalise a productivity gain that had hitherto remained hidden and

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been exploited only by the worker in taking his rest, or perhaps to take advantage of a quality improvement resulting from the novelty; by the training school and by the foreman, if it is necessary to re-educate and to supervise the worker so as to avoid a loss of manufacturing quality. This is a system not to be taken lightly, for there are in fact five or six of these auditors per shop. Finally, the training school contributes to the determination of operations-sheet timings by the work-study technicians. The latter come to the school to test the allowances for some operations, the trainers working on the practice vehicles. In this way they avoid taking the stopwatch to workers on the line, an exercise that is always somewhat tricky, sometimes tense, and which occasionally leads to open conflict. On these occasions the trainers can take advantage of the observations they have made on manual technique in the course of training, certification or other visits to the line, and make suggestions to work-study staff. Tasks are now timed on the line only for the purposes of verification. When one then adds to this a certain ‘natural’ co-operation between the moniteurs of the training school and the améliorateurs, it becomes clear to what extent the training school in the end represents an effective network for the prescription and subsequent monitoring of manual workers’ gestures, an instrument of the organisation and methods and quality control departments in their relations with the ‘producers’. The guardian of the norm, it confronts this with day-to-day practice so as to continuously reduce any gap that might develop between the two.

Certification: towards a ‘Taylorism of quality’ One of the more important recent developments in the field of quality has been the implementation at Sochaux of two successive schemes of quality certification, the one to meet the standards of the company’s own Assurance Qualité Automobiles Peugeot, the other to meet the more general requirements of ISO 9000.10 This is entirely in line with developments in France from the 1980s onward. The logic of the quality assurance system was developed in the United States during the massive production of armaments in the Second World War. To avoid having to check everything, quality assurance validated forms of industrial organisation capable of ensuring a constant level of quality and thus of winning the confidence of the client, in this case the armed forces. The approach was then adopted by automobile manufacturers who wanted to confide certain production tasks to sub-contractors in an effort to reduce costs, it therefore becoming necessary to guarantee their reliability as suppliers. 11

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This ‘EAQF’ system, adopted by a number of French car manufacturers, was then applied ‘internally’ by Peugeot. The decision was taken for several reasons. Coherence suggested that the criteria imposed on suppliers should also be applied within the company. Secondly, European integration led to the replacement of type approval on a countryby-country basis by a single EU-wide type-approval mechanism which looked not only at the product but also at the production system. Furthermore, the symbolic value of ISO certification had become so important in advertising terms that it was more-or-less unavoidable for a major manufacturer. The company began by applying its own system of standards, the AQAP, inspired by the EAQF, before beginning on the process of obtaining ISO 9000 certification. At Peugeot-Sochaux the introduction of these two quality standards involved the application, at every level, of the principle ‘Write down what is done, and do what is written down’, the local version of ‘Say what you do, do what you say, and prove it’. 12 This led, of course, to an increase in paperwork, but more importantly, it led to a reduction in the space left to informal arrangement. By adopting this approach, the management intended to reduce the margin of uncertainty, unclarity and unverifiability in production and communications, implementing a classical programme of rationalisation whose scope has perhaps been underestimated. Many authors have spoken of it as an instance of ‘the revenge of Taylorism’.13 In fact, self-inspection is not a step towards the autonomy of the producer, but rather a reinforcement of subordination to procedures of control. In practice, then, the written accompanies the done in a double sense, first as model and secondly as witness. As a means of exerting pressure on the shop, the audit carried out by the training school is in this respect instructive. In general, the audit system may be said to operate at every level: the foremen are ‘audited’ in turn by their superiors, and so on. There are two fields, however, where this process of standardisation comes up against its limits. The extension of formalism represented by the quality approach encounters a sometimes effective resistance from producers: such reactions are anchored in the relationships of solidarity between production staff, as we have seen above. Might one say, then, that after an offensive of rationalisation, and a counter-offensive of informal adjustments, actual productive practices have now more or less returned to what they were before? It certainly can be said that there was a ‘fashionable’ aspect to the whole move towards quality certification. But these developments are sustained, outside the shop, outside the plant, and even outside the company by

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such forces as the administrative integration of the European Union, relations with suppliers, and the role of the quality discourse in the market. Hence the company’s decision to invest a great deal of effort in this domain. Within the plant, certification, accompanied by selfinspection, has led to an ambitiously detailed rationalisation of production processes. Overall, as we have seen, it is intended to shift attention away from the product and on to the process of production. Employee insistence on a degree of autonomy does of course render illusory the hope for a total transparency of production processes, a perfect congruence between what is written and what is done. But the margin of uncertainty has been reduced, and the inspection and control introduced in the name of quality has registered long-term advances, effects on practice that are also elements in an organisational learning process. Finally, quality is sometimes – and might this perhaps be the price paid for success? – the site where one sees played out certain relations that might earlier have found expression elsewhere. So the risk most often mentioned in conversation is that of a ‘15-pointer’. Quality has extended its dominion over the social relations of the shop, while ground has been lost by other issues that had earlier enjoyed greater salience, such as the questions of industrial discipline or cycle-time. Perhaps this is because the majority of the old-timers have been polished to smoothness by the force of friction. Yet certain classical causes of tension have now been subsumed under the problematic of quality. Carelessness, for example, or forgetfulness, or slowness at work are now often dealt with in terms of quality. The worsening of relations between an assembly worker and his moniteur entails the withdrawal of the latter’s goodwill, while a foreman will choose this discourse to reprimand a worker. To sum up, discussion at work often takes place on the terrain of quality, which serves as a consensual point of reference.

Medical restrictions on work: when the marginal becomes central Work on the assembly line causes physical wear and tear on workers who do it for a long period of time. This impairment, recognised by management, becomes the locus of confrontation and negotiation over the seriousness of medical problems and their consequences, and the medical restrictions that may be appropriate. Occupational physicians, nurses, supervisors, foremen, line-balancers, trade-union representatives and, of course, the workers themselves, find the grant or denial of medical restrictions at the heart of their day-to-day relations. Should the worker undergo

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surgery, there can be no more argument . . . at least for the moment. But before that, or where there are other less tangible problems, or the slight injuries that can nonetheless be troublesome in manual work, the negotiation of medical restrictions casts light on the nature of assemblyline work, and even more on the attitudes of the various actors towards the health of assembly-line workers. They highlight, too, the importance to supervisors of having enough workers available to them in the morning to cover all the workstations on the line. What is more, with the majority of workers going to see the nurse or the doctor with their various problems, their complaints tell us a great deal about the nature of the fatigue engendered by work on the line. As required by employment legislation, Peugeot has an occupational medicine service, which has premises in the Carrosserie, where as well as the occupational physicians there are nurses to provide first aid when necessary. Because they enjoy managerial status, the workers have long seen the occupational physicians as the accomplices of the company. It is true that they have for a long time combined their role as doctors with another in the organisation of work, and today they are much more involved in these matters, especially with the new attention being paid to improving the working conditions of manual workers. As they say themselves, occupational physicians find themselves on a razor’s edge, balanced between competing pressures, with the board and assembly-line management on the one side and the workers and the unions on the other. According to one of them, working at Peugeot-Sochaux, the occupational physician is at the centre of the dynamic between problems and their solution: though the problems themselves may often seem simple enough, the answers are hardly ever black and white. While the nurses, as well as providing the necessary treatment, are entitled to impose temporary restrictions on work, it is for the occupational physician to certify the existence of longer-lasting injury or disease on the basis of detailed examination and discussion with the patient. The doctor’s decision has long-term consequences, which is why he or she will produce an epidemiological analysis intended to lead to modifications in workplace layout: for prevention is better than cure.

The occupational diseases of automobile assembly Although the occupational physician is responsible for more than the certification of medical restrictions, these do represent one of the most delicate areas of work, given what is at stake on both sides: workers will seek to have disease or injury recognised so as to obtain a less demanding workstation, or to get to leave the line altogether, while from the point

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of view of management, medical restrictions entail monetary losses, because the partially incapacitated worker (PIW) cannot do normal work, i.e. be assigned to any post whatsoever. The official definition defines as a ‘PIW any individual who as a result of illness or incapacity is unable to carry out some part of the duties associated with a workstation’. As well as temporary incapacities resulting from accident or illness, there are long-term incapacities caused by diseases connected with the work of assembly itself. For the upper limbs, these are carpal tunnel syndrome (wrists), which tends to appear at the age of 45 in the dominant hand and 2 or 3 years later in the other. There is also inflammation of the tendons of the elbow (epicondylitis) or of the shoulder. All these are recognised as occupational diseases resulting from excessive demand on nerves and muscles, by force, vibration, the angle of the hand in working, and in particular, by repetitive action: the workers who fit the snappons, the rubber seals around the doors, strike 5,000 blows of the mallet each day! Slipped discs, on the other hand, which make their appearance at age of 38–42 in those workers who have to get in and out of cars, who frequently have to bend over, or who work with the back curved or twisted, are not recognised as an occupational disease. The average cost of these diseases deserves note: 157 days off work on average for a slipped disc, and 125 days for carpal tunnel syndrome. Certain permanent physical incapacities (PPIs) now afflict between 2 to 3 per cent of employees. The number of cases of disease has increased noticeably over recent years, as a result of the ageing of the population that has been kept on the line, and the high level of physical demand: there has been an increase from 33 to 83 cases of peri-articular occupational disease between 1993 and 1997. 14 For the Directorate of Human Resources, prevention is no longer a matter of modifying workstations, but of involving occupational physicians and ergonomists in the fundamental design of the assembly line. Yet this isn’t easy, given the nature of the constituencies involved in process planning, and the scale and mass of existing installations, which limit the possibility of radical changes in workstations when changes of model are introduced. For some years now, occupational physicians and ergonomists have been involved in the teams planning vehicles and production processes, which is believed to be a first in the field of occupational medicine. 15 But it would seem that physicians and ergonomists are not succeeding as well as perhaps they should, as the technical mind-set of the engineers continues to win out over ergonomic requirements. The prospect of keeping assembly workers on the line until their retirement will require a much greater investment in ergonomics.

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The incidence of occupational disease is such that of the 13,000 manual workers at Sochaux, 40 per cent have been accorded some form of medical restriction on the work they can do: 16 in total, there are 12,000 individual restrictions applied to the population of manual and ex-manual employees. In the HC shop, 51 per cent of manual workers (representing 38 per cent of the total population of the shop) have been granted at least one medical restriction. These are broken down as follows: 1 standing position; frequent movement; heavy loads; frequent flexion, torsion, rotation of the trunk; squatting position, etc.: 43 per cent; 2 repetitive movement of wrist or elbow; movement of wrist or elbow under load; raised arms; movement of shoulders under load, etc.: 25 per cent; 3 environmental irritation (cutaneous, respiratory, ocular, etc.); vibrating tools held by upper limbs: 13 per cent;

The issues at stake in the grant of medical restrictions Manual workers seek the grant of medical restrictions in order to get specially adapted workstations, or at least to be able to negotiate with the foreman or the line-balancer the possibility of an easier post. In other words, they use these in the elaboration of a defensive system which they put to work more particularly when the line is being rebalanced each month, or on the occasion of the introduction of a new model, when everything, or nearly everything, has to be re-learnt from scratch. The end-goal, hardly ever attained, is to be able to leave the line and work in the office. Many workers would prefer the office hours in order to be able to work at some other, part-time employment. Supervisory staff in the Carrosserie are aware of the negative image from which assembly-line work suffers, compared to other types of occupation within the plant, due in part to the physically demanding nature of the job. They willingly acknowledge that ‘some fellows refuse to go on the line, they stop working, or work slowly or only really work 4 or 5 hours a day’. Medical recognition of restrictions on the tasks that one may be asked to carry out imposes a respect for one’s body that the brutality of the line tends to refuse. Despite this, the more or less complaisant certification of sick leave by GPs is now very rare. The records of return-to-work appointments with the occupational physician (for absences of more than 2 weeks), intended to determine whether there is a connection between work and sick-leave, show that while in 1992 there was no disease or injury in 10% of cases of sick-leave taken,

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the rate today has fallen to zero. What is more, some workers have their carpal-tunnel or slipped-disc surgery carried out during their holidays, so that they are not recorded as absent from work. The pressure of unemployment is influential in such decisions, while other factors may be the desire to maintain a certain self-image, or the wish to enjoy attendance bonuses. For the occupational physician, every medical restriction corresponds to a certified medical condition. The question at issue is when the physician will decide to certify. Despite the immediate satisfaction this affords the worker, who has a document he can use to bring about improvements in his workstation, there is nothing to guarantee that his transfer to another post may not be a step out of the frying pan and into the fire: in preparation work, for example, the fatigue is less physical than psychological, by reason of the monotony and the frequent isolation. There is another risk, too. Even with a certified medical condition, a declaration of unsuitability for work on the assembly line holds out the possibility of the sack at some point: for the law holds that frequent absence (even for long illness) or the inability to carry out certain tasks may be of such a nature as to disrupt production, authorising the employer to terminate employment. This is the reason, say the occupational physicians, why they hesitate to certify unsuitability for assemblyline work, always looking out for ‘residual capacities’ in the worker concerned. In certain cases, workers who can no longer continue on the line may be transferred to office work. The quest for the certification of a medical restriction is therefore part of a project that is easily expressed: in the long term to leave the line and in the short term to gain a specially adapted workstation, which both reduces fatigue and improves one’s position in the negotiations over the rebalancing of the line. The strategy, however, is rather more complex: on the one hand, to gain certification, the condition must exist, yet bad management in the exploitation of this restriction can lead to the marginalisation and even exclusion of the worker concerned. For their part, supervisory staff may wish to see a certain number of their workers recognised as incapacitated, so as to be able to negotiate the attribution of additional staff. In one of the teams studied, the wide range of strategies employed in the play around rebalancing the line emphasises the complexity and variety of combinations possible. For example, a worker who has been granted a medical restriction may not make use of it: yet both the foreman and the line-balancer know of its existence, and will have regard to it as much as possible. On the one hand, the worker benefits from an increase in his ‘loyalty quotient’, without losing any credit among his

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peers; and on the other, he engenders an uncertainty as to the use he does intend to make of it, and as a result increases – obviously within limits recognised by all parties – the assets he has in negotiating his refusal or acceptance of certain tasks. Unlike him, the great majority of workers who are granted a medical restriction will make use of it, even if only temporarily. They see it as a sign of resistance to the demands of line-management, and as an asset in any rebalancing of the line. Medical restrictions are thus a major asset in the negotiations that accompany the recomposition of workstations and the redistribution of workers amongst them, not only to avoid maximally loaded posts but also to avoid particular tasks which assembly workers may find over-demanding. For assembly-line management – and for the line-balancer who carries out his technical role under their authority – medical restrictions represent constraints which increase the difficulties of their position, standing between senior management and the worker group with which they spend most of their day. Charged with finding a 12 per cent increase in productivity every year, they come into conflict with the occupational physician when the latter judges the modifications made to workstations to meet the requirements of a certified medical restriction to be insufficient. Finally, any specially adapted workstation must suit the workers on both shifts: there is no question, either, of assigning a worker without medical restrictions to such a post, for this would be to lose productivity. For the workstation to be suitable to the workers on both shifts, the modifications must reflect a kind of common denominator in relation to more or less similar medical restrictions. Balancing the line then becomes an absolute headache, with medical restrictions accounting for 90 per cent of the difficulty according to one line-balancer. Hence the temptation, often mentioned by assembly-line workers, not to follow to the letter the proscriptions of the ‘yellow sheet’ on which are entered the bodily movements forbidden by the occupational physician. For their part, the unions, and the CGT and the CFDT more particularly, try and ensure that medical restrictions are observed: 17 often enough the foreman will not pass the ‘yellow sheets’ on to the line-balancer, as the recourse to medical restrictions by his workers is indirect evidence of a worsening atmosphere in the team. Or, according to one employee representative, in putting two workers certified 50 per cent incapacitated onto one workstation, this may be given a workload of 150 per cent of the normal: it is then a difficult matter for those concerned, or their representatives, to get hold of the relevant documentation (the operations sheet, the line-balancer’s listing, tables of operation times etc.) in

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order to demonstrate the excessive nature of the workload. What is more, even if ‘going to see a CGT employee representative isn’t quite enough to bring about marginalisation or exclusion’, as one rep put it, it isn’t a step that is always taken, as other less visible approaches can also lead to favourable resolutions. Finally, if supervisory staff and line-balancers have to meet the company’s demands for productivity increases, they also try and ensure a good atmosphere on the line. Hence the quest for durable compromises and the tendency to reduce the pressure for productivity by building up reserves of manpower, more or less tacitly recognised (for the management of the shop, too, knows that it is impossible to cope without such a reserve, to deal with absence and other chance events). For example, in a reversal of the practice described immediately above, there may be advantages in not finding formal posts for workers with a temporary 50 per cent incapacity – thus subtracting them from the official figures for those involved in production – while finding them employment in a supernumerary capacity assisting operatives in difficulty. This consensual management – obviously high-cost from the point of view of senior management – has positive effects on the climate of work. It is often decisive in gaining acceptance of a badly composed workstation, or in getting through the first three days of a demanding reorganisation of the line. This oscillation between coercion and consensus in the exploitation of medical restrictions is characteristic of the whole of the everyday life of the shop, as it involves problems of pay, bonus, sequencing, quality, management style, etc. The diversity of career trajectories among workers leads them to adopt different positions in relation to employer demands: but in every case, they also come across the different trade unions, more or less favourable or more or less opposed to the plans and intentions of company management.

Trade-unionism and industrial militancy Thanks to a rather manichaean tradition of industrial relations at Sochaux, trade unionism faces a number of difficulties, whether sympathetic to management or not. The great national union confederations have a presence there, which finds expression in what seems to the external eye an intermittent activity. More generally, the day-to-day influence of unionism of whatever kind seems weak. Detailed observation shows, however, its importance in the everyday relations of the shop, and how it enjoys a negotiating strength that the board and assembly-line

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management must always take into account, at the risk of seeing such an outbreak of industrial unrest as the great strike of 1989.

Trade-unionism at Peugeot-Sochaux After 1968, Sochaux saw not only the development of mechanisms of worker-representation, but the emergence, encouraged by management, of the Syndicat Indépendant des Automobiles Peugeot (SIAP – Peugeot Cars Independent Union), which in the late Seventies affiliated to the Confédération des Syndicats Libres (CSL). The prime function of this company union was to counter the influence of so-called oppositional (contestataire) trade-unionism, denouncing it as a threat to the survival of the company and to workers’ own interests, while at the same time attempting to satisfy the wishes and demands of its members and sympathisers among the workforce. In a de facto alliance with the CFTC and the FO, the SIAP-CSL formed what the company called a reformist or participatory tendency, while the CGC was very strong among middlemanagement. An alliance of these ‘participatory’ unions, helped first of all by the CFDT, formed a majority to run the Works Council and to remove the CGT from its leadership. Since that time, the CGC and the FO have taken the chair in alternate years, to the exclusion of those unions that were earlier described as revolutionary, and now as militant or oppositional: the CGT and the CFDT.

Table 4.1 Elections for works council (WC) and for employee representatives (HC–1st electoral college, 1996) Elections to WC

Election of employee representatives

Registered

1,784

1,784

Voting

92%

92.21%

Valid papers

87%

86.61%

Blank and spoiled

13%

13.39%

CGT

47.8%

CFDT

13.2

61%

47.48%

17.7%

26%

FO CFTC CSL

13.68%

61.16%

11.77% 8.3%

5.89%

25.45%

7.79%

Source: Peugeot-Sochaux, Carrosserie, Direction des Relations Sociales et Humaines.

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The results above show the distribution of union support in HC, through voting figures in the elections for the Works Council and of employee representatives (délégués du personnel). These figures demonstrate the stability of the vote between elections of different kinds, in ballots six months apart. If one compares the elections of employee representatives in 1996 to those in 1994, the ‘militant’ unions have gained a further 5 per cent of the vote, testimony to a relative deterioration in the industrial relations climate. The FO, which had the wind in its sails in 1994, lost almost 2.5 per cent. Such cyclical variations are hardly significant in the longer term: basically, more than a half and sometimes almost two-thirds of the manual workers support the so-called militant unions; in certain sectors and on certain lines, the proportion exceeds 70 per cent. Such a vote, however, is not a militant engagement against Peugeot, and even less against the capitalist system; it is used as a means of exerting pressure on conditions of work, on supervisors’ attitudes and on pay. The workers know that the results are pored over and carefully analysed by the senior management of the company. Trade unionists have expressed a certain irritation at this ‘protest vote’, which expresses a certain dissatisfaction but only in the privacy of the voting-booth. At the same time, this kind of challenge also demonstrates the failure to establish company unionism among the workers, the difficulty of expressing overt opposition in sight of the supervisory staff . . . and in this, too, the weakness of militant unionism. Employment relations at Sochaux are thus characterised by the low profile of the trade unions, which are overshadowed by worker/supervisor personal relations, even as the relations between these unions and management offer a benchmark for very many. The limits of trade-unionism at Sochaux are made clear by the membership figures, which in all likelihood total some 1,500 to 2,000 for all unions taken together. 18 These unionisation rates are a half or a third of what one would generally find in major companies in France. Only the CGC–CFE, the managers’ union, scores high: its membership here makes this one of its biggest branches in France: very many supervisory staff are members, no doubt finding in this union an intellectual framework and a culture which supports them in their daily work, while the values promoted reinforce the social relations of the enterprise: the legitimation of hierarchy, the justification of orientations adopted by the company management. What is more, for supervisory staff, to belong to the CGC–CFE is to lay claim to a managerial identity that raises them towards the company’s nobility, a good way above the common run of workers with whom they spend their days and from whom they have themselves mostly emerged.

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On the other hand, the many successive company restructuring plans, which have led to a reduction of the workforce by half while maintaining more or less the same level of production, have had a seriously damaging effect on the manual unions, on the CGT more particularly; on top of the reduction in the workforce, the unions are having some difficulty in recruiting among younger workers, who are content to have found a job and wish to avoid doing anything to displease their superiors. At the same time, union power isn’t only a matter of membership or of votes gathered in elections: if the former were the case, the militant unions would rule the roost. Union power is also measured by the institutional presence of employee representatives, which gives a place to union activists and sympathisers who can give day-to-day support to workers in difficulty, through their ability to win the respect of supervisors, and, if need be, to organise a stoppage, or, in the case of deep and widespread dissatisfaction, a strike.

The union activist and his image In discussions of trade unionism in France a distinction is often drawn between two kinds of union culture and activity. The one, urban and blue-collar, sustains a militant, class-based unionism. The other, Catholic and rural, excludes any challenge to the bosses as well as any ‘workingclass consciousness’. This dichotomy, however, hardly survives examination of the case of Sochaux, where, since the immediate post-war period, the Christian and Communist tendencies within trade unionism have both been well-rooted among manual workers in the region, extending their influence well beyond the Sochaux-Montbéliard conurbation. Here the CGT and the original CFTC were both dominated by skilled workers in the metallurgical industries, and many of their leaders were trained at the Peugeot Apprenticeship School. They recruited too those who had worked in the old textile industry, and the children of immigrants, of Italians in particular. They then opened their doors to unskilled workers in the period 1960–80, being willing to appoint them to positions of responsibility, and they established themselves among the immigrants of the period: the Yugoslavs, the Portuguese and the North Africans. In the CGT, still dominant among the manual workers at Peugeot, the crisis of Communism in the Eighties, which took on specific regional forms, allowed the development of allegiances to a wider range of political organisations, amongst which Lutte Ouvrière has an acknowledged role. The majority support for the CGT, combined with this relative political diversity, gives it a very particular position in comparison with branches at other Peugeot-group sites. The CFDT, earlier influenced by the managers’

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union and committed to joint management (co-gestion) has since the 1960s swung back-and-forth between a radical militancy and a managerialist reformism. The key-point in these developments came in the midEighties, with its break with the CGT, followed soon after by its eviction from the ‘participatory’ majority on the Works Council. Since then its identity has been somewhat unclear: while taking up an oppositional stance at the side of the CGT, it is careful to take its distance from it on very many occasions, a difficult position to maintain for a minority union. Apart from the favourable foundation provided by family background or by immediate environment, most activists are brought to the CGT or CFDT by some event in the course of their career. One young worker joined the CFTC on the advice of his parents, supported by the views of the supervisors and of his own foreman: after three years in this union, and having qualified as polyvalent, he realised that the promises that had been made to him of promotion to supervisory status had not been kept. He then left the CFTC and joined the CGT, ‘in order to make himself heard’. This fate, though it rarely leads to membership of a militant trade union, he shares with a number of younger workers recruited some five or six years ago, and also with that group of middle-aged workers returned to a fixed workstation after qualifying as polyvalent with the hope of promotion to moniteur: it is the disillusioned and the disappointed with their differing attitudes to work who tend to vote for the militant unions. They join the CGT or the CFDT, or at least become sympathetic conduits for their ideas as soon as they feel themselves to have been injured or insulted by their supervisors – something that happens quite easily given the nature of existing employment relations: for many supervisory staff, workers who do not pledge allegiance to them are seen as potential adversaries. By reason of their position on sometimes difficult and always unrewarding workstations, many workers feel fragile and vulnerable: disappointment, arrogance, an ill-received remark or the repetition of incidents, all can lead to a rigidifying of positions. Such wounds do not heal easily in an environment dominated by the constraints of productivity and the monotony of work. According to one young trade unionist ‘the guys who join [the CGT or the CFDT] do it to get back at Peugeot which has dropped them in it. Union members aren’t class conscious, but they are against the bosses. Management doesn’t have the same control over union members that it does over other workers: union-members know the law, the employment regulations; management treats them with kid gloves’. A worker who had been employed in die-stamping, where he had been developing his skills for seven years (and thus acquiring a potential of

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225 points) was transferred to HC0 to meet a shortage of labour. Having mastered the requirements of work on the assembly-line, qualifying as polyvalent and working as an inspector of electrical work for 4 years, he was then told by his senior supervisor that he could look forward to no further progress in his career: he was now at 190 points, while his potential had been downgraded by 25 points. This man joined one of the two oppositional unions, and agreed to become an employee representative. In this case the ill-temper of his superior had radicalised the young worker’s positions, and with this only confirming the end of his career hopes, he then went even further, claiming that ‘blackmail (promotion in exchange for submission) is unacceptable’. Employee representatives, together with health and safety representatives, and to a lesser extent members of the Works Council, enjoy a certain social recognition from other workers, and often attract the grudging respect of supervisory staff as they play their role on the razor’s edge – that is, by winning individual demands without falling into systematic opposition. The peer recognition enjoyed by CGT and CFDT representatives often makes them important figures, if not exactly stars, who sometimes even succeed in forging a group identity for the line concerned, despite the mobility of assembly-line workers. Of course, this recognition and this popularity were also extremely costly to the activist, who until 1998, that is, until the settlement of claims for anti-union discrimination, thus brought an end to all hope of promotion and ran the risk of the sack. A representative does have a marginal advantage – he gets to leave the line to attend to his duties (15 hours a month for an employee representative, 20 hours a month for a health and safety representative). This fact is seized upon by supervisory staff, who see it as evidence of representatives’ laziness and lack of commitment to their work – an opinion they freely share with other workers on the line in the attempt to discredit representatives and the unions to which they belong, or to cast doubt on the sincerity of their activism. Yet such advantage as this seems very little compared to the bar on the further advancement of representatives aligned with the oppositional unions. Supervisory staff’s discourse on oppositional trade unionism does have its effects. On the one hand, it is very rare for workers who have once joined the SIAP–CSL to then turn to the CGT or CFDT, or to vote for them, even after they have suffered repeated disappointment (the disillusioned). On the other, young workers often take their distance from the older: for them, if yesterday the unions played a positive role (in terms of pay, breaks, hours and conditions of work . . .) today they

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are no use at all; the union is for activists, and has nothing to do with the mass of workers. The majority of young recruits (in post for two years) ‘don’t want to get involved.’ One of them says: ‘To support the CGT or the CFDT is to get into the bosses’ bad books, while to join the company-friendly unions is to cut yourself off from the workers; what I want, I shall get for myself, without owing anything to anyone else’. At the same time, a refusal to participate in elections is very badly regarded among workers: the right to vote has become a duty, and if the abstention rate is something around 10 per cent, this is for the most part as a result of absence. Other young workers and some of their older colleagues justify their non-commitment, if not their rejection of the unions, by criticism of the lack of unity between them. Some of the disillusioned workers regret that membership of the SIAP no longer guarantees, as it used to, the payment of bonus; others among the disappointed and disillusioned – not union members – wish that the unions would be more aggressive in pursuing reductions in linespeed and workload, in denouncing the number of vehicles produced in excess of target and so on; a young man expresses his astonishment at not having been contacted by activists from any of the various unions in four years at the factory. All these positions and these expectations testify to the lack of points of reference: the immigrants allowed themselves to be recruited by the SIAP, and grumble about it today; while the young are relying on their personal skills rather than on collective action;19 older workers, disappointed or disillusioned, are more or less convinced that trade-unionism can do nothing to improve their immediate situation.

The strike of 1989, still not forgotten The strike of 1989 was called in support of a pay demand.20 It was provoked when in September the management announced an increase of only 1.5 per cent for the second half of the year, when that spring the press had reported the large profits the company was making (8 billion francs net in 1988).21 The atmosphere was already tense on the return from annual holidays, when the August pay-slips seemed meagre enough because they showed no overtime.22 In the first week of September there were stoppages with occupations at the Mulhouse plant; at Sochaux there were sporadic, small-scale stoppages. The following Monday, workers in the Carrosserie mobilised more substantially, and 600 marched through the shops, accompanied by workers from neighbouring sectors (the foundry in particular). The announcement of the 1.5 per cent increase on the previous Friday had had its effects: despite the efforts they had

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put in, the workers felt deprived of their share in the recovery of the company and of the considerable increase in productivity since the beginning of the decade. In the early days, non-unionists often took over unionists’ work during stoppages. The mobilisation extended on Monday, 13 September, and continued until 24 October, winning an increase for lower-paid workers. Although the number of strikers is a matter of debate, the unions estimate there were 1,500 workers between the two shifts on that Monday (out of 27,000 employees at Sochaux), and between 6,000 and 7,000 in total at the height of the strike, that is to say, the next week. For its part, the management say that there were never more than 2,300 strikers at the site. 23 The company rapidly reorganised production in the Carrosserie, using the non-strikers, moniteurs, polyvalents and supernumeraries, even foremen: they wanted to keep the assembly-lines going at any cost and to increase the number of cars produced, which had fallen to 15 per cent two days after the effective beginning of the strike. In this it was only partially successful, because actual production was only between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the target by the end of September. For the management, the issue at stake was economic: it was necessary to limit the loss of cars and perhaps of customers. But the goals were also political and symbolic: to keep the lines running and to carry on producing cars would show hesitant workers that the strike was failing because it could not halt the line. The marches through the shops were a moment of controlled tension, the strikers being careful to avoid any confrontation with non-strikers, or with assembly-line management, who were accompanied – as is customary – by court bailiffs. A week in, the strike found organisational expression in a mass-meeting called at 7.30am (break time for the non-strikers) by the three unions involved (CGT, CFDT, FO). If the trade unionists were taking the initiative, it was the active participation of the non-unionists that meant that the clash of differing ‘trade-union sensibilities’ did not gain the upper hand. Women workers, too, were noticeable by their presence. Co-operation between the unionised and the non-unionised, or between the unions and the grassroots, developed on a pragmatic basis: the latter felt the need for institutional support and representation in their struggle – and also in negotiation – while the former knew the ‘price’ required by the strikers, in the context of Sochaux. On the basis of this relationship, the strike brought the CGT new members from a workforce that was already ageing. The claim for pay was expressed in different ways by the various unions, but was strengthened by the publication of Jacques Calvet’s

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income-tax declaration in Le Canard Enchaîné on 27th September. If the strike found support in the Montbéliard region more generally, and succeeded in addressing a national audience, within Sochaux the foundry and the Carrosserie were kept isolated from other sectors of the plant by the presence of supervisors and managers who prevented the demonstrations moving from one shop to another. This tactic of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ was intended both to prevent the action from spreading into other shops and to protect the non-strikers who were continuing to assemble cars. If the supervisors in the shops generally supported this policy, appeals to the white-collar staff in ‘the building’ were not so enthusiastically received: fewer of these came to the aid of the supervisory staff and their management colleagues in the shops. 24 Company management for its part was keen to prevent non-strikers joining the action, while also attempting to persuade the strikers to return to work. Alongside its refusal of negotiation (Jacques Calvet said nothing about discussions until 2 October, three weeks after the beginning of the strike), in its statements and leaflets it continually insisted that the action was doomed to failure, how risky it was to take part in it, and how pitifully inadequate was the social assistance provided by local authorities compared to the pay to be earned at Peugeot. It sent a number of letters to the entire workforce, each one received just before the weekend. The first (on 16 September) was intended as an appeal to everyone’s sense of responsibility in order to bring the action to an end; the second (on 30 September) issued threats, speaking of sanctions; the third (on 21 October, at the end of the strike) called for reconciliation.25 If those most committed to the strike spoke of these letters with contempt, others considered the arguments and balanced the risks run and the chances of success. The solitude of home could lead to a change in attitudes, especially as the letters were backed by an effort at networkmediated persuasion by shop management and supervisory staff: multiple interconnections through relations of work, neighbourhood and family, threats and promises, all came together to discourage the strikers and to keep the non-strikers at their posts. For their part, once they had exhausted their resources inside the shops concerned, the trade-unionists turned towards outside the plant, organising demonstrations in the streets of Sochaux and Montbéliard. The morning demonstrations brought together between 1,000 and 3,000 people, while those at 5 o’clock in the evening assembled up to 10,000 – including some non-strikers – with delegations coming from neighbouring towns, and support from elected members of the local authorities. ‘This is coming after years of job-losses, the resettlement grants that

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sent so many immigrants home and left us with walled-up tower blocks, the blocks that are being demolished, the schools that are being closed, the businesses that are failing, and even if the strikers are in a minority there is an enormous sympathy both from non-strikers and from the population as a whole’, said a spokesperson for the strikers.26 The plant having been rapidly closed to external inspection, these demonstrations were the sole tangible manifestation of the strike. What is more, the scale of the demonstrations legitimated the strike in the eyes of the workers: it was the response, outside the plant, to the management’s attempts to reorganise production inside the shops. On 2 October the FO accepted the preconditions for negotiation set by Jacques Calvet, which were an end to the occupation of the pressshop in Mulhouse and to the strike more generally. At that point production was hovering at about 50 per cent of target, and this breach in union unity heralded an upturn in production which marked a loss of momentum in the three-week-old mobilisation. The action at Sochaux was closely connected to that at Mulhouse: negotiations took place in Paris, and related to both production centres. The announcement on 2 October of the opening of discussions was succeeded by ‘definitive proposals’ only after the tough overnight negotiations of the 16–17 of the same month: a rise of between 350 and 500 francs a month in lower rates of pay, and the consolidation into the ‘13th month’ payment of a number of bonuses. Nothing else was gained by the end of the strike on 24 October. The six weeks of conflict, indeed, had had limited results. The company had conceded only a relatively insignificant rise for the low-paid, although it did ‘institutionalise’ certain bonuses by including them in the calculation for the 13th month. It seemed to by applying the principle outlined some months earlier by Nathan Hudson, the PSA Group’s director of industrial and human relations, at a seminar organised by EDF, the French national electricity company. ‘A principle to observe in negotiation,’ he had said, ‘if the conflict is serious enough, negotiation should lead to something that allows a return to work but which has certain negative connotations for employees. The strike should be remembered as an occasion on which people lost.’27 However, certain demands were met. A mechanism was established for granting points to those with work-experience elsewhere, while in 1991 the grading agreement was amended to allow the level of 190 points to be reached on the basis of seniority alone. The conflict underscored the legitimacy of the oppositional role played by the unions, and re-introduced the strike as one of the possible

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expressions of industrial conflict within the company. At its end, one worker declared: ‘We have conquered fear, defied the big boss and his management, and we have gained in solidarity, in friendship and in dignity. Now that is worth more than a month’s pay.’ At the same time, it is essential to remember that only a minority went on strike: the force and legitimacy of the action cannot therefore simply be measured by the number of strikers but by the degree to which it was representative – in this case in the demands that were largely shared by all – and the way it took place – in inter-union unity and in the relationship between the unions and the wider ‘base’. As in other conflicts, the Carrosserie was one of the most active sectors, and remains a reference for workers at the plant: the high proportion of strikers and their marches through the shops served to connect the action to the plant as a whole. Yet it was only the old shops that saw this surge of strike action, while the workers in the HC shop, which had only just begun operations, kept a careful distance. This shop was characterised by its high proportion of volunteers, and the transfers from the old Finition were far from being completed. The difference in attitude does not only reflect the measures taken by management, and the strikers’ marches through this shop met a blank rejection. Symmetrically, the pro-strike attitudes of the old shops related to changes at the plant. More or less explicitly, worries about the ‘new shops’ and the management’s highly voluntarist and normalising discourse about them was a factor in the strike, as was suggested by a member of the CFDT at the time: ‘One can sense the desire [on the part of management] to establish a cordon sanitaire around these shops, saying to themselves that what is going on, precisely, is part of the old. In the end, these are just the unpersuadable putting up a struggle.’ 28 By its very force, the 1989 strike established a network of solidarity throughout the Carrosserie. This network, largely informal, renewed an ideological, occupational and personal frame of reference through which events left their marks on the social body, some of them injuries difficult and slow to heal. Such a happening generates connections and cleavages between workers, between the strikers and those who continue to work. Some gulfs are almost unbridgeable, while the informal groupings of breaks and mealtimes embody affinities established during the strike. The conflict continues to mark relations between workers and supervisory staff. According to one assembly-line worker: ‘Difficult workstations are given first of all to difficult workers.’ A polyvalent tells how, after the strike in 1981, he was ‘sent back to a fixed workstation for four months

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to calm down,’ before being employed again as a dépanneur. One of the supers interviewed explained how he had been put on the line in 1989, to replace workers on strike: ‘When the march arrived, we left the line so as to avoid the bolts and the insults that flew past, despite the cordon sanitaire provided by the foremen.’ For him, ‘It’s difficult, strikebreaking, but if you stop work, that’s the super over, back to the line and no chance of promotion.’ More generally, as was said by another worker: ‘People agreed with the demands, with the strike, without being able to take part; they were frightened for the future: if there was a downturn in production and a restructuring, and redundancies, they were frightened of being part of them.’ For others, the game just wasn’t worth the candle, and the pay increases of 1989 have been forgotten. Some years later, the strike seems to be remembered by Peugeot workers in many different ways. The overlapping and contradictory discourses reflect the diversity of personal situations, the segmentation of the workforce and its experience (by ethnicity, by age-group) and the multiplicity of pressures, influences and references. But the resulting equilibrium is never final. Day-to-day social relations tend to upset the acceptable reconstructions that each one makes of his own condition: it may be a change of workstation as a result of absence, a rebalancing of the line that brings new demands, fatigue, or family worries invading the space of work and distracting the attention that ought to be given to quality. The unions keep an eye on these personal factors, the employee representative visiting each of the workers – as does the senior supervisor, indeed – to see how things are going and to pick up opinions and complaints. Justified complaints are entered in a journal by the health and safety representative, for action by shop management: the FO and the CGT have entered into competition in this field, so suitable for union activity: the FO finds it easier to obtain satisfaction from a management that supports it, and this encourages a politics of union clientelism. From time to time, where union activists or other oppositionallyminded workers are present, an intolerably excessive workload may lead to a mini-stoppage. On one line in HC, for example, made up of some 90–100 workstations, eight workers might suddenly stop work, supported by the employee representative. This leads to the line being stopped for ten minutes or so, with the loss of three or four cars. Negotiations then have to be organised with the shop’s manager and personnel officer: the union will usually insist that these be held off the management’s territory, preferring the office of the supervisor concerned; employee representatives from oppositional unions on other lines come and lend their support to the strikers. In the negotiations, their employee representative will

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stand behind the men, allowing them to explain their complaint: the workload, non-observance of the skeleton plan with too high a frequency of complex vehicles, etc. The loss of three or four vehicles might be regarded as nugatory, given the total production at Sochaux and the losses incurred in connection with other incidents such as breakdowns or problems of supply. But this loss carries a high symbolic charge for the workers who dare defy the organisation and the force of the flow of production in defence of their own individual interests. The effect of such a stoppage is always the same: a certain embarrassed silence among those who have not joined in, followed by interested questions on the circumstances, the content and progress of negotiations. Though there may be no real disruption of order, the very fact of having resisted, of having stood up for oneself, shows that docility is not the only attitude possible.

Politics, medicine and the law, drawn into industrial conflict It is not only at the level of social groups that relationships between the plant and the surrounding region find themselves played out, in the interaction within the plant of identity-components originating outside, and in their ensuing recomposition, which in its turn has repercussions outside. Plant-region relations also find embodiment in outside institutions, sometimes influencing their own internal dynamics, as can be seen, for example, in the connection between the educational problems in working-class children and the problems their fathers may be having at work. 29 Such has been the case in local politics, for a long time, and this is understandable enough when one considers the enormous weight of the Peugeot plant in the life of the region. For decades now, regional politics have been organised around a right-left split30 which has some of its roots in the plant, and which again finds new echoes there. It is not at all uncommon to see workers active in one of the oppositional unions also take on roles in the voluntary sector, or assume political responsibilities in municipalities controlled by the left. In symmetrical fashion, members of management are very active ‘on municipal councils, in the voluntary sector and in sports clubs. This type of activity is also characteristic of technicians and supervisory staff who belong to the FO, CFTC or the CSL, and sometimes of their non-unionised colleagues too. Thus, for example, the constituent municipalities of the Urban District which are run by the right nearly always have members of Peugeot management, employees or ex-employees often more or less aligned with the RPR. Montbéliard, the principal town, has a senator and mayor

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previously employed at Peugeot as a shop manager and then head of personnel; a deputy mayor who is an ex-director of the plant; and several assistant mayors still employed at Sochaux’.31 In return, these partisan commitments also find themselves projected back into the plant as cleavages generated elsewhere that have nothing to do with the logic of the productive process. The politicisation of social relations within the enterprise and rivalry for control over the social body outside the context of the plant are two facets of a tradition of double polarisation: there is both interference between plant and region and the subsequent reinforcement of oppositions in trade-union, voluntary–sector and political activity. But such interference has recently come to characterise other fields as well, those of medicine and law in particular. For some years now, conflicts between management and the oppositional unions, mainly the CGT, have found forms of expression less immediately visible than strikes and demonstrations, but just as significant. Conflicts have in fact escaped the plant, to propagate themselves in two regulatory institutions: in the law, and less predictably, in medicine. Since the agreement on the introduction of monthly pay in 1973, in the case of sick-leave certified by a doctor, the company, like many other employers, pays 50 per cent of basic salary, on top of the daily sickness benefit paid by the social security scheme. At the same time, it set up a system of domiciliary medical inspections carried out by doctors of its own choice. The latter, after a more-or-less comprehensive examination, may declare the patient to be in good health and demand that he return to work despite the sick-leave prescribed by his own doctor. Such cases have very often led to legal proceedings, and the law has most often come down on the employer’s side: in the best of cases, where the patient’s own doctor renewed or extended the certificate, the employee would receive no more than the social security sickness benefit if he did not return to work. There have been more recent legal developments, however: in 1995, the Montbéliard employment tribunal ordered the company to grant sick-pay to an employee whose absence was certified by his doctor, a judgement upheld by the Cour de Cassation in 1998. The company’s doctor may challenge the patient’s doctor’s judgement, but the patient’s doctor may in turn challenge the company’s. This is where there has been a change in company–union–doctor relationships. For the CGT approached the Ordre des Médecins, the professional body that regulates physicians in France, and all the general practitioners of the region, to alert them to the professional misbehaviour of some inspecting physicians, who took their decisions without consultation

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with the doctor treating the case, in breach of their obligations under the profession’s ethical code.32 The CGT pushed the general practitioners to insist on their professional prerogatives, or if not, to confirm the authority of the company’s medical inspectors in the region. This demand led the national professional body to communicate with its members, and the company in its turn to clarify the obligations of its medical inspectors. Here the plant was extending its influence into medical practice, while its opponents called on the medical profession to take a position not only in terms of industrial relations but also in terms of its own regulations. The second instance of interference between unions, management and medicine arises in the case of individual dismissals on the grounds of prolonged absence or serious wrongdoing. Many of these cases come before the employment tribunal: the issues are the same as elsewhere, and are dealt with in the same way; management generally appealing when judgements go against it, and the company never re-employing a claimant who wins, preferring to pay the higher level of damages. In the case of dismissal for prolonged and repeated absence, the management argues that this has had a seriously disruptive effect on the functioning of the business, and that it is thus at liberty to dispense with the services of the employee concerned. It claims, furthermore, to take care not to sack anyone for physical incapacity, but only those who have regularly been absent for questionable reasons. Most of the workers who are regularly absent, however, are on sick-leave. For tradeunionists, these are workers who are suffering from occupational disease (recognised or otherwise), kept on the line at workstations that may or may not have been adapted (there being fewer and fewer preparation jobs off the line), and who cannot keep up with the demands of the work and so fall ill. Given that French employment law prohibits dismissal on grounds of illness, these workers are then sacked on grounds that are admissible in law, for prolonged absence that is disruptive of production. The growing number of employment tribunal cases supported by the CGT and the CFDT damaged Peugeot’s reputation by undermining the idea of security of employment, of a job for life, for which it had long been known in the region. This is one of the reasons, in connection with changes in the senior management of the plant, why the number of individual dismissals fell by half between the periods 1991–93 and 1994–96, dropping from 150 a year to some 70 to 80. The local newspapers, such as l’Est Républicain, report proceedings before the employment tribunal, and on 27 June 1992 this paper reported on the sacking of two workers recognised as being handicapped. One of these,

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suffering from a non-operable slipped disc after 38 years’ employment in the stamping-shop, and certified sick for 12 months by his doctor, had received a letter telling him: ‘Your continued absence and the disruption this has caused has made it necessary to find a permanent replacement.’ On 19 March 1993 the same paper reported the issue of proceedings before the employment tribunal in the cases of 19 employees sacked while sick. According to the CGT, which said it regretted the other unions’ silence on the issue, around two-thirds of sackings in 1992 had been on the grounds of prolonged absence due to sickness. In September 1996, a woman worker from the cabling shop killed herself the day after she had been sacked for repeated absence; although this suicide might have been caused by problems with health, family and work, the Montbéliard employment tribunal found that sickness had indeed been the reason for her absence. At the same session (7 July 1997) they also found against the company for having sacked a worker from the paint-shop ‘for no real or serious cause’. The oppositional unions have been constant in their support for such cases, and this has won the CGT a certain respect among Peugeot employees, especially as the great majority of these are now getting on in age. What is more, the growing number of cases brought has very likely changed the attitude of the employment tribunal, now more receptive to employees’ arguments, while the company management has itself sometimes agreed to compromise in certain cases. Are industrial relations now undergoing a transformation? While at Renault the CGT has seen its status as a necessary interlocutor disappear, one might wonder whether events at Sochaux do not express a change in union–management relations within PSA. If this is so, then it was events in a third field of conflict which opened up the possibility. Recently, the CGT set out to prove, within Peugeot, but more especially to the outside world, that CGT and CFDT activists had been discriminated against in terms of pay and also more generally in terms of career development, and in doing this to remove a constraint on freedom of trade union activity at Sochaux. In 1995 it therefore brought a case on behalf of six of its activists before the employment tribunal in Paris,: they wished to avoid the tribunal at Montbéliard, which they felt was too much inclined towards the company. The Paris tribunal declared itself competent, decided in favour of the CGT activists in June 1996, and ordered the company to pay the complainants 360,000 francs, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeal. This notable judgement, however, was only the first stage in the process.

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At the end of 1996, the Inspector of Employment for Montbéliard, called in by the CGT, concluded after enquiry that there had been discrimination on grounds of trade-union activity against 19 activists belonging to the CGT and 2 belonging to the CFDT. The CGT then took 18 new cases before the Paris employment tribunal and on to the Court of Appeal, with an award of 1.18 million francs being made against the company in January 1998. The company has appealed again. The CFDT, for its part, prefers to take up individual cases with management. The third phase of this legal offensive extended the field of action with 60 new cases brought before the Criminal Court at Montbéliard, a change of strategy by the CGT, in the face of the costs of legal assistance and of travel to Paris. The struggle continued at the symbolic level: when the discrimination was upheld on appeal, it was now a matter of forcing the group to acknowledge this negative public image, which also affected other PSA plants where the unions had won similar cases, and of course, to bring it to an end. Faced with the risk of criminal convictions for senior managers and the possibility of a binding judgement in the Cour de Cassation, the company started negotiations. In addition, with the departure of Jacques Calvet and the arrival of Jean-Martin Folz at the head of Peugeot SA, relationships between management and unions improved. On 11 September 1998, just before the third wave of trials, an agreement was signed with the CGT, covering 169 union members and sympathisers whose career had been penalised. It had several provisions: first of all, these employees had their salary adjusted to reflect their skills and seniority, with increases in monthly pay of between 500 and 1,400 francs; secondly, in compensation for past discrimination Peugeot paid to each a sum of between 20,000 and 135,000 francs, depending on seniority but with no reference to occupational grading. In addition, an undertaking was given to examine each year the position of trade unionists within the company. Beyond the content of the agreement itself, the board gave a strong signal that industrial relations at Sochaux were to change. Despite the culture of confrontation described earlier, unionists from the CGT say that they did receive the support of certain members of supervisory staff, though a significant number among the assembly-line managers and supervisors at first resented these changes. In fact, this decision by the company was not enough, in itself, to mark a new beginning in industrial relations. For it was not as simple as that to put an end to discrimination, to irregular practices (pratiques anormales) as they were called, especially as this could here and there pose a challenge to the legitimacy and cohesion of the management hierarchy or of other

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unions. At the same time, CGT members also had to readjust their attitudes: between pointless sacrifice on the one hand, and the special treatment that was still regarded with disfavour on the other, it was difficult to get it exactly right. What is more, not all CGT activists had brought cases, not all of them were ready to accept the loss, for a few tens of thousands of francs, of the lives they had not lived. The past would still weigh upon the present. This was not history’s only legacy to Sochaux. If the workers had obstinately continued to give the CGT a good half of their votes, it is also because earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s, even if conflicts were fierce, sometimes violent and punctuated by sackings – as at Renault, indeed – both social partners, both sides of industry, had their undisputed place. A shared past in the Resistance, Christian activism and even the Peugeot Apprentice School, all these until the early Seventies generated discreet networks of relationships between assembly-line managers, supervisory staff and workers, between board-level management and oppositional trade unionists. Within the CGT, the legal battle for the recognition of anti-trade-union discrimination opened up a new field of practice. It was union officers who took on the role of lawyers in preparing the individual cases, or rather in assisting their members to do this. Then the highly skilled workers, the curtailment of whose career was plain to see, helped the production workers prepare their cases, where the relative absence of real career advancement in the best of circumstances made it more difficult to establish discrimination. Finally, through various forms of direct democracy, the union succeed in managing the tensions between the personal nature of the legal complaints and the collective character of the initiative as a whole, the individual interests of the plaintiffs and the collective goal of demonstrating systematic discrimination. 33 Finally, the legal soap-opera of 1998 showed once again to what extent a business finds itself embedded in a network of institutions and social and political forces that all undergo their own autonomous developments. But it also offered the social partners the opportunity to re-equilibrate their relations, and to bring back into the company itself the debates which had earlier been broken off too soon only to emerge again outside, in the newspapers, the courts and other institutions. The February 1999 agreement on the 35-hour week shows, however, how difficult it was to re-establish a discussion between the two sides which went beyond the old attitudes. This company agreement had a turbulent birth in February 1999, particularly at Sochaux, where the CGT had organised a series of stoppages

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in protest against the first draft that had been published. In this highly complex agreement, what worried the CGT was not the prospect of future job-losses (for it was accompanied by a new and already expected scheme for early retirement)34 but the reorganisation of working hours. The reduction in working hours proved to be a disappointment, limited by small print covering breaks and mealtimes. Above all, the annualisation of overtime calculations threatened some workers with a much higher degree of inflexibility (growth in compulsory Saturday work in periods of high demand, increases in anti-social hours and a reduction of summer holidays to three weeks), accompanied by the almost complete disappearance of hours paid at overtime rates. With little reduction in working hours, the threat of worsening conditions in terms of holiday schedules and of the timing of hours worked, bringing with it a deterioration in family life, and all this accompanied by fears of a reduction in pay, the flexibility promised by the agreement seemed all to the company’s advantage. Renegotiation brought improvements, with an increase in paid leave, and a mechanism for time worked beyond normal hours to be matched by rest-days that could be taken, saved up, or paid for. Employees nonetheless remained divided, because the CGT refused to sign the agreement, and uncertain about the management’s intentions.

Worker involvement and social integration Another way of considering the enterprise, or the production plant in particular, is to think of them as institutions that produce inequalities between individuals, or at least as systems which reveal, reinforce and recompose social inequalities. This is not intended as a value-judgement, but rather as a statement of fact grounded in the detailed observation of the social processes which – through industrial production, the organisation of work and the rules of man-management – tend to reduce, or contrariwise to consolidate or reinforce, the differences that exist among employees as they enter the plant. Everyone who comes in is posted onto the assembly line with his own resources: education, qualifications, work-experience, aptitudes, individual autonomy, relations with friends or family within the company, political and trade-union sympathies, etc. All these resources have been worked for or inherited, or indeed both, if one considers the numerous theories of social reproduction that make use of the idea of the inheritance of social and cultural capital. In particular, young, manual-worker recruits have various skills, whether recognised in qualifications or not, and

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above all, a variable degree of savoir-faire in their new role, that is to say the ability and inclination to meet the explicit and implicit demands of the job: this involves manual dexterity, of course, continuous attention to the quality of manual operations, but also a willing obedience to the demands of supervisors. The presence of friends or family already at the plant can be a help or hindrance to the new recruit. Do they hold posts of responsibility? Are they well-regarded by management? Do they believe that the young recruit should climb the rungs one by one, just as they did? And so on and so forth. Finally, the aptitude for leadership enjoyed by some, the reserve of others; the immediate acceptance or the refusal of membership in a company-friendly union; too evident a resistance to authoritarian supervisors; all these are traces of upbringing and education. All these components of the worker’s personality are the foundations for the differences that exist between assembly-line workers: some workers assigned to assembly work will leave the line to make careers as skilled workers, technicians, or in the ranks of supervisors or management. The shop, and more concretely the hierarchical superiors immediately involved in man-management, will encourage or repress these tendencies, depending on the nature of the skills and characteristics, and as may required by the needs of the enterprise. The pay system reflects the choices of the company, recognising and encouraging skills of a particular kind, and what survives of the paternalist tradition offers other modes of social integration by valuing and exploiting certain aptitudes and inclinations ignored elsewhere. Finally, tired of playing the game when hopes remain unrealised, workers may adopt an oppositional stance – at least by voting for an oppositional trade union – in relation to management. Between the possibilities of conflict and integration, the ‘Sochaux system’ of employment relations navigates through always choppy waters. In fact, despite a certain desire for changes in employment relations, in sectors where the work remains more or less unaltered, the conditions governing the involvement, motivation and mobilisation of manual workers essentially remain what they always used to be. The most important changes have been the reduction in the number of workers and the intensification of rhythms of work over the last 20 years – the latter imposed on an ageing population whose mobility has been blocked. It has thus become more and more difficult to involve and to mobilise these workers, because there is no incentive on offer. As it was in the past, the role of supervisors and the quality of foreman/assemblyworker relations are at the heart of the life of the shop: whence the figure

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of the multi-functional team-leader who first of all has to try and meet the expectations of his workers, in a relatively hostile environment. Beyond the integrative virtues of the ‘Sochaux system’ (see the section on ‘Employer hegemony and social integration’ later), can pay, payincreases and bonuses play the same role in motivating workers as they did during the Fordist ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ of the post-war period?

The difficulties of pay-based employee involvement Workers recruited into the assembly shops come in with a point-score of 170 (giving a net monthly sum of around 5,500 francs in 1998). They reach 180 points (from 6,500 to 6,800 francs net) after eight years’ service, maximum, and 190 after 12 years. Most young workers reach these points after two-to-three and four-to-five years respectively, should they qualify as polyvalent. Two hundred points (7,500 francs net) is reckoned to be an appropriate rate at the end of one’s career on the line. A minority of workers become moniteurs, entitling them to 215 points, the top of the scale at this grade. In one team, half of the workers are on 180–90 points, a third on 200, and the others, recent recruits, still on 170. These scale points, however, only represent a part of the salary calculation, which also takes account of ‘personal points’ awarded each year by the supervisor, on the proposal of the team-leader. A certain number of points (1 point giving a supplementary 55 francs in monthly pay) are given to each team leader to award, on the basis of a complex calculation that distributes these points among different sectors of the shop.35 In the distribution of these points among the workers, supervisory staff may adopt a policy of systematically rewarding (maximum 4 points) a minority of dedicated workers, or a greater number whom they judge to be deserving. In any event, in order to avoid exaggeration, or systematic neglect, they must have regard for the position of each worker on his career progress path (see below). The career path form locates each worker by age and by point-score together with the maxima and minima that bound the Normal Progress Zone (Zone d’Évolution Normale), outside which a worker may not fall.36 The regular attribution of personal points does not directly influence the scale points themselves. However, when they bring a worker above the level of a higher scale point, the worker may be moved up to this higher point on the scale, which gives certain advantages in terms of length-of-service payment. In other words, the regular grant of numerous personal points accelerates a worker’s progress, while others’ careers stagnate or progress more slowly. Aside from the moniteurs, who regularly

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receive an above-average number of personal points, the distribution of points among the other workers varies widely, even within teams, as can be seen by examining the records of the distribution of such points over five years in one team in the HC2 shop. Some workers have received very few personal points, stagnating at the level of 180 or perhaps 190, despite their age – and after the age of 45, because of it. Others regularly benefit from the award of personal points, because they meet the behavioural norms already described: willingness, speed and quality of work, loyalty to management. What is the effect of these personal points on workers’ involvement and motivation? It is in fact somewhat ambiguous, because the workers are hardly aware of the intricacies of the scheme or the criteria for attribution. Everyone is of course convinced that it depends on whether ‘they like your face’. Some believe that they are awarded three times a year, confusing together the individual interview (which has no effect on personal points), the point distribution decision-making period, and the actual final decision as communicated to them. This demonstrates a misunderstanding of the pay-calculation mechanism, and shows the difficulty that many assembly workers have in reading and understanding their pay-slips. One worker, believing himself to be disliked and somewhat victimised, illustrated the injustice of the system by pointing out that he had not been granted any personal points since 1994 – which was entirely untrue, as he had been awarded them every year except 1993. Despite this evidence of misunderstandings, the personal points do represent one of the Peugeot system’s most important symbolic rewards. The reward is not of course entirely symbolic, because it also brings an increase in pay (relatively modest, it is true, at 55 francs per point) and an advance towards a higher-scale point. The symbolic dimension remains essential, however, because it demonstrates that the beneficiary is ‘still in the game’, that he is still recognised as a good worker by his superiors, who have rewarded him for this. For even if the award of these points is strictly speaking confidential, the whole team ends up knowing who received how many. The points thus become the most significant tangible result, because they form a public standard of comparison between workers, and of evaluation of workers by supervisory staff. The fortunate see their dedication rewarded, and the others know what they must do: imitate the behaviour of the former, change assembly line, or if they cannot, simply accept the rebuff. Hence the significance, too, of the different ways of distributing these points among the team, corresponding to different management styles: in a team managed in a modernising consensual style, two-thirds of the workers benefit from

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the award of personal points; in another, the foreman prefers to restrict the points to only a third of his men, but granting rather more (3 or 4) to each. To prevent divergences becoming excessive the personnel department is attempting to introduce a certain uniformity of practice. As paradoxical as it might appear, the attribution of personal points, which imply individual advancement, is disconnected from the individual assessment associated with the progress interview. What is more, according to one supervisor, the company forbids such a connection being made. In the individual interview, the question at issue is the career path and potential of the worker concerned: the team-leader proposes a potential point score, explaining why it is higher, lower or the same as the year before. This method of assessment is intended, of course, to encourage workers to give satisfaction to their supervisors through quality work done at the rate required. In return, supervisors manifest this satisfaction by symbolically rewarding the worker by increasing his potential score (being unable to increase the actual point score any further by the attribution of a greater number of personal points). As one might expect, this leads to an inflation of potential. It is clear, we were told by a manager from the Directorate of Social and Human Resources, that the great majority of workers really do have this potential, but ‘at the moment we are unable to develop the workstations so that they correspond to the aptitudes and capacities of the workers: at workstations rated at 180 points, we have workers who are already at 190 or even 200 points’. In fact, on one of the teams studied, of the ordinary assembly workers, 6 of these had a potential of 190, 11 of them 200, 4 of them 215 and 3 of them 225. Of these, fewer than three will have the opportunity to become moniteurs, which means that a good 15 will continue, with their potentials of 200–25, to occupy posts rated at 180–90 points. To deal with this inflation of potential as compared to current possibilities, a policy of deflation has been adopted which involves a gradual reduction, firstly within the scale grade (say from 225 to 225-), and then by a drop from one grade to another (from 225 to 215). In this case, the mechanism of symbolic reward no longer functions, but the reduction is more easily accepted than one might imagine, because it affects workers of more than 40 years of age, ex-polyvalents who have been returned to fixed workstations, already aware of their failure to make progress in their career via selection as moniteur. At the same time, this reduction in potential does create anxiety among assembly-line workers. One young worker (of 31 years of age), for instance, complained of the company’s lack of clarity with regard to career prospects: ‘we are in complete

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uncertainty: you can climb quickly, or just stagnate. Something has to be done to organise careers if workers are to be motivated’. To sum up, the mechanism of the potential score, designed to outline a possible career path, has proved to be contradictory: sometimes unable to keep its promises, it can turn against its inventors. In a certain way, the bonuses introduced in the last decade also run the same risk. Bonus systems differ between MV and HC. In MV, a fixed line-based bonus is thought sufficient to reward non-absentees, while the HC shop has a sophisticated system of bonuses determined by a range of criteria, whose efficacity is doubted even by those who administer it. 37 There, each month, assembly workers receive two bonuses: one for shift-work (between 320 and 550 francs), and the other called the prime d’objectifs, which one might call the performance bonus.38 This includes a cleanliness bonus, a production bonus (around 50 francs a head, normally awarded), and a quality bonus calculated weekly: for the workers on a particular segment of line (up to 80 posts per shift) to receive this, the number of 15-point penalties must not exceed 10 per cent of the number of inspections carried out over the week by the contrôleuses (on average 150 inspections per week per shift). This bonus is worth some 50 francs a week, so a little more than 200 francs a month. The quality bonus depends so little on individual effort, given that it is awarded on the basis of the collective output of 80 workers, that it seems almost a matter of chance. An individual has so little opportunity to influence the result that its effect on increasing a sense of responsibility is minimal, and it is in fact generally awarded. A coercive effect cannot be exercised on so large a group (only the number of the module responsible for a defect is published at the end of the week), while a sense of solidarity generally limits any remonstrations addressed to the worker responsible by his neighbours at work. It is true that their awareness of the error committed means that the worker concerned will be careful not to do it again; and if he is not careful, the team-leader is there to remind him of his obligations, and to refer if necessary to the question of personal points. The quality bonus, then, does not work in terms of the normal model, as the promise of a more-or-less substantial premium in exchange for something else, but functions at a rather more symbolic level: the internalisation of the value of solidarity encourages one to avoid defects that may penalise the whole group; this possibility does not even need to be realised, its existence is enough to impel each assembly worker to avoid, as far as possible, any defect entailing a penalty. This quality policy thus operates at a much more symbolic level, rather than imposing a rationalistic defect-hunting adherence to operations sheets: this is also the

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reason why the policy seems so difficult to implement and to control, as working groups, from solidarity, may construct opaque spaces precisely in response to the policy of transparency pursued by the management through the proliferation of audits, random inspections and other checks. To the monthly bonus just mentioned should be added the prime de rentrée, a post-summer-holiday, beginning-of-the-academic-year bonus (in 1997 1000 francs + 440 francs for each child in full-time education up to the age of 25), the collective suggestions bonus (paid twice a year, varying both with the suggestions, and with pay over the previous halfyear), the new-vehicle bonus (620 francs for the 406) and the 13th-month bonus, also paid in two instalments, and weighted by attendance. In fact, attendance remains a problem for Peugeot management, and at Sochaux more particularly, where absenteeism (running at some 6 per cent or 7 per cent) is higher than at the group’s other plants, without anyone really understanding why. To encourage perseverance in more difficult working conditions, the company provides ‘a privilege accorded to manual workers and to technicians and supervisory staff on the basis of attendance, shift worked and conditions of work’. 39 These are the PIEC points (the Plan Individuel d’Épargne Congé, being an Individual Holiday Savings Plan) awarded for every week without absence: between 15 and 33 points for manual workers, depending on whether or not they are working double-shifts, doing overtime etc., and between 9 and 19 points for technicians and supervisors. At the end of each year the total points earned should give the right to several days’ leave, or to pay for these days if the employee prefers. How effective are these measures to reward assiduity? Although the question is difficult to answer, it would appear that they tend to reward those employees – and assembly workers in particular – who are already good attenders, either because they are young and they have adopted those behaviours that are expected by supervisory staff if they are to have any hope of promotion, or because, being old, and still in good health, they are more or less resigned to routine and carry out their jobs as conscientious workers. Absenteeism, however, is to some extent the result of unease or trouble at work. 40 For young workers who think of themselves as working at Peugeot temporarily, or for tired old-timers, not what they were, physically, and without hope of improving their state, these bonuses for attendance seem paltry and ineffective: from choice or from lack of choice, these two categories can establish habits of absenteeism. The ensuing sanctions41 only go to deepen the gulf between the employer’s logic and that which underlies the worker’s

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absence, and the divergence can widen to a point of no return that is sanctioned by dismissal. Paradoxically, short-time working, with the loss of 3–5 days per month at Sochaux in 1996–97, does not have a straightforward effect on absence. One might imagine that it would allow workers to rest, and so encourage their attendance at the plant. In fact, though the first increases in lay-offs decreased absence, it has again increased with the years. As if, for some part of the older and/or tired workers, temporary lay-off and absenteeism were two forms, hardly different, of the same reality: freedom from a work that is felt to be difficult and strenuous. For these reasons, short-time working tends to be generally welcomed. Only new recruits and those who have got into substantial debt to buy their houses are unhappy at such announcements, because of the loss of income they represent. For the old-timers, however, the news gladdens the heart, auguring days of rest bought at a price in loss of income that seems eminently cheap. Days laid-off are paid at 70–75 per cent of normal pay, 42 supplemented by any public assistance that may be payable (for housing in particular). To sum up, neither the basic salary nor the various bonuses seem to be enough to motivate the workers to work; even the symbolic component of the bonuses and the attribution of personal points fail to involve assembly-line workers. The whole system of remuneration seems ineffective as regards motivation, when compared to the personal supervisorworker relationship. Is this not in fact the true legacy of the ‘Sochaux system’?

Employer hegemony and social integration Of course, as we have already seen in the first chapter, the inheritance so often described as paternalist is not what it was, and Peugeot’s ascendancy outside the Sochaux plant, its place in the family life of its workers, has been very much reduced. If the so-called consensual unions have been a key element in the system of employment relations over the last two decades, their institutional role has nonetheless constantly tended to diminish as the stakes at issue have themselves shrunk in importance. The arrival of Jean-Martin Folz at the head of PSA in September 1997 was accompanied by a clear desire to turn over a new leaf. These changes have been particularly difficult as they have affected the SIAP-CSL, even if the tradition at Sochaux, and at Peugeot in general, was never the same as that at Poissy and at Citroën. In addition to the rapid recruitment of immigrants from Yugoslavia, Morocco and Portugal, intended to ensure their amenability to direction

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by supervisory staff, the strength of the SIAP, and to a certain extent of the CFTC, came primarily from the utilitarian and self-interested approach of its members, who looked to it as an aid to more rapid promotion, its individual sections within the plant generally being run by supervisors. Today, workers’ discontent with the SIAP is in part the result of the loss of these opportunities for promotion. Many assembly workers told us of their disappointment: today in their forties, and having paid their dues regularly, they have lost their status as polyvalent and have been returned to a fixed workstation, which for them means the end of all hope and a sufficient reason to abandon membership of the SIAP or the CFTC. It also appears that management style has changed, and that assembly-line managers are less supportive of the SIAP and are encouraging the FO and the CFTC to occupy the trade-union terrain. Today it is the FO in alliance with the CGC which runs the Sochaux Works Council, the CGT-CFDT alliance having lost control in 1985. New techniques of integration have emerged, such as the family visit. On specified dates the workers of each sector can invite family and friends to visit their shop. In between an introductory talk in the lecturetheatre of the Peugeot-Sochaux museum and a drink with nibbles in the canteen, families tour the site accompanied by supervisors and managers from the sector concerned. The introductory talk and other commentary celebrates the product manufactured at Sochaux so as to reflect well on the men who build the 306, the 406 and the 605. The visit to the assembly line and the valorisation of the men through the productive technology which they serve is intended to raise the assembly-line worker in the estimation of his children and others, to counterbalance the particularly negative image of assembly-line work that prevails outside the plant.43 Above all, alongside the specific worker/supervisor relation extensively discussed above, security of employment – what in Japan is called life-long employment – is one of the pillars of the Sochaux system. In a sense, given the legislation on non-temporary employment, life-long employment is a statutory right in France. But Peugeot makes a specific point of its employment policies and its policy of integration, refusing, for example, to have recourse to short-term contracts. Peugeot manages its needs for flexibility through short-time working, and by the use of young temporary workers employed by agencies: the latter allows for short-term adjustments on the launch of a new vehicle, while also making it possible to try out candidates for employment on a provisional basis. Security of employment at Sochaux runs like a leitmotiv through the talk of both managers and workers. To be taken on at Peugeot is to be

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guaranteed employment until retirement, which means the ability to go into debt to realise the plan so close to everybody’s heart: to buy a bungalow, to purchase consumer durables, and all this without giving up one’s holidays, in France or further afield. By adopting security of employment as a deliberate policy, Peugeot endeavours to secure the loyalty of its workers, and by means of a ‘win/win’ trade-off to secure in exchange for life-long employment the dedication and willingness of its workforce. Until the 1970s, life-long employment was accompanied by the more-or-less automatic transfer of older workers to the preparation of sub-assemblies off the line. Since these kinds of operations have been subcontracted to outside firms – on grounds of economy (the pay elsewhere being much lower, and the unions weak or non-existent) – the managers of assembly-shops have found themselves trying to deal with an insurmountable problem: what to do with older and less productive staff, sometimes medically certified as partially incapacitated. At present, managers try to get these workers into office jobs (if they have the abilities, and if they have given sufficient proof of loyalty), or cleaning, or into the few preparation jobs that remain. In fact, given the age-structure in HC, the number of older and more unproductive workers is higher than in other assembly operations in Europe, the United States (in comparison to Japanese ‘transplants’ in particular) or Japan itself. Early retirement schemes developed with the FNE (Fonds National pour l’Emploi) can then look like the miracle solution, both for the company and for its ageing workers. Today they cover workers over the age of 56, who receive 65 per cent of their last gross pay, the State being responsible for the payment of the greater part of this allowance. 44 Early retirement funded by the FNE seems to meet the obligations of Peugeot’s employment policy, without the company having to pay the costs: far from it, for all workers can look forward to an almost automatic early retirement at 56. The strength of a certain form of attachment to the company is indicated by the results of a survey on the social atmosphere within the plant, commissioned by Sochaux management in 1996. If dissatisfaction expressed by workers is directed at pay-rates they believe to be too low, their attachment to the company exceeded the expectations of the investigators: and the survey itself shows that this was due primarily to the security of employment it offered. The strength of this attachment manifested itself yet more clearly at a critical moment in the life of the Sochaux plant, the floods of February 1990. On the 15th and 16th of that month water invaded many of the shops, halting production, and for these two days and the week following

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the work-force was temporarily laid off. The retreat of the waters revealed a desolate scene: electric motors waterlogged, the conveyors filthy, tools damaged, stocks of parts fit only to be thrown away or returned to suppliers. Metal was threatened by rust, machines and motors had to be dismantled for cleaning and drying, the floors and pits had to be cleared of mud and rubbish and so on. The company turned to local and national cleaning companies and to its equipment suppliers to help it get the assembly lines running again. At the same time, supervisors called for volunteers to help speed up recovery in each shop. This encountered a massive response from workers of every kind, some of whom still talk enthusiastically of the 5-day clean-up: as Peugeot and the companies it employed didn’t have enough cleaning equipment for individual use, everyone came with mop, bucket, brush and cloths, or brought in their own toolkits. Working 8 to 10 hour days, the manual workers laboured for their supervisors, for their employer, or for their working tools, evidencing aptitudes that had hitherto found no opportunity for their expression. This event brought about the appearance of a productive community for these days of cleaning and return to work. What is more, this cessation of production came at a very bad time for Peugeot. Apart from the imminence of the launch of the 605, sales in France and Europe were growing again: the company had therefore planned for voluntary Saturday morning work until July. The floods, however, had led to the loss of 12,000 cars, which the company now wanted its employees to produce nonetheless, for fear of losing business. All it could do, then, was to propose a ‘recovery plan’ to the unions. This provided for: 1 the voluntary Saturday morning to become compulsory, that is to say worked by a full-strength shift (an increase of 91 vehicles); 2 the working of an additional Saturday morning that had been left free (increase of 915 vehicles); 3 an increase in the daily hours worked by the afternoon shift by 1 hour and 32 minutes for 55 days, with the shift now ending at 23.08 rather than at 21.36, (an increase of some 10,000 cars produced). With these increases in working hours Peugeot made up for its lost production by May 1990, while the workers (who had received lay-off payments during the week of the floods) earned between 2,000 and 3,500 francs in overtime, worked at the end of the afternoon or on Saturday morning.

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The company’s proposals were well received by some of the unions, who signed the agreement on 28 February, as they had been asked. The CGT and the CFDT, hostile in principle to overtime, refused to do so. They called rather for the recruitment of new workers, and also accused the management of using the opportunity to compensate for the effects of the strike some three months earlier. For some time, the CGT organised stoppages every evening: a minority of workers thus stuck to normal working hours, while the union reiterated its call for a reduction in the working week. The flood is therefore remembered by the company and its employees as the occasion of both a convergence of conceived interests, in the great clean-up, and of a divergence of opinion about the means to recovery, and it is the ‘Sochaux system’ that is capable of generating such contrasts.

Negotiation and interpretation As caught in the nets of micro-sociological analysis, the shop is a place of permanent negotiation between the multiplicity of actors who have their roles to play there. To speak of negotiation is also to speak of more or less latent conflict, of occasional open confrontation, of compromises either fragile or durable, depending on the qualities of the negotiators representing the parties involved. Whatever else it is, negotiation of whatever kind, institutional or otherwise, marked by violence or not, is first of all an attempt to loosen existing or proposed constraints. The relationship of forces, inherited or newly reorganised, appears as a presupposition of negotiation and of the new regulatory settlement arising from it. The shop is a succession of spaces of negotiation in which each actor attempts to extend his area of freedom, his space of play. To improve the preconditions for the adjustment that will result from negotiation, each group, with its allies, defends its own identity and what it represents, that is to say what it represents to itself as relevant to its future. The life of everyone in the shop is subject to the outcomes of ongoing conflicts over issues of determination and autonomy. But of course, the different actors do not all enjoy the same resources, whether in terms of power (over each other), or expertise, or indeed of dexterity or physical abilities, for example. This is why the shop is also a place of unequal, disequilibrated negotiation: the always fluid regulatory settlements which emerge are also the outcome of actions by those the most deprived of resources attempting to escape constraint. Settlements, then, and thus regulation, are not just results, states of affairs, but ever-recommencing processes: in the shop,

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nothing is fixed, nothing is definitive, everything is always changing through unending negotiation. This loss of fixed points of reference is a loss of fulcra upon which one party or another might find the support to exert leverage and to transform a situation to its own advantage. All these interlinked processes of adjustment and transformation within the shop, all these quests for increased efficiency on the part of the various actors are also the results of situations outside the shop and of the constraints to which they are subject. The profitable enterprise lives in the competition between products: produced more cheaply, of ever-increasing quality, the motor-car offers more and more options over a shorter and shorter life-span for any particular model. For their part, the workers have spent longer at school, which has considerably transformed their expectations in terms of pay and the content of work – though the significant underemployment of their capacities imposes its own limits on their insistence on reward. All these factors, taken together, contradictory as they are, are mediated by the general organisation of the enterprise and more particularly by the organisation of work. It is this mediation which explains why in interviews or in the data of participant observation the lived experience of some is not necessarily referred to the changing context of the enterprise and of workers’ conditions of life, and that these constraints, when they do find expression, are transformed into destiny, without their ultimate causes ever being considered. This mediation of constraint through the organisation of work results in a multiplicity of sites of negotiation, in the emergence of relationships of force and the establishment of the regulations analysed in this chapter. Though every worker does not bring the same resources to negotiations, these latter do occupy an important place in thoughts and representations. The stuff of everyday life, these negotiations and the adjustments they entail accompany every moment of the working day, diverting the attention of assembly-line workers to concerns less immediate than the monitoring of their own manual operations. In the same way these ongoing and unending negotiations and settlements give meaning to gestures subordinated to technical injunctions (themselves derived from competition mediated by the organisation of the enterprise) and to the social imperatives of recognition by ones peers, by the moniteur and by line-management. Not everything is negotiated in the shop, of course: not everything in it is negotiable, either. Far from it; in the short term, the margins of autonomy are relatively limited. Yet social change can be interpreted as changes in the rules of the game, as for example in the case of the

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suggestions system or of quality assurance policy, and tomorrow perhaps – why not? – of the rebalancing of the line. To see work in the shop – and in the enterprise more generally – as also the permanent subject of negotiated regulation, is to offer another representation of it, one which by its very nature allows one to characterise the nature of the shop – or the enterprise – as a place of inevitable conflict and of the dynamic compromise that enables its essential goals to be achieved: both work and production.

5 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System

Since the summer of 2000, the object of our investigation has undergone further transformation, and the colourful new Habillage Caisse building now also accommodates the Montage Voiture shop. Throughout the preceding chapters, the question of change has been there just beneath the surface, even when it hasn’t arisen overtly, as in the comparison of the HC and MV shops, or in workers’ recollections of developments at work. The Peugeot-Sochaux plant has witnessed several phases of change in the organisation of work, each of which has been an issue, a focus of contention around which were revealed, constituted and recomposed distinct and sometimes contradictory positions whose richness and complexity is not always entirely reflected in the current situation that is their historical outcome. This is all the more so as reference to the very existence or reality of change may be an important distinguishing feature, one of the questions at issue in the construction of identities and solidarities within the shop. For many workers, in fact, the modernisation of productive technique has been accompanied by continuity in work relations. This modernisation (clipping a part rather than screwing it, the introduction of different adhesive techniques, the robotisation of various operations such as the fitting of windows and dashboards) has not led to radical changes in the content of work, which remains fragmented and repetitive, all the more so as cycle times have grown even shorter. And the same might be said of the flattening out of the management hierarchy or the introduction of self-inspection. Such points of view seem difficult to reconcile with the claim that ‘in HC, it’s not what it used to be’. In fact, in claiming that at bottom nothing has changed, or not really, these 218

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workers, and the disappointed and disillusioned more particularly, are highlighting the absence, as far as they are concerned, of any qualitative change in their work. Yet there do exist different, alternative forms of organisation of work, in other shops on the Sochaux site, characterised by differences of equipment, or by the lengthening of cycle-times. These shops are evidence of a parallel history of experiment with forms of organisation alternative or complementary to the dominant schema found in HC and MV. Apart from their intrinsic interest, they also prompt reconsideration of the creation of the HC shop, and the actual content of the attempt to ‘Japanise’ the new shop from the beginning; while an examination of these alternative approaches also raises questions about the complexity of any attempt to modernise the Sochaux system.

Alternative forms of organisation in peripheral shops In Habillage Moteurs the workers fit to the engines and gearboxes that come in from the specialised shops the various necessary additional parts: alternators, ignition, carburettors, turbochargers, as well as numerous contactors, cables and flexible pipes. The fitting-up of each engine corresponds to a precise vehicle specification ordered by an individual client, and the engine is then attached to the chassis, which is then ‘married’ to the appropriate body. Suspended from an aerial conveyor, the engines used to move along the shop, the workers at each station attaching the parts assigned to it. The engines tended to swing about as they travelled, and assembly operations were carried out while walking alongside: this double motion was fatiguing to the workers, who had to adjust their stance to the position of the engine, while in certain cases they would try and halt the engine in its motion to establish a comfortable working position. The first improvement to be introduced, then, was the possibility of halting the conveyor so that one no longer had to walk while working: the gearbox was thus attached to the engine while both were at rest: yet this workstation remained awkward and physically demanding because the engine was still swinging and thus difficult to line up with the gear-box. The next improvements involved the extension of work at fixed stations, all the parts being set out around the workstation, and the tools themselves being suspended. The engine was no longer moving forward, and the work could be done without walking. Three or four workstations were combined together, extending the cycle time from 3 to 12 minutes and allowing the workers greater autonomy in the management of their time.

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Finally, it was necessary to replace the aerial conveyor by a system that held the engine firm, and which allowed each to be progressed to some extent independently of the others. This was done for the big engine needed for the 605, whose complexity called for a great deal of labour. The engine is positioned on a powered trolley (an AGV or automated guided vehicle) which moves from station to station as required by the workers, each workstation being provided with the requisite parts or sub-assemblies and the tools needed to fit them. Operatives thus work at fixed positions, adjusting the arrival of successive engines to their own capacities and their own rhythm of work, within the overall limits imposed by the organisation and methods department. As a result of technical improvements and increases in manual dexterity the total time required has been reduced from 96 minutes to 73 minutes: a reduction that contributes to the productivity increases demanded by the board. This also shows that ‘reflexive production’, as was implemented by Volvo at Uddevalla, where workers assembled a quarter of the car, or even a whole one, 1 can represent a continuous source of productivity, contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Japanese model or of lean production. For this engine-fitting circuit, the organisation and methods department, in consultation with the workers, sets regular targets for productivity increases throughout the year: and it may be noted that this system of production leads to far better co-operation between technicians and workers. The former are looking for improvements in productivity, while the latter are seeking greater ease at work, but both parties are able to enter into a compromise, which is of course unstable, but is nonetheless attended by much less violent conflict than we have seen on traditional assembly lines, either in the final assembly shops or elsewhere in Habillage Moteurs. With the AGVs, workstations seem much more comfortable: the engine can be turned around on its platform, which reduces the need for unproductive changes of position by workers. In the same way, the platform to which the engine is fastened can be raised or lowered according to need. At Sochaux, the best of the engine-fitters are posted to this section, in recognition of their greater skills, which are here better remunerated, and as a symbolic valorisation through the granting of responsibility for a complete cycle of work, which has also led to improved quality. These measures are somewhat reminiscent of the ergonomic approach adopted by Volvo at its Tuve plant, where work on the engines is carried out on AGVs that allow variations in height and tilt. This is no coincidence, for both emerged from the same questioning of the

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fragmentation of work in the 1970s. At Peugeot, consideration was given to work-enrichment, and in April 1973 managers made the first of a number of visits to Volvo to study Swedish experience in improving conditions and enriching the content of work (through job rotation, self-managing groups and parallel assembly in particular). During the same period, the Carrosserie embarked on a number of experiments in job-enrichment, such as the preparation of doors at fixed workstations; or in the Eighties, transferring the trimming of top-of-the-range vehicles to a specialist workshop, where workers who had volunteered for these posts pushed the vehicles about themselves and were able to decide – within the limits of the collective organisation of the workshop agreed in consultation with supervisors – whether to work on a section of the line or all the way along it, following the car from one end to the other. This experiment would last several years.2 The assembly of the big 605 engines on AGVs thus takes its place in a recognisable tradition of experiment that combines alternative modes of organisation with innovative technology under the influence of leading contemporary examples. The proponents of this system, like the workers who operate under it, argue for it in terms of ease of work, productivity and quality. Those who oppose its more general adoption will argue, on the other hand, that assembly-line workers’ general level of skill is too low, or that they show but little interest in this kind of work. However this may be, here, as in most establishments of the same kind, the generalisation of this new organisation of production does not seem to be on the agenda for engine assembly. In the new cable shop where the cars’ wiring is prepared, the debate continues. With the growing complexity of wiring design – connected to the increasing number of electrical accessories – the individual workstations at which complete electrical systems had been assembled were gradually abandoned through the 1970s and 1980s, to be replaced, following Fordist–Taylorist principles, by carrousels at which a number of women carry out fragmentary tasks. The wiring is assembled on a kind of octagonal truncated pyramid, each of whose faces corresponds to a workstation occupied by a woman who must make so and so many connections and carry out so and so many other tasks in a set time. To break up the monotony of the work and to deal with the quality problems resulting from it, the management of the shop wanted to move back to individual workstations, at least for those women who wished it. This was done with the wiring for the 605, which is extremely complicated, being made up of between 400 and 500 separate wires; the operative must memorise 600 to 700 connections to be made in a cycle

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time of 135 minutes. The work requires a certain concentration in order to avoid reversed connections; there is a real-time quality control carried out on the assembly-surface itself, a bulb lighting up immediately to indicate an error in assembly, but correcting such errors slows down the work. It is likely that a number of women dislike such long cycle times, by reason of the length of training (2 to 3 months) and the effort of memorisation required, even if such new skills bring a better grading. Those who are working on the 605 are proud of their professionalism and of their connection with the cable shop, where the increasing complexity of the work has led to an improvement in status. More generally, faced with difficulties in ensuring the adoption of such a wide-ranging reorganisation of work, shop management has retained the principle, but reduced the number of tasks to be carried out and so to be memorised. For the 406, each of the two parts of the wiring (which is divided into two sub-systems to facilitate its fitting to the body) is made up in 45 minutes. In addition, for those who prefer, it can be split between two or three workstations further to reduce the difficulty. As the manager insists, however, this is not the best way to go, ‘because by fragmenting, you’re also abolishing people as people’. Fixed allowances of time, too, have been replaced by group performance targets. There is one problem: certain women have lost their temporal frame of reference as a result, and faced with this autonomy are having difficulty in setting norms for themselves. Group leaders or foremen have disappeared to be replaced by facilitators, one to each nine to fifteen operatives, whose role is to ensure that the necessary conditions obtain for production to proceed in good order (supplies, quality control, tooling, etc.). The increase in workers’ autonomy (choice of cycle time and of number of operations to be carried out) and the lengthening of the cycle (up to 45 minutes) and hence the increase in skills and responsibility, represent an incontestable break with the traditional model and the general tendency to reduce cycle times. These innovations highlight the diversity of orientations obtaining amongst assembly-line management at Sochaux, and also the tensions that underlie this. For this alternative organisation of work and production has by no means achieved a definitive victory: a return to traditional practice is constantly threatened in the name of competition-driven cost-reduction. Here as elsewhere, the cost paradigm is inescapable, all the more so as the shop has been put into direct competition with a sub-contractor, the subsidiary of a major international group, which has a factory nearby. The Garniture shop, for now, has come well out of

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the comparison. At the same time, the supporters of the new form of organisation have not succeeded in quantifying all its advantages, in terms of quality, just-in-time delivery (at all hours!), and above all in speed of reaction to sudden changes of programme, emergencies, or modifications in the product itself. The debate goes on, without any direct participation by the female workforce, who are nonetheless those chiefly concerned. This demonstrates both the style of change – generally imposed from the top down – and its resulting limitations, even while underlining its necessity in the permanent quest for improved performance. It was this same concern which led to the adoption of a quasi-Japanese organisation of work and management style on the creation of HC1, only for a retreat to be made later.

The opening of HC1 – an aborted Japanisation The transfer of the body shop from the old building to the new, begun in 1989 (see Chapter 1) had been long prepared. It was of course intended to procure substantial productivity increases through the modernisation of the production process, in particular by the replacement of the old chain-drawn trolleys by a continuous conveyor, by increasing the number of assembly operations carried out by robots, and by the introduction of automated controls over the flow and over just-in-time supply. Its technological sophistication was thus the most important aspect of the project. At the same time, another important goal was the transformation of the working atmosphere and of relations on the assembly line. In September 1987 a working party was set up by the Automobiles Peugeot production directorate to consider the organisation of work in the new shops. This organised several visits to car plants abroad (to Honda in Japan, Nissan in the United States, NUMMI in California . . . ) and also to other industrial sectors considered to be leaders in the management of human resources, such as pharmaceuticals, while also drawing on specialist studies and reports on Peugeot managers’ visits or placements as manual workers with Japanese firms. 3 A reference to the Japanese organisational model can also be seen in the title adopted by the working party: the ‘NUMMI Group’. This is significant, referring as it does to the joint Toyota–General Motors subsidiary set up in the US in 1984. Since 1980 at least, Peugeot had been interested in Japan, now adopted as its exemplar; the American transplants, however, were of particular interest to senior management, for their demonstration of Japanese organisational techniques and principles

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stripped of their cultural particularities and so of all mystery, and so that much easier to evaluate and to adopt. More than the Japanese model, Peugeot was looking for the assimilable element in it: Japanese advances validated by American production. A report on a placement at a Honda factory highlights the low level of absenteeism at the Japanese plant (0.5 per cent); the great number of suggestions; the mobilising function of the information meeting at the start of the shift; the absence of any monthly rebalancing of the line and redistribution of tasks; the importance attached to informing workers of the cause of any stoppage of the line, by means of announcements on the loudspeakers responsible for the discreet background music etc. It shows the close relations between workers and the ‘flying defectrepairer’ or quality monitor responsible for second-level quality control. The authors envied the team spirit which enabled the group to deal with the difficulties of the assembly process and to actively participate in the numerous meetings that brought the shop’s workers together: ‘Solidarity between team members is exemplary, and this mutual understanding is one of the elements that cements the unity of the enterprise. No one is left outside the team’s circle, which ensures a particularly rich process of reciprocal communication that helps each one of its members in their daily work.’4 These discussions led to the decision to move towards a form of team organisation, dubbed polycellular organisation, to be based on three principles: the flattening of the hierarchy; organisation in small groups motivated by a leader; and employee self-organisation. This was intended to increase the degree of responsibility and autonomy enjoyed by assembly-line workers (in terms of quality in particular) and to transform their behaviour. The plan explains: ‘The operative is an actor for progress. He participates and takes initiatives in the introduction of improvements.’ To do this, line management had to give up its disciplinary role to take on a technical function: ‘line-management ensures the conditions that will allow operatives to fulfil their new role. It prepares for and organises the work’. Assembly-line workers are to be organised in work groups of seven to ten, together with a polyvalent capable of replacing any of them. They are to participate, with supervisory staff, in drawing up their own operations sheets, a task hitherto reserved to the line-balancer. Finally, provision is made for a mobile moniteur or flying defect-repairer who can be called in directly by an assembly-line worker. This moniteur would also be responsible for carrying out certain training functions, preparing improvements to production, and ensuring that supplies and tooling were such as to enable work to

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be carried out without problems; he would also be responsible for safety, and for relations with other groups and with the team-leader. These reforms were accompanied by a number of more specific ideas inspired by visits and placements in Japan: – all employees in the shop to wear the same clothing, whatever their rank or function (in the event, a very bright, almost fluorescent green jacket); – a five minute briefing at the beginning of the shift, given by the moniteur or team leader, and also monthly information meetings; – the creation of a loudspeaker system on the line; – no monthly rebalancing of the line; – actual assembly time always to be less than time taken to pass through the workstation, whatever the model; – the creation of the performance bonus (prime d’objectifs); – an increase in multi-functionality (polyvalence) and its recognition in the grading scheme. In order to ensure a transformation in attitudes from the very start of operations in the new shop, management wished to organise staffing by rigorous selection from among volunteer applicants, as in previous experiments with the enrichment of work selection and volunteering had appeared to be the decisive factors in success. When, however, the economic situation proved to be unfavourable to the external recruitment that had been envisaged, training was organised for those workers destined for HC, in the form of a three-week course. This took place at Morvillars, the training centre for supervisory staff: a symbol in itself. The course first of all explained the constraints of the market, and then the measures adopted to deal with them, and their effects on the shop, justifying the proposals outlined above, and stressing management’s concern for improved working conditions and simplification and ease of work. At the end of the first week, the workers had to sign a charter, a condition for their continuing on the course and joining the new shop. In doing this they undertook to adopt new behaviours and new attitudes in relation to their day-to-day work and to the business more generally. Such a project could not be implemented without difficulty. In the first six months, until the middle of 1989, the workers selected to go to HC were chosen because supervisors believed them to be the best and the most willing – indeed the charter made explicit reference to this. This presupposed, allowed or demanded – depending on ones point of view – the dissolution of the old teams and the recomposition of working

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groups, an unpopular and suspect measure in the eyes of the majority of employees. Nevertheless, the great majority of those chosen, loyal and dedicated, had no trouble in accepting the new rules of the game: some even overtook more senior colleagues in their promotion to moniteur. Yet little by little, some workers began to question the content of this course at Morvillars, which they began to see as a species of brainwashing. Others, more optimistic, saw it as three weeks’ holiday, because it got them off the line as long as it lasted. One way of opposing and resisting the new methods, for some workers, was to refuse to sign the HC1 Charter: they were excluded from the course and sent back to their original workstations, which only confirmed the employees remaining in the Finition shop in their negative ideas. As the numbers transferred increased, so did the number of refusals, and also discontent with a Charter that was seen as a declaration of allegiance to management (in terms of willingness in particular, now understood as availability for overtime and Saturday work). It was gradually abandoned. At the same time, in the face of difficulties in meeting recruitment requirements on a voluntary basis, the course was reduced to one week for most of the operatives posted to the second line in HC1. Finally, when HC2 was opened, the course at Morvillars was dropped completely, to be replaced by a single day’s training, with a visit to the new premises and the provision of general information on the new style of production. Unlike HC1, HC2 was deliberately started up with teams from HC0 – or at least with what was left of them after recruitment to HC1 – under the leadership of the same team leaders: ‘We went off with our toolboxes and the same foremen’, said one of the workers. Collectively identifying with their image as the ‘bad boys’, workers and foremen set about their work in the new shop with a scarcely disguised lack of enthusiasm. The management’s gradual abandonment of its ambitions for the reform of work relations was expressed in the day-to-day life of the new shop by a return to earlier work practices. Slowly, the start-of-shift briefings, reporting on the previous days production, its failures and successes, and announcing the targets for the coming day, grew more and more occasional; by 1992 they had disappeared more or less everywhere. Badly prepared for the motivational effort required, team leaders and moniteurs were unable to hold their audiences’ interest in topics (such as productivity, quality, the reasons for stoppages) in which many of them refused to take an interest. For very similar reasons, and also because one section of the supervisory staff distrusted the very idea of increasing worker autonomy, assembly-line workers themselves were

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never really involved in drawing up their own operations sheets: determined by the organisation and methods department, these were simply passed on by the HC Training School. Furthermore, the plan to do away with the monthly rebalancing of the line was also abandoned in the face of demands by the commercial side and the requirements of changes in the product itself (the continuous introduction of new versions, miscellaneous modifications etc.). Supervisors also regained responsibility for the management of leave, initially negotiated within the working groups. Later, the uniform fluorescent green clothing characteristic of HC was replaced by the light grey shared by all the other shops.5 On the whole, the intended ‘Japanisation’ did not take place, thanks, in part, of course, to resistance encountered among assembly-line workers as soon as recruitment was extended to the generality. Another reason for the failure of this transformation of attitudes and assumptions was that at the very moment the management embarked on this enormous project, it found itself with other more pressing problems to deal with: ensuring the technical reliability of the new shop and launching the new 605. Even with a well-tried and smooth-running system of production, the launch of a new car involved many unknowns and would be marked by numerous surprises. Here, not only was the whole machinery new, but the product too was a major new challenge for Peugeot: a top-of-the-range vehicle, with a high level of electronic control and a powerful engine, it had been designed to take on Mercedes on its own ground. On the one hand, however, Peugeot had no tradition of production at this level, and on the other, the car had been hastily validated and the requirements for its assembly were sometimes demanding:6 its production thus posed big problems from the very beginning, which prevented Peugeot from successfully setting itself up as a direct competitor to Mercedes, despite later corrections. What is more, during the first months of operation, the new equipment suffered problems of reliability: the lifts, conveyors and numerous other automated materials-handling installations did not work as planned. On robotised sections (for the fitting of windows and dashboards) stoppages were frequent, penalising the whole line. In normal circumstances upstream and downstream buffers would have been sufficient, but these were unable to cope with the long adjustment times required for increasing line speeds. The frequent stoppages undermined the authority of supervisory staff and of the whole system they represented, and the discourse on ‘the new principles of production’ encountered mockery and misgivings among the workers. In other words, difficulties in getting the line up to speed and recourse to previously abandoned

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practices to resolve them rapidly overcame the intention to transform work relations, because it was necessary to produce vehicles for the market at all costs. The multiplication of breakdowns also contributed to the loss of the innovatory momentum that had characterised the new shop and the course at Morvillars. To these difficulties were superadded the ambiguities inherent to the very conception of the project. Those responsible had very largely underestimated the role and function of supervisory staff in Japanese methods of industrial production. Concentrating essentially on the shop-floor worker group, they seem to have thought that the loyalty of their immediate managers would ensure the success of the enterprise. Hence the recruitment for the opening of the new HC shop of the most loyal of foremen and supervisors: yet the project had promised to make an actor of the assembly-line worker, to whom the course at Morvillars promised autonomy and a degree of control over his own work. On return to the plant, the divorce between what had been promised and the traditionalism of the supervisory staff rapidly reinforced the difficulties encountered in production. While the project called for leadership by supervisory staffs convinced of the importance of a participative approach, it seemed rather as if a section of shop management had taken precautions against any possible excess by putting the supposed social transformation into the charge of reliable disciplinarians who had already proved themselves. An approach which did not conduce to the success of the project. Finally, as production targets became more demanding and rates of activity increased, the shop as a whole came to understand the balance of advantages and constraints in the alternatives introduced. By getting rid of much unproductive movement, the ergonomic design of the installations, in particular the ability to work while standing on the conveyor, enabled greater energy to be devoted to productive gesture, the workers encountering in this the robust and continuing logic of the industrial plant, which involves the more and more productive exploitation of their gestural resources. Furthermore, the Japanese organisation of production presupposes a ‘blue-collar career’, a succession of promotions that allows one both to get off the line (where the average age is in the thirties, rather than in the forties as in France) and to enjoy a continuous increase in pay: according to Chauvin et al., pay is increased some four or five times in the course of the first seven years of employment, an observation confirmed by all available analyses of the Japanese automobile industry. 7 The recruitment of workers to life-long employment involves a number

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of filters (temporary employment, individual assessment), as it does today in France, at Peugeot through the use of temporary employment in particular. Unlike at Peugeot-Sochaux, however, commitment to work and loyalty to the company are given in exchange for a guarantee of significant progress in pay and departure from the line before the age of 35. Without this provision, which underlies the productive compromise of daily work, in which each finds a relative advantage, it is hard to imagine the reasons why workers should become more deeply committed to work that is unrewarding, repetitive, and fatiguing after forty. While strongly insisting on its inspiration by the Japanese model, the HC project differed from it too in terms of its mode of implementation. Rather than the careful preparation of a consensus within the Carrosserie building and across the Sochaux site more generally, the project was a plan more or less confined to the team in charge, implemented with little regard for pragmatic considerations. Faced with the simultaneous obstacles outlined above, this voluntarism to some extent became selfdefeating. The idea of the failure of the Japanisation project associated with the new shop thus requires a double inflection. First of all, in its content and in its methods, the HC project differed in many ways from the Japanese model that was said to have inspired it. As is generally the case with the supposed transplantation of a borrowed model,8 the idea of an identical copy is doubly illusory: not only is it impossible simply to transfer a foreign model, but the model adopted is as much the expression of the borrower’s own ideas as it is of the reality of the example to which it refers. Japanese who visit HC are in fact astonished at what they see, and even more so when they hear that this is meant to be a reflection of their own practice. Finally, the idea of failure must be contextualised. Once the reliability of the new installations was assured, the automatic processes reviewed and simplified, the expected gains in productivity certainly appear to have been achieved. In fact, the notion of failure is not neutral. It is an asset retained for use by every subordinate to legitimate his own reservations with regard to goals assigned. Furthermore, though the launch of the new shop may be generally discussed in the light of this idea of failure, of error or blame, or of promises not kept, the arguments vary with the position of the speaker, and some are mutually contradictory. The idea of failure thus contributes, paradoxically, to a form of consensus among the disillusioned in the shop, in the construction of a specific ‘we’. Through and beyond the image of Japanization this consensus describes the launch of HC as overvaluing automation and based on

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a somewhat utopian vision of work relations: robotics plus worker involvement, a typical 1980s mixture.

The new Montage Voiture: a frugal modernisation After several years devoted to digesting the technical, social and no doubt financial costs of the new HC shop, in 1996 Peugeot-Sochaux decided on the transformation of Montage Voiture. The project essentially involved the transfer of this shop to the ground floor of the new building, beneath HC. When this was done, there would be nothing left in the old Carrosserie building of what had earlier occupied it. The transfer would bring about a logical, coherent geographical relation between the various final operations of paint and assembly, getting rid, in particular, of the long conveyors of bodies and doors, very costly in terms of operation and buffer sizes. Furthermore, in bringing these two shops together, the plan did away with the two-hour interval imposed by the circulation of bodies between the two shops: it offered increased simplicity of co-ordination and the possibility of considerable increases in speed of reaction. Through concentration, the industrial process gains in simplicity and efficiency. The conditions for just-in-time supply are improved. And finally, this modernisation also corresponded to a proposed cut in the plant’s capacity, down from some 1,800 vehicles a day to around 1,250. This reduction emphasised Sochaux’s transformation into a terminal plant among the others of the group, and was intended to encourage an efficiency which its previous exceptional status had done little to encourage. Installations were simplified, with the number of lines in MV being reduced from four to two, accompanied by a doubling of line-speed. In addition, changes in the supply of engines allowed the building to be divided into two autonomous sub-ensembles, with each half of HC being connected to a line in MV, allowing more flexibility in adjusting the rate of production. Finally, the bodies are now suspended from aerial conveyors, and the striking descent of the body onto the chassis and the mechanical components has been replaced by an automated and unspectacular alignment of parts. This reorganisation also offers an increase in usable space, while ergonomics have not been neglected either. The height of the body suspended from the conveyor varies with the type of work to be carried out by operatives on different sections of the line. The pit has disappeared. Work with upraised arms has not been eliminated, but it is carried out at normal ground level. The social facilities (team rest areas, canteens,

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changing rooms, etc.) have brought marked improvements in comfort during breaks and mealtimes. The transformation has thus brought about considerable improvement in the working environment and in ergonomic conditions. Yet there seem to have been few expensive improvements: it had been planned that the whole of both lines should be provided with a travelator moving at the same rate as the aerial conveyor, on which it would be possible to work without having to walk to keep up with the line, as in the new HC. After various calculations, however, it was decided to limit this to those sectors where the necessary travel was particularly fatiguing, and represented too high a proportion of working time – and thus of the associated cost. In a general way, the modernisation of the second tranche of the Carrosserie differed in substance from that of HC. During that first phase, the sophistication of the installations was intended to reduce to a minimum the amount of direct productive labour required, while the resulting productivity increases would fund the costs relating to the accompanying social transformation. For the new MV1 and MV2 lines, cost-reduction was the prime criterion, the goals being increased productivity and economy of investment. Experience of the actual costs of automation, including those represented by breakdowns and maintenance, led to a return to the employment of workers whenever this would prove more economic. Furthermore, the notion of ‘frugal’ or lean production was at the centre of all explicit or implicit communication with employees. The management of the plant wanted to leave no room for mere dreams, and to gain acceptance of the idea that Peugeot had to reduce costs to survive, and at Sochaux even more than at other sites. Taken as a whole, the changes to installations and organisation were conceived from a dual perspective. On the one hand, they stood in the direct line of continuing rationalisation. The doubling of the speed of the line entailed the halving of cycle time for operatives. This accentuation of the repetitive nature of the task was reinforced by an intensification of work-study, so as to reduce the number of operations not directly productive, through the reduction of locomotion in particular, and to increase the number of ‘waitresses’, the mobile parts-racks, to produce ‘the efficient workstation’ (see Chapter 2). On the other hand, these changes have increased the autonomy of worker groups and the degree of co-operation between them. The line is divided into successive sections, each with some slight autonomy of production, thanks to the existence of transitional zones that allow the fluctuations resulting from various incidents to be absorbed. This arrangement allows the

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autonomous management of production by section. This is accompanied by an extension of multi-functionality and increased mobility between workstations, intended to compensate for the impoverishment of the work and to counter the increased risk of injury or disease associated with the increase in repetitivity, at the same time as endowing the working group itself with greater flexibility. In a certain way, these organisational choices intensified the demands made in every aspect of work, and upset the balance of the old shop. This modernisation was accompanied by a company-wide plan to recompose working groups, which converted the traditional teams into Unités Élémentaires de Production, basic production units. This was intended to reinforce the cohesion and autonomy of the shop-floor working group. The person in charge of the UEP, the old team leader (AM1), now renamed RU1 (Responsable d’Unité de premier échelon – first level unit ‘manager’), enjoyed increased responsibilities for the management of men and equipment, as also in his relations with human resources, maintenance, tooling and quality departments, all now designated as support functions. Within the UEP, the plan was intended to change relationships through an intensification of institutional communication (through notice-boards, periodic briefings), and leadership of a participative type. The emphasis placed on collective responsibility for the workspace (the ‘five Ss’ of Japanese inspiration) and for PARI suggestions leads to the periodical organisation of campaigns and other mobilising events. In addition, co-operation, multi-functionality and mobility are all encouraged within the working group. There is an explicit reference here to the reforms introduced at Renault, which enables in this case, as elsewhere, the reformulation of schemes of participative management already developed within the company, and more particularly those which figured in the HC project. These developments received further emphasis through the flattening of the management hierarchy, with the fusion within this shop of the roles of supervisor (AM2) and assembly-line manager (chef de groupe) in the new post of RU2. The old supervisor, earlier the key figure in the life of the shop, and often the production worker’s ultimate interface with the company, has disappeared in the new hierarchy, which as it becomes flatter is beginning to strain relations between the UEPs at the bottom and shop management above. The new MV shop thus offered an opportunity to develop a new conception of the modernisation of the organisation of manual labour. After the enrichment of the tasks assigned to operatives, and alternatives to work on the line, after the tightening of flows through a new

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sophistication of equipment and lay-out and a recasting of work relations, it was now a question of making optimal use of traditional techniques and resources of rationalisation, while associating them with the participative management of the working group. The transformation that has occurred however, cannot be reduced to the simple implementation of the project, or even to its acceptance or rejection by employees; as for previous efforts at the reorganisation of work, the bringing into service of the new shop generated interactions which recomposed relations and renewed the system.

Towards a renewal of the Sochaux system? At the time when the transformation of the MV shop and the reorganisation of working groups were being put into effect, the ‘Sochaux system’ was undergoing certain changes on the initiative of various actors. This social system is based to a great extent on the wage relation,9 within which we include such diverse fields as the organisation of work, management style, work relations and the system of remuneration. The preceding chapters have shown that in addition to components resulting from the initiative of such institutional actors as the company and the unions, other factors also play a decisive role in the organisation of the relations that make up this social system. Among these factors are the demographics of the workforce, employees’ effective career trajectories and their representations of them, and finally the social implantation of these workers outside the plant and its perspectives. The management style is feeling its way between one school which practices authoritarian command, and another which is trying to develop participative approaches through encouraging workers’ initiative and self-expression. Both are bound to the highly prescriptive nature of the work, to which many workers respond by the adoption of a defensive attitude. Work relations remain imbued with a high degree of conflict. In the shops, supervisors often favour the so-called reformist unions, but this type of unionism does not have a base among the workers sufficient to allow it to be regarded as a real interlocutor. While FO is relatively well established among technical staff and the CGC–CFE among line management, the maintenance of a relation of conflict with the more militant, but more representative trade-unions – with the CGT, the most influential in particular – undermines workers’ confidence in their management. The mode of remuneration has lost some of its advantages. Not only is blue-collar pay among the lowest in European car-manufacture, but it is

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no longer so much better than that offered by other local industrial employers. Furthermore, certain associated advantages have also lost in importance. With very few exceptions, career advancement for manufacturing workers – including advancement by seniority – remains poor, and inadequate in the eyes of those concerned. Only the guarantee of continuing employment has grown in significance, compensating for the disillusion manifested by the majority of workers at Sochaux. In terms of the organisation of work, the differences between shops discussed above represent the traces of the various conceptions, the successive choices adopted by Peugeot: the old MV shop was designed in the long-ago days of the simple motor car with its high requirement for manual labour, while HC has seen the application of ideas of global automation and just-in-time flows; MV2 reintroduced a certain overall flexibility, pursuing automation in a pragmatic manner. If one ignores those few sectors which have benefited from job-enrichment, in response to criticism of fragmentation, the three shops can be said to confirm the power of prescription over the organisation of production and its organisation (agencement) of social groups. How different are the shops in reality? At Sochaux this question is the subject of much dispute. In the differing organisational choices, the same principles appear to be being followed, even while the rules for their implementation are varied. On the one hand, these different instances confirm the power of prescription, if only through the differing modalities of its imposition. Decisions on lay-out and equipment are unilateral, as are the rules which govern operation, while supervisory staff retain the powers and instruments that allow them to control work activity. The plant thus continues to be marked by a split between ‘us’ and ‘them’,10 a cleavage between those who are responsible for organising and managing the work of others, and these others who carry it out. For the latter, it is still a matter of being chained to the line, an enforced transparency, norms as constraints. For the former, the logic of control has lost none of its vitality: more than ever, it is finding new territories to conquer, from defect management to the organisation of rest areas, and new instruments, such as optical pens, computer terminals and techniques of worker involvement. Yet the differences observed are not the outcome of a linear implementation of the decisions of assembly-line management. Beneath the time represented by the major developmental stages undergone by the plant are other temporalities, more local and more complex, in which there occurs a multitude of social adjustments. As our research has gone on, we have been struck, when returning each time for another period

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of observation, by the ceaseless change which traverses institutions and social arrangements: a workstation once analysed becomes unrecognisable some months later, contacts are dispersed, acronyms come and go, reforms succeed one another. Careers begin to take shape, even as others are confirmed in failure. Equipment becomes obsolescent, new rules render forever invalid those which they replace. Endlessly, the present disappears in a movement that is itself not without its fascination. This interplay between different temporal scales modifies the terms in which the question of change must be posed. If the modernisation of the shops is the result of decisions by board-level management, the modifications which then occur take place in much more limited spaces: the plant, the shop, the line, the team or the work group. At each of these levels there exists a particular system of relations, an autonomous space of social play. These autonomous spaces may in part be the intentional outcome of the company’s plans, as in the case of the UEPs, the basic production units. In every case, however, they are recast by the play of co-operation, negotiation, conflict and readjustment between those directly concerned. As time passes, a certain autonomy emerges: the members of this ensemble evaluate constraints and controls and organise the means by which they may collectively avoid them or adjust to them. It is then, often, that specific rules become established, some in secret, others more openly. This autonomy, the basis of social relations at work, really exists. It has a name, and workers are at pains to insist on its importance, often suggesting that it is at the heart of work relations: this is the ambiance, the atmosphere. Good or bad, the atmosphere is generally held to be an essential collective construct which, inscribed within the institutional framework, proves permeable to the play of each of the actors. It is the synthesis of the identity-constitutive social play of the members of the group; at assembly-line level, it used to be determined by the informal regulation of the supervisors now abolished. In the old MV shop, where the implementation even of supervisors’ directives was in the hands of autonomous networks, this autonomy was the accumulated product of decades of working life. At the same time, the weak degree of autonomy characteristic of HC has discouraged a number of employees, who in the absence of ties between them, maintain distances and construct barriers, establishing new forms of resistance. But like every social construct, autonomy is an issue in contention, and each actor has his own definition of what is a good atmosphere. At each level, it is for those above a concession that must be kept under control, more or less directly, while for those below it is closely related

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to the degree of opacity they are able to recover and maintain.11 Differing attitudes mark sub-groups among Sochaux employees, such as the disillusioned veterans’ resistance to the hierarchy while the youthful enthusiasts play the game of transparency. Autonomy, the object and issue of the social forces within the plant, is also revelatory of actors’ positions. Why pay so much attention to the atmosphere, to forms of autonomy? Because with technical developments and the advance of lean production, margins are becoming tighter. Quality control is an instructive example in this regard. If at the beginning of the 1980s, company management enriched the jobs of assembly-line workers by giving them partial responsibility for what had previously been done by the quality-controllers, the advances in electronic information technology have reabsorbed this autonomy, which fifteen years later has often been reduced to no more than passing an electronic pen over a bar-coded label. Such developments prompt new perspectives on the development of work. For in the ongoing search for job enrichment and new forms of organisation of work, the individual dimension of changes has long attracted attention. The Swedish model and its emblematic development at Uddevalla 12 was seen for a time as an effective alternative to the dominant mode of organisation. In the same way, the progress of automation and industrial information-processing could be considered essentially under the aspect of robotisation, of its effects on skills and employment. Such approaches reflect the changes that have taken place in some sectors of industry and in some branches of production, in car-manufacture as in sheet-metal work or engineering. But work on the contemporary assembly line reveals a continuous refragmentation. In their different ways, new machines and lay-outs, the traceability of parts and cars, or again, the permanent co-ordination of activity, all these involve the workers ever more deeply in collective systems. The more organisation is tightened, the more it binds. This underlying tendency in the historical development of work explains the growing weight of networks in the organisation of work. But the function of these is not at all restricted to the technical or strictly productive. Some networks are the vehicle for the new forms of control, motivation and information-distribution by means of which assembly-line management strengthens its grip on workers. It is through other networks that workers themselves establish or restore the opacity of relations in respect of that same management. Networks thus represent a plural, even contradictory, form of organisation of work relations and the ensemble of

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their configurations represents the social space of production with its constraints and resistances. The future of this social system has been brought all the more into question by the possibility that the skewing of the employee agestructure might bring about a kind of demographic transition over the coming years. The first question is, in what conditions will the oldtimers finish their working careers? Their own history may be divided into two phases. Recruited during the 1970s, they acquired prospects and points of reference in this period of easy employment and plenty of overtime, when manual workers were in demand and enjoyed a high degree of mobility. The difficulties of assembly-line work were then thought of as temporary, and they had their compensations. The Eighties and Nineties brought age, short-time working and disillusion. Career stagnation at the end of working life called out for solutions. Until recently, however, Peugeot’s reflection on the organisation of work, and the plans that have resulted from it, have ignored these weighty problems. Ergonomic concerns have taken on growing importance, and have been the subject of numerous initiatives by Sochaux management, alone or in collaboration with the social partners. These efforts, though, have had difficulty in compensating for, or even catching up with the growth in medical restrictions and other work-difficulties encountered by the old-timers. The plant is having difficulty in innovating, in challenging such rigidities as the 2 x 8 hour shift system and the accumulation of days off, or the treatment of medical restriction as an exception in the face of its growing generalisation. In sum, then, it is public funds in France which make an essential contribution to solving the problem of the ageing of manufacturing workers by financing early-retirement schemes. For their part, the youngsters have found conditions favourable to their own promotion, thanks to their own specific assets: their training, the selection they have undergone, their vitality at work, their limited numbers and the encouragement of supervisory staff. These have already brought them the status of polyvalent or moniteur. In consolidating the youngsters as a favoured group destined for promotion, management may be adjusting to conjunctural demographic conditions, but they may at the same time be running risks for the future. The thirtysomethings, whose promotion is thus threatened, have at least 20 years of working life ahead of them, and threaten to join the discontented. In the same way, young moniteurs are at risk of making practically no progress over the decades that remain to them, while blocking in turn the promotion of their successors, the young people who will be

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recruited over the next ten years. Finally, many supervisory posts are destined for young graduates, and this too will restrict opportunities to rise from the ranks. What is more, the current conjuncture, so favourable to the career development of the youngsters, threatens to last only a few years longer. There will in fact be massive retirements among assembly-line workers in the coming years, involving the most numerous cohorts, the near future seeing an enormous turnover of personnel, with half leaving over the next ten years. 13 This will lead to the rapid erosion of the mass of old-timers, a hegemonic force in the construction of the current atmosphere. This haemorrhage will have to be countered, at least in part, by a policy of continuous recruitment, for the first time in more than twenty years, and this at a scale that will be determined by Peugeot management’s plans for the Sochaux site. There will thus come about a renewal of the workforce which will not only profoundly alter the ratio of generations, but also patterns of identity-constitution among workers. While the old-timers remain without prospects, the young will soon find themselves in the majority. Their recruitment may perhaps be less selective than today. Above all, their hopes of rapidly gaining promotion may be much more difficult to satisfy, and some part of them, perhaps the majority, will have no prospect but to carry on working on the assembly line for decades. A key element, then, in the future of the wage relationship at Sochaux will be the reintroduction of a degree of mobility for manual workers. Without such occupational and social mobility, participative management threatens to appear as no more than an illusion, quite incapable of halting the emergence of new generations of the disillusioned, so much do the current criteria for promotion favour youth and efficiency to seniority and experience. These basic features of the organisation of work are difficult to escape. In the end, one of the most important questions that remains is posed by the fact that the system continues to keep people in undignified working conditions: ‘Work that consists of endlessly doing the same thing, always in the same way, is a terrifying prospect for certain types of intellectual organisation. It would be for me. For certain minds, however, it is thought itself that is worrying. For these, the ideal occupation is one in which there is no call for initiative. We are always looking for men who like their work because it is difficult. . . . Most workers, I regret to say, look for occupations that demand no great muscular effort, but above all, they look for those that will not call upon them to think.’ One can hear this kind of thing every day in the Sochaux plant, and

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elsewhere in the world of industry, but these are the words of Henry Ford. 14 This view of Ford’s, and of his disciples’, leaves out one crucial point, which is the role of the very organisation of work itself in generating this type of attitude, and the ability of these same workers to conceive and to execute projects outside the workplace, as long as the activity has some meaning in their own eyes: the building of a bungalow, voluntary-sector activity, political responsibilities on municipal councils, creative and artistic activity and so on. What smothers the individual’s initiative and creativity is work on the assembly line, where even high standards of quality are very often attained, not by a greater involvement and application of the worker but by a fragmentation of control adapted to the fragmentation of work. Behind the technical demands what one finds in the end is a political relationship, corresponding to the distribution of power in the enterprise, which determines what assembly-line work is. For Taylorism, manual workers cannot occupy, for instance, roles now peripheral, such as linebalancing or work-study: they can be carried out only by specialists removed from the object of study, and themselves subject to supervision and control. The result is well known: in the words of the already anxious young recruits interviewed in 1999, ‘Assembly-line work is not a real job’ (La fabrication n’est pas un métier). In a hurry to escape their jobs on the production line, they countered the dull, irksome aspect of such work with the attractions of belonging to the company. If Taylorism is now old-fashioned, as one hears so often said by managers, then it is necessary too to abandon the practices that follow from it, and in particular the dynamics of fragmentation and control which characterise them. One might, of course, once more evoke the extension of responsibilities, in particular the integration into the work of the assembly-line operative of functions now made peripheral and attributed to ‘whitecollar’ employees: quality control, line-balancing, time and motion study etc. In fact, however, it is not so much in concrete suggestions from outside, as within the shops themselves that one will find alternatives to the current trend. It is here that one finds the workers’ endless effort to expand their autonomy, to give substance to the networks they constantly attempt to bring into action. It is in the shop that the logics of control and flexibility collide and adjust to each other, and it is there that the shifting outcome of negotiation is permanently in question. It is through the breakdown and displacement of the existing compartmentalisation that changes in the atmosphere of the shop are played out.

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Through this recomposition, might assembly-line work yet become more attractive, both in its content and in the career progression that it might offer? It might exact less of a physical toll on the workers, while the greater intrinsic interest of the work might reduce boredom and fatigue. Training could no doubt improve skills to meet the requirements of new tasks, rather than reaffirming submission to the norm. The transformation of assembly-line work and of the wage relation within the shop would in any case require profound changes in management style and in work relations. With workers’ enjoying a greater autonomy and themselves responsible for some of the technical functions in networks of production, logic requires that management itself be transformed and become more participative, increasingly open to worker initiative and putting into question to some degree its own powers of control. Such questioning would doubtless lead to reconsideration of company structures beyond the manufacturing shops themselves: one might look, for example at the place and importance of the centralised functions and of the engineering department. The questions, in fact, are more about the content of change than about its existence. As a result of decisions taken by the company, the Sochaux plant benefited during the 1990s from large-scale investments. Its reorganisation, intended to increase efficiency while reducing capacity and modernising its installations, is intended to change and to revivify production, and thus to introduce a new dynamics at the site. The wage relation, caught up in this transformations, is also entering a new period, whose incertitudes open up new possibilities.

Notes Introduction 1. Work, that is to say, which requires a given number of operations to be completed in a fixed time. 2. With the workforce organised in 2 or 3 shifts of 8 hours a day – or even 4 or 5 shifts when the weekend is worked as well.

1 Peugeot-Sochaux: A Solid Inheritance and Incessant Change 1. Jean-Louis Loubet, Automobiles Peugeot: une réussite industriel, 1945–1974, Paris, Economica, 1990. 2. Maximum year-end employment was in 1978, when Sochaux had 39,103 employees and some 3,000 temporary staff. 3. Jean-Louis Loubet, ‘Peugeot meets Ford, Sloan and Toyota’, in Michel Freyssenet, Andrew Mair, Koïchi Shimizu and Giuseppe Volpato, eds, One Best Way?: Trajectories and Industrial Models of the World’s Automobile Producers, Oxford, OUP, 1998. 4. Nicolas Hatzfeld, ‘L’Ecole d’Apprentissage Peugeot (1930–1970): une formation d’excellence’, in Formation-Emploi, No. 27–28, July–December 1989. 5. AMAT, the Association Montbéliardaise d’Aide aux Travailleurs, rapidly came to focus on hostels for single men and for immigrants in particular; the ALTM, the Association pour le Logement des Travailleurs Montbéliardais, was intended to provide accommodation for young technicians and professionals, and took responsibility, by extension, for the housing of workers of French origin; the CRL, the Comité Régional du Logement, at first a joint employer-trade-union organisation, above all built entire estates and housing developments, the rented part of which it managed itself. 6. Bernard Dézert, La Croissance industrielle et urbaine de la Porte d’Alsace, Paris, SEDES, 1969. 7. Bizarrely, there was very little publicity for this de facto 35-hour week. Sochaux management was unwilling to draw attention to the industrial weaknesses of the plant, or to institutionalise a situation which it wished to change as soon as possible; the trade unions themselves might have been embarrassed by this considerable advantage, which nonetheless represented no kind of victory; and the public or para-public bodies which funded compensation for the shortfall in earnings perhaps preferred to pass over in silence the cost of their intervention. 8. There are only economists or managers, not all of whom are very early risers, who recommend – for others – a 2 × 8 or even 3 × 8 shift system for the sake of a more efficient utilisation of fixed capital. 9. Home visits to workers at the plant often result in a regularly repeated incident: while conversation may range easily over matters related to work,

241

242 Notes

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

career or rates of pay, there is one topic on which frequently leads to the worker being brusquely or even violently taken to task by his wife, even among couples who get along very well: the damage done to family life by the hours worked by the husband, who nonetheless can do nothing about it. The wage-strike in 1948 lasted five weeks. Although long-lasting, it was very restrained (absence of violence, involvement of the public authorities, successive ballots respected by the protagonists). The conflict of March 1950, on the other hand, was bitter (confrontations over control of the factories, intervention of the CRS), ending in a defeat for the strikers after four weeks. Jean Louis Joubet, Automobiles Peugeot . . . op. cit. Nicolas Hatzfeld, ‘Peugeot-Sochaux: de l’èntreprise dans la crise à la crise dans l’entreprise,’ in R. Mouriaux, A. Percheron, A. Prost and D. Tartakowsky, eds, Exploration du Mai français, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1992. Company agreement signed in 1973, which came into force in 1974. The unreliability of a wage determined by post led to an important strike by paint-sprayers at Sochaux in 1969. At Renault, in the same period, it led to a series of disputes over the granting of P1F, that is to say a classification as skilled manufacturing worker equivalent to the P1. It was at this time that clocking-on for manual workers was abolished. These are little cabins of some 2 square metres squeezed in alongside the line which serve to offer the team leader a little protection from the noise and from association with the assembly-line workers. Each boquette has a desk, a computer terminal, a cupboard and filing cabinet – and a telephone, of course. Overall, this ‘fixed relation’ remains untypical in the final assembly: MV is still traditional, as are the line ends in HC where the ‘hands-up’ work is done, as the management felt that the investment required for the ‘turnover’ of the body, as at Mercedes, or as was done at Volvo-Kalmar, was excessive. Finally, the plants at Mulhouse and Poissy have retained the system of overhead conveyors for the new vehicle, which demands that the worker co-ordinates his movement with that of the advancing body.

2 The Line Seen from Below 1. James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos, The Machine that Changed the World, New York and London, 1990. 2. Jean-Pierre Durand, Paul Stewart, Juan-José Castillo, eds, Teamwork in the Automobile Industry, Radical Change or Passing Fashion? Basingstoke, 1999. 3. Yves Clot, Le travail sans homme? Pour une psychologie des milieux de travail et de vie, Paris, La Découverte, 1998. 4. The following month, a new division of labour added to this workstation a simple but incidental operation: the fastening of an adhesive-backed plastic hook within the passenger compartment, alongside the rear door, and the partial positioning of electrical wiring behind this hook. This operation, required only for right-hand-drive cars, necessitated an additional selective attention unrelated to earlier tasks, which provoked a temporary disorganisation of the routine as a whole. 5. Christophe Dejours, Travail, usure mentale: essai de psychopathologie du travail, Paris, Bayard Editions, 1993.

Notes 243 6. The équilibreur or line-balancer is the technician assigned to the line who is responsible for the balanced distribution of tasks among line workers, hence the name (see Chapter 3). 7. Jean-Pierre Durand, ‘Volvo: l’innovation brimée’, in J.-P. Durand ed., La fin du modèle suédois, Syros, 1994; and K. Ellegård, T. Engström and L. Nilsson, ‘Reforming industrial work – Principles and Realities in the Planning of Volvo’s Car Assembly Plant in Uddevalla’, Actes du Gerpisa, No. 9, Université d’Evry, 1994. 8. Nicolas Dodier elaborates on this cognitive aspect of prescription: it is a set of benchmarks which the operative must interpret on the basis of assumptions derived from his own representation of the activity, one of the normative instances which the operative must order, between which he must ‘establish an equilibrium’. Nicolas Dodier, Les hommes et les machines: La conscience collective dans les sociétes technicises, Paris, Editions Métailié, 1995. 9. The MTM (Method–Times–Measurement) method involves assigning a standardised time-value to each gesture, so as to be able to calculate, on the basis of tables of these values, the time to be allocated to an operation. See S. M. Lowry, Harold B. Maynard and G. J. Stegemerten, Time and Motion Study and Formulas for Wage Incentives, New York and London, 1932. 10. A gesture of a similar kind, ‘simply start the screw in its thread’ was the subject of a similar discussion during Nicolas Dodier’s research at a medium-sized business. It is interesting to compare the two cases: at Peugeot, the act has a specific name, épinglage, a definition, a double written record, on paper and computer, and finally a time-value. This shows the difference in degree of formalisation between the technological culture of a big business (which has available to it accumulated decades of work by the work study department) and an ordinary SME. Nicolas Dodier, Les hommes et les machines, op. cit. 11. Musculo-skeletal problems are becoming more and more common, and will be considered in some depth in Chapter 4. 12. Robert Linhart, The Assembly Line, trans. Margaret Crosland, London, 1981. 13. This observation is prompted by a very particular workstation observed in Montage Voiture. To place a screw in the dashboard, the operative had to perform a contortion, supported by the bottom sill of the door, which generally led to substantial marking on the sides of the ribs. This station was occupied by a young man, previously a temporary worker, who refused nothing in his enthusiasm for a permanent post, and who put on a display of remarkable gymnastic ability. The performance was witnessed with a kind of embarrassed fatalism: the ergonomist, the union rep and the supervisor seemed all to have given up, while other workers were careful not to get too closely involved. This kind of physically demanding operation has certainly become uncommon today, but it hasn’t disappeared. 14. Robert Linhart described such practices among Yugoslav workers at Citroën. 15. The 1960s and 1970s were when the assembly line was subjected to the fiercest criticism, both workers and intellectuals denouncing its hellish rhythms. It is paradoxical at the very least to see older workers today regretting the ‘good old days’: is this a nostalgic effect of memory, or an objective deterioration in the conditions of work. Or perhaps a combination of both?

244 Notes 16. Marcel Durand records incidents of workers’ revenge on an insensitive dépanneur in his book Grain de sable sous le capot, Paris, la Bréche, 1990. 17. There is no shortage of material on fear of work or fear of the factory. See in particular, Robert Linhart, The Assembly Line, op. cit., pp. 67–8; and Christophe Dejours, Travail: usure . . . , op. cit. 18. The year after this interview, problems with his back led him to take time off sick on a number of occasions. Since then, he has been dismissed for repeated absenteeism such as to interfere with production. 19. On the subject of virtuosity see Nicolas Dodier, Les hommes . . . , op. cit., and Chapter 3 below. 20. Christophe Dejours, Travail, usure . . . , op. cit. 21. See Part II of Robert Boyer and Jean-Pierre Durand, After Fordism, trans. Sybil Hyacinth Mair, Basingstoke, 1997. 22. The supers belong to a group of 70 or 80 élite workers operating at a wholeplant level, led by an AM2 attached to the body shop, who are assigned their work on a day-to-day basis. This is also true of the multi-functional workers attached to the shop, who are assigned their work at the beginning of the day. These two groups represent the aristocrats among assembly-line workers. 23. The Personnel Department at Sochaux looks unfavourably on the creation of a specific occupational category, and for this reason refuses to remunerate multi-functionality as such. Plant management, likewise, doubts the usefulness of concentrating multi-functionality on a number of persons distinguished from the rest of the team. 24. On the basis of the monthly charts of multi-functionality maintained and posted by the supervisors, which had been preserved by the AM1 of the team studied at MV, it was possible to track the arrival and departure of staff over a period of more than a year: the team’s turnover, as one might say. 25. Michel Callon, ed., La science et ses réseaux: Genèse et circulation des faits scientifiques (Anthropologie des sciences et des techniques), Paris, La Découverte, 1989; Gabriel Dupuy, ‘Réseaux’, Encyclopaedia Universalis, corpus, t. 19, 1996, p. 879. 26. Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedenberg, Actors and Systems: the Politics of Collective Action, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago and London, 1980. 27. A very relative degree of acceptance: among young temporary workers sent by agencies to work on the assembly lines at Sochaux, 10 per cent do not stay for a whole day, 20 per cent do not last longer than a week or two, while at least as many are looking for other work while continuing their temporary placement. At the same time, one young temporary worker out of two wants to be taken on by Peugeot and accepts work on the assembly line. 28. In Le modèle japonais à l’épreuve des faits, Paris, Economica, 1997, JeanPhilippe Neuville speaks of the ‘improbable encounter’ of all the conditions necessary for the production of each car. 29. Koïchi Shimizu, Le toyotisme, Paris, La Découverte, 1999. 30. This briefing follows immediately after the AM2’s briefing from HC management, at which are discussed the previous day’s production problems (the causes of malfunctions or defects) and short-term changes in the production programme.

Notes 245 31. In 1998, in the course of the organisational reform mentioned in the last chapter, it was altered and flattened, with the abolition of the post of AM2 and a recomposition of the role of the AM1. 32. The growth in the number of quality-related audits is to a great extent the result of Japanese influence. But how efficient they are remains debatable: if at Honda these audits produce information that is used by assembly workers themselves and their local management (all being evaluated in terms of improvement in results), here the audits are often treated as formal checks carried out by technical staff, while the lessons drawn from them come down again from on high in the form of further prescriptions as estranged from the workers as were the audits themselves. 33. In 1996 these addresses during halts to the line were not a regular feature. 34. This ‘model’ isn’t always what it is thought to be: at the new Toyota factory at Kyushu we have noted a good number of workers who refused to get involved in the between-shifts briefing. 35. In 1996, the Carrosserie had 23,000 operations sheets.

3 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 1. Monique Selim, ‘Ethnologie et entreprise’, in L’Homme et la Société, No. 109, July–Sept. 1993, pp. 51–66. 2. Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour sur la condition ouvrière: enquêtes aux usines de Peugeot-Sochaux, Paris, Fayard, 1999. 3. The group evoked here, the working group, (collectif de travail) is not the same as the worker group (groupe ouvrier) discussed by Michel Pialoux and Stéphane Beaud in the work that they did with the help of Christian Corouge, a worker in the Carrosserie. Their use of the notion of worker group in different situations related to a group of ‘old-timers’ who shared certain points of reference, more particularly in a militant trade-unionism with its memories of past struggles and a contestatory attitude towards hierarchical superiors and the management of the enterprise. See Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, op. cit. 4. See Michel Pialoux, ‘Alcool et politique dans l’atelier’, Genèses, March 1992, pp. 94–128. 5. Christian Corouge, interview, 27 August 1998. 6. S. Volkoff, A. Laville, A.-F. Molinié and M.-C. Maillard, ‘Effectuer des gestes précis dans le travail: est-ce plus difficile avec l’âge? (Une approche statistique)’, Le Travail humain, Vol. 60, No. 1, March 1997. 7. Armelle Gorgeu, René Mathieu and Michel Pialoux, Organisation du travail et gestion de la main-d’oeuvre dans la filière automobile, Noisy-le-Grand, Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi; Paris, la Documentation française, 1998. 8. In this he wasn’t wrong. On the multi-functionality chart he was entered not as a moniteur but as a polyvalent. Questioned about this anomaly, the team leader explained it as a mistake, but made no effort to correct it. This represented, then, either the beginning of a process of demotion, or a front intended to hide the situation from management.

246 Notes 9. A year later, and it was one of the younger men who had been made a polyvalent. Two years later, in 1998, he was acting as moniteur, joined by another of the three youngsters. With all three of the moniteurs young men, the takeover was sealed by the appointment of a young graduate as team leader! ‘In this team,’ said Roger, almost 50, ‘it’s the old men who do the work while the young men take it easy.’ 10. Nicolas Dodier, Les Hommes . . . , op. cit. 11. In making use of the concept of identity-constitutive social play (jeu social identitaire), we are deliberately taking our distance from that of collective action (action collective), which in certain of its recent uses in the sociology of enterprise in France covers similar ground: in fact we reject the term ‘collective action’ used elsewhere to designate social eventuation within the workplace. In the same way, we avoid the notions of interdependence or interactionism characteristic of certain sociological tendencies interested in similar areas, because they tend to efface the ‘system effects’ of the enterprise and of its capitalist logic which structure the working situation. The type of micro-sociology attempted here cannot abstract from the strategic determinants which orient the actions of the various parties, and which thus explain and give meaning to any instance of identity-constitutive social play. 12. There is no connection here with game theory and the meaning of the concept of the game within it. On the one hand because it refers to rational calculating beings – which is not what humans are, except in very specific and temporary circumstances – caught in constraints of interaction or interdependence which leave no room for creative initiative. On the other, because game theory has nothing to say about the alteration of rules, which it treats as external to the game, while here they are in fact are at the heart of play and are precisely what is essentially at stake in it. 13. There isn’t a recognised term used to categorise these ‘good’ workers: those that exist are used in a somewhat pejorative sense, but they reflect the general recognition of the quality of work by the person concerned: it might be said of someone, for instance that he is a caïd, chef, roi or as (chief, boss, king, or ace). 14. The point is to be able to leave one’s post before the line itself comes to a halt, while departure from the plant by bus or car always takes place at the same time, even though manual staff no longer clock in and out. The assembly-line worker who leaves the line early can go to the changing room and take a rest before catching the bus. Not being able to extend rest time is frustrating, as was explained to us by a worker weakened by severe diabetes, who occupied a workstation he felt was overloaded, and which on top of everything required the use of an electric screwdriver. In telling us how the moniteur sometimes volunteered to finish work instead of him so that he could get away early he revealed his recognition of the validity of the rules of the game for going up the line, and how he lacked the resources to play it. 15. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process under Monopoly Capitalism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979. 16. These tensions contribute to increasing competition between workers. The interests of workers are then constituted as those of an individual as against

Notes 247

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

other individuals, rather than those of an occupational category, a group or a social class. Which raises a question: does such an internal labour-market represent a further rationalisation of the management of labour by engendering greater stability and predictability of behaviour, or is it rather, as Michael Burawoy maintains, an opportunity for the workers, who are offered a wider range of choices with new possibilities of protecting themselves against managerial domination? Jean-Daniel Reynaud, Les règles du jeu: l’action collective et les règles du jeu, Paris, A. Colin, 1993, p. 31. These redistributions are also an opportunity to alter the conditions of play: change in workstation content affects the possibilities of going up the line. Otherwise play would become stereotyped and repetitive, not play any longer because the results would be known in advance. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing . . . , op. cit., p. 175. On this, see Chapter 4. The number of workstations on a line varies in fact between 80 and 100. Times are expressed in minutes and hundredths of minutes, not in seconds. One has also to remember that in addition to these social constraints, the line-balancer has to ensure the compatibility of operations: the order of assembly, the prescriptions of the operations sheets, the impossibility of carrying out certain tasks with dirty hands, the presence of hand protection not allowing certain gestures, etc. This expression of Gilbert Simondon’s comes from his Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Paris, Aubier, 1958 (republished 1989). Christian Corouge and Michel Pialoux, ‘Chronique Peugeot’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Nos 52–53, 54, 57 and 60; Marcel Durand, Grain . . . , op. cit. Such situations are reported in studies of the conflict at Peugeot-Sochaux in 1989: Alain Kopff, Essai d’analyse d’un conflit ouvrier: la grève à l’usine PeugeotSochaux, septembre-octobre 1989, Institut d’Etudes Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, 1991; Pierre Mathiot, ‘La grève Peugeot-Sochaux (septembre-octobre 1989)’, Les cahiers du CEVIPOF, No. 7, March 1992, pp. 7–93. With one exception: the table occupied by a group of older ‘countrymen’ is also frequented by a temporary worker who comes like many of them from the Haute-Saône, but as soon as he finishes his sandwich he joins the other temporary workers at a table nearby to drink his coffee – a sign of the pull of two irreconcilable identifications. During the summer one finds ‘students’ on the assembly-line, students or leavers from technical education doing vacation work, often members of Sochaux employees’ families. Their presence multiplies the relations of interference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that the plant likes to encourage. The hope for permanent employment was to be disappointed this time: with the adjustment to lower levels of production, the temporary workers were dismissed and short-time work introduced. During the 1989 strike, the strikers accepted the temporary workers carrying on working, and even recommended it to them as something ‘completely right’. See Pierre Mathiot, op. cit., and Alain Kopff, op. cit. See Gérard Noiriel, Longwy, immigrés et prolétaires, 1880–1980, Paris, PUF, 1984.

248 Notes 32. 1980–81 and 1985–86. 33. This being the nationality before the division of the FYR. The majority are Serbs. 34. Six months later, the situation had already developed: the young polyvalent had been posted to the demanding workstation of one of the two recent recruits (1995), who had themselves been transferred to the sheet-metal shop, where their skills would have more scope for application and development. 35. Emile Guillaumin, La vie d’un simple, Paris, Stock, 1943 (1st ed., 1904). 36. This was an argument put forward by Ivan Plazanet, then Director of Peugeot’s Mulhouse Production Centre, in an interview in February 1997. 37. Given that there were only one or two women on each of the teams studied, any analysis of their situation could only have been based on insufficient data, and would furthermore have betrayed their anonymity. 38. Marcel Durand, Grain . . . , op. cit.

4 The Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 1. Taïchi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production, Cambridge, Mass., Productivity Press, 1988; James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos, The Machine that Changed the World, op. cit. 2. Sylvie Célérier, ‘Le travail du flux: l’activité de gestion d’un flux de fabrication automobile’, Formation-Emploi, No. 47, September 1994. Jean Louis Loubet, ‘Peugeot meets Ford, Sloan and Toyota’, op. cit. Jean-Louis Loubet and Nicolas Hatzfeld, Les sept vies de l’usine de Poissy, Boulogne, ETAI, 2000. 3. Bertrand Ciavaldini and Jean-Louis Loubet, ‘La diversité dans l’automobile française: hésitations et enjeux. Regards croisés de l’historien et du gestionnaire’, Gérer et Comprendre, December 1995, pp. 4–19. 4. 24, the number of slots, has been developed by experience, giving a loop that is not so tight as to throttle the sequential flow and lead to bottlenecks in the store, nor so loose as not sufficiently to control it. 5. Aimée Moutet, Les logiques de l’entreprise: la rationalisation dans l’industrie française de l’entre-deux-guerres, Paris, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 1997. 6. Two works may be cited as testimony to the past: Christian Corouge and Michel Pialoux, ‘Chronique Peugeot’ in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Nos 52–3 and 54, 1984; Marcel Durand, Grain . . . , op. cit. 7. In order to save money, meetings of the circles are scheduled outside working hours, or at best on days of short-time work, which has its effects on their composition: they are attended by few assembly-line workers. 8. On this point, see François Chateaureynaud, La faute professionnelle: une sociologie des conflits de responsabilité, Paris, Métailié, 1991. 9. Déraillage or derailment means that the car is set aside at the end of the line for defect repair to be carried out. 10. The first ISO certificate, issued by AFAQ (Association Française pour l’Assurance de Qualité) was granted in June 1989. 11. Armel Gorgeu and René Mathieu, Partenaire ou sous-traitant?: qualité et ressources humaines chez les fournisseurs de l’automobile et de l’armement aéronautique,

Notes 249

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

Noisy-le-Grand, Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi, Dossier de recherche No. 31, 1990. J.-L. Lamprecht, ISO 9000, se préparer à la certification, Paris, Afnor Editions, 1994. Frederik Mispelbloom, Au-delà de la qualité: démarches qualité, conditions de travail et politiques du bonheur, Paris, Syros, 1994. Automobiles Peugeot, Centre de production de Sochaux, Bilans sociaux: 1993, 33 cases; 1994, 55 cases; 1995, 65 cases; 1996, 92 cases; 1997, 82 cases. Dr. Moreau, occupational physician at the Carrosserie, Sochaux, L’Usine nouvelle, No. 511, 15 December 1995. To the partially incapacitated workers must be added at least 200 clerical workers whose promotion was connected to similar incapacities: the management assigns certain workers to office work, and to normal office hours, sparing them from shift work because the shifts are almost as much of a stress as assembly work itself. Leaflets issued by these two organisations, and by the CGT in particular, describe the gestures responsible for occupational diseases, recognised and unrecognised. Written by occupational physicians or by health and safety reps, and illustrated with easily understood diagrams, the texts encourage workers to discuss their workstations with supervisory staff or production technicians. Estimate of the number of trade-union members at Peugeot-Sochaux in 1996: CFE-CGC, 800; FO, 150–200; CFDT, 180–200; CFTC, 50–80; CGT, 400–530, according to figures from sources at the 1995 conference, giving a total of 1,500–1,900. The figures come from contradictory sources, each one tending to reduce the figures for opponents or competitors, and to flatter the membership of one’s own organisation. If all these figures are then political, the ranges given were felt to be more or less correct by those we spoke to. Before sending young temporary workers to Peugeot, several agencies organise courses about the Sochaux plant: one of the courses deals with trade unionism, explaining its role (the improvement of working conditions) and denouncing ‘unions that are against everything’. The previous strike over pay was in 1965, which goes to show how unusual an event it was. Pierre Mathiot, ‘Etude socio-politique d’un conflit ouvrier de la fin des années ’80: monographie de la grève Peugeot-Sochaux (septembre–octobre 1989)’, master’s thesis, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 1990. Published as ‘La grève Peugeot-Sochaux (septembre–octobre 1989), Les cahiers du CEVIPOF, No. 7, March 1992, pp. 7–93; Alain Kopff, Essai d’analyse d’un conflit ouvrier: la grève à l’usine Peugeot-Sochaux, septembre–octobre 1989, master’s thesis, Institut d’Etudes Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, 1991. These works have been extensively drawn upon here. In the years 1988–89 the upturn in sales, after the difficulties that Peugeot had suffered in the mid-1980s and the significant reduction in jobs that these had led to, had made Saturday morning work necessary. The additional earning that this had made possible had given the impression of an improvement in pay without resolving the question of basic pay. The difficulties caused by the low level of the latter were compounded by the burden of loans taken out in the years of growth.

250 Notes 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

Automobiles Peugeot, Supervisory Board, 16 October 1989. Pierre Mathiot, ‘La grève Peugeot-Sochaux . . . ’, op. cit. Idem. Gilbert Marion, one of the strikers’ spokespersons, in ‘Peugeot-Sochaux: le sens d’un grève’, Collectif, No. 9, November 1989. Cited in P. Mathiot, Etude socio-politique d’un conflit ouvrier . . . , op. cit. Bernard Cuny, a CFDT employee representative, quoted in ‘Peugeot-Sochaux: le sens d’un grève’, Collectif, No. 9, November 1989. Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour . . . , op. cit. The Communist Party, dominated by trade-union activists from Peugeot, ran several important municipalities in the Pays de Montbéliard before it underwent a profound crisis during the reform process of the 1980s. Pierre Mathiot, op. cit. In 1995, a clause in the code required such medical inspectors to inform the treating physician if there were disagreement over the length of sick-leave required. The CGT attempted to have this provision applied by Peugeot management. Tiénot Grumbach, advocate, interview, May 1998; Bruno Lemerle, CGT activist at Peugeot-Sochaux, interview, November 1998. For the whole of the PSA group, there would be 12,500 early retirements at the age of 57 across the 5 following years, one-third to be replaced by new recruits. In the first year, with the reduction in the working week as well, the group was to take on 5,600 new recruits. It should be remembered that these points correspond to the what is set aside for individual bonuses in the overall pay increase negotiated with the unions. For example, for an overall increase of 3.9 per cent, 2.1 per cent represents the upgrading of the basic scale, while the remaining 1.8 per cent are distributed according to merit. The part represented by these individual bonuses tends to increase year by year, to the detriment of basic salary levels. On these sheets the curves representing progress are inflected asymptotically, workers being unable, in the words of one assembly-line manager, of ‘giving as much service after 45 as they did when young’. The human resources manager for the Carrosserie in 1996 declared that in his opinion the two systems did not differ in their effects on the workers concerned, but did in their costs of administration. The performance bonus can be lost for the following reasons: absence, whether or not approved by management or otherwise justified; sickness, with or without certificate; strike; accident at work or on the way to work; maternity leave or other parental leave; training other than by the company; unpaid leave; sacking. Brochure distributed to employees by the Directorate of Social and Human Resources, Sochaux, entitled: Le Bulletin de paie, informations pratiques. Danièle Linhart, L’appel de la sirène, ou l’accoutumance au travail, Paris, Le Sycomore, 1981. We have already considered the dismissal of a worker for unjustified absence on return from paid holiday, while that week’s work had already been truncated by some days of temporary lay-off.

Notes 251 42. The UNEDIC reimburses the employer for 50 per cent of the payment, and sometimes 80 per cent where an agreement exists (which was not the case with Peugeot in 1997). 43. Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour . . . , op. cit. 44. From 1993 to 1997, Automobiles Peugeot implemented 4 redundancy plans involving 11,226 workers, only very partially compensated by the recruitment of 3,135 young workers: Year

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

Posts lost Covered by FNE Young recruits

2,597 n/k –

4,023 n/k –

– – 2,300

1,760 n/k 835

2,816 1,481 –

5 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 1. See ‘Volvo: innovation brimée’, in J.-P. Durand, La fin du modèle suédois, Paris, Syros, 1994. 2. Nicolas Hatzfeld, Organiser, produire, éprouver . . . , op. cit. 3. J. Chauvin, C. Rabillon and D. Verguet, ‘Honda aujourd’hui’, Carrosserie, Sochaux, 1988, a report on a two-month manual placement. 4. A visit to Japan for managers was organised by the production directorate in July 1980. 5. The fluorescent green of this clothing bore contradictory connotations. During the strike of 1989, the ‘men in green’ of Line 1 in HC1, carefully selected for their new posts, did not take part in the strike, and the colour suggested the ‘yellow’ which in France is the colour of the scab. On the other hand, the high scores gained by the CFDT and the CGT in the shop’s first election of employee representatives led to its workers being dubbed ‘watermelons,’ for their being green on the outside and red on the inside. 6. In this connection, J. Chauvin et al. (op. cit.) emphasise the greater ease of assembly in Honda cars, due in part to the fact that the technicians of the shop’s organisation and methods office spend 70 per cent of their time in the design department. As a result, ‘the speed of the line only seems crazy to the passing visitor. The work is simplified, and the level of fatigue is comparable to that on our own assembly lines, yet with a lower level of peak effort, thanks to the design of the product’. 7. The success of Japanese organisation in the US is largely explained by the high rates of pay in the automobile industry (around $20 an hour): workers accept the constraints in exchange for decent pay. In connection with the status of the worker in the Japanese automobile industry, see R. Boyer and J.-P. Durand, After Fordism, op. cit. 8. Robert Boyer, Elsie Charron, Ulrich Jürgens and Steven Tolliday (eds), Between Imitation and Innovation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. 9. For a detailed account of this definition of the wage relation see J.-P. Durand, P. Stewart and J.-J. Castillo, Teamwork in the Automobile Industry . . . , op. cit.

252 Notes 10. Philippe Bernoux, Dominique Motte and Jean Saglio, Trois ateliers . . . , op. cit. 11. Jean-Pierre Durand and Paul Stewart, ‘Transparence et opacité au travail’, Sociologie du travail, October 1998, pp. 419–37; Gwenaële Rot, ‘La gestion de l’opacité dans l’industrie automobile: les vertus de l’opacité’, Sciences de la société, No. 46, February 1999. 12. See ‘Uddevalla, questions ouvertes par une usine fermée’, Cahiers du Gerpisa, No. 9, Université d’Évry, 1994. 13. On 31.8.97, 53.4 per cent of manual workers at Peugeot-Sochaux were 46 or older. 14. Henry Ford, My Life and Work, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, Garden city, New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922.

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Bibliography 255 Hirschman, Albert Otto, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970. Kochan, T. A., Landsbury, R. D. and MacDuffie J. P., eds, After Lean Production: Evolving Empployment Practices in the World Auto Industry, Ithaca, ILR Press, 1997. Kopff, Alain, Essai d’analyse d’un conflit ouvrier: la grève à l’usine Peugeot-Sochaux, septembre–octobre 1989, Aix-en-Provence, Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 1991. Lamprecht, J.-L., ISO 9 000, se préparer à la certification, Paris, Afnor Editions, 1994. Linhart, Danièle, L’appel de la sirène ou laccoutumance au travail, Paris, Le Sycomore, 1981. Linhart, Danièle, La Modernisation des entreprises, Paris, La Découverte, 1994. Linhart, Robert, The Assembly Line, trans. Margaret Crosland, London, Calder, 1981. Loubet, Jean-Louis, Automobiles Peugeot: une réussite industrielle, 1945–1974, Paris, Economica, 1990. Loubet, Jean-Louis, ‘Peugeot meets Ford, Sloan and Toyota’, in Michel Freyssenet, Andrew Mair, Koichi Shimizu and Giuseppe Volpato, eds, One Best Way? Trajectories and Industrial Models of the World’s Automobile Producers, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. Loubet, Jean-Louis, Citroën, Peugeot, Renault et les autres, 2nd, expanded edition, Boulogne, ETAI, 1999. Loubet, Jean-Louis, and Hatzfeld, Nicolas, Les sept vies de l’usine de Poissy, Boulogne, ETAI, 2000. Lowry, S. M., Maynard, H. B. and Stegemerten. G. J., Time and Motion Study and Formulas for Wage Incentives, (2nd edition) New York and London, McGrawHill, 1932. Mathiot, Pierre, ‘La grève Peugeot-Sochaux (septembre–octobre 1989)’, Les cahiers du CEVIPOF No. 7, March 1992. Milkman, Ruth, Farewell to the Factory: Autoworkers in the Late Twentieth Century, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997. Minazzi, Georges, En marche. 30 ans de lutte à Peugeot-Sochaux, l’itinéraire d’un militant, Paris, Syros, 1978. Mispelblom, Frederik, Au-delà de la qualité: Démarches qualité, conditionsde travail et politiques du bonheur, Paris, Syros, 1995. Moody, K., Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, London, Verso, 1997. Moulinier, Véronique, ‘La passion hiérarchique. Une ethnographie du pouvoir en usine’, Terrain No. 21, october 1993. Moutet, Aimée, Les logiques de l’entreprise: la rationalisation dans l’industrie française de l’entre-deux-guerres, EHESS, Paris, 1997. Naville, P. (1961) L’Automation et le Travail Humain, Editions de CNRS. Naville, P. (1963) Vers l’Automatisme Social? Gallimard, Paris. Neuville, Jean-Philippe, Le modèle japonais à l’épreuve des faits, Paris, Economica, 1997. Noiriel, Gérard, Longwy, immigrés et prolétaires, 1880–1980, Paris, PUF, 1984. Ohno, Taiichi, Toyota Production System: beyond Large-scale Production, Cambridge, Mass., Productivity Press, 1988. Pialoux, Michel, ‘Alcool et politique dans l’atelier’, Genèses, March 1992.

256 Bibliography Pialoux, Michel, ‘Stratégies patronales et résistances ouvrières: La ‘modernisation’ des ateliers de finition aux usines Peugeot de Sochaux’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. 114, September 1996. Reynaud, Jean-Daniel, Les règles du jeu: l’action collective et les règles du jeu, Paris, A. Colin, 1993. Rinehart, J., Huxley, J. and Robertson, D., Just Another Car Factory?: Lean Production and Its Discontents, Ithaca, ILR Press, 1997. Rose, Michael (1979) Servants of Post Industrial Power? Sociologie du Travail in Modern France, London, Macmillan. Rot, Gwenaële, ‘Autocontrôle, traçabilité, responsabilité’, Sociologie du Travail, January–March 1998. Rot, Gwenaële, Les usines Renault à l’épreuve de leur modernisation: Contribution à la sociologie de l’atelier, doctoral thesis in sociology, IEP, Paris. Sainsaulieu, Renaud, L’identité au travail, Paris, 1977. Selim, Monique, ‘Ethnologie et entreprise’, Homme et la Société No. 109, July– September 1993, pp. 51–66. Shimizu, Koichi, Le toyotisme, Paris, La Découverte, 1999. Simondon, Gilbert, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Paris, Aubier, 1989 (first pub. 1958). Stewart, Paul, ed., Beyond Japanese Management: the End of Modern Times?, London, Frank Cass, 1996. Volkoff, S., Laville, A., Molinié, A.-F., and Maillard, M.-C., ‘Effectuer des gestes précis dans le travail: est-ce plus difficile avec l’âge? (Une approche statistique)’, Le travail humain, Vol. 60, No. 1, March 1997. Womack, James P., Jones, Daniel T. and Roos, Daniel, The Machine that Changed the World, New York, Rawson, 1990.

Index Key: b = box; f = figure; n = note; t = table. 206, 208, 209, 225, 242(n15), 244(n24), 245(n8), 246(n9) content of work, 74 ‘extensive management role’, 78 held responsible for defects, 72 list of responsibilities, 75–6b measurement of calibre, 74 mental burden, 76 multi-functional, 206 overburdened, 73–9 personnel management role, 75b recomposition of role (1998), 245(n31) reconciliation of discordant requirements, 55–8 renamed RU1, 232 route to the post of, 73 self-perceptions, 74–9 supervision of production and team leadership functions, 75–6b ‘substantial technical responsibilities’, 78 technical role, 75b twenty-minute addresses, 77, 245(n33) AM2 (contremaître/supervisor), 3, 6b, 14, 20, 29, 43, 46, 55, 56, 65–7, 70, 71, 73, 75b, 76b, 78, 91, 97, 103, 104, 106, 108, 113, 129, 143b, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175, 180, 181, 188–91, 194, 205, 206, 208, 214, 227, 235, 243(n13), 244(n22, n24, n30) abolition of post (1998), 245(n31)

absence/absenteeism, 56, 59, 64, 77, 94, 172, 184, 200, 201, 210–11, 224, 244(n18), 250(n41) accident, 22, 66, 123b, 124b, 250(n38) accommodation, 119–20 flats, 12 hostels, 12, 241(n5) housing, 11–12, 14, 120, 211, 213, 239, 241(n5) affinity networks, 151 age, 13, 14, 15, 39–40, 47, 50, 51, 53, 93, 97, 109, 110, 122–6, 132–4t, 135–9t, 147, 148, 149, 182, 197, 201, 207, 208, 212, 228, 229, 237, 246(n9), 250(n36) force of youngsters/old-timers conjuncture, 126–9, 130 ageing, 48, 155, 182, 193, 205, 213, 237 agencement, 234 agriculture, 11, 13 AGV (automated guided vehicle), 220, 221 alcohol abuse, 92 Algerians, 118, 119, 133t, 140 alienation, 52 Allan River, 10 Alsace, 118, 120 ALTM (Association pour le Logement des Travailleurs Montbéliardais), 12, 241(n5) AM (agent de maîtrise/supervisor), 29 AM1 (chef d’équipe/team-leader ), 20, 21, 25–6, 29, 43, 47, 51, 55–8, 59–60, 63–7, 70–82, 91, 92, 96, 97, 103–6, 109, 111, 112, 115–17, 121, 122, 129, 136t, 142–6, 148–9, 154, 169, 257

258 Index

AM2 (contremaître/supervisor) – continued attitudes, 188 contremaîtres as managers, 79–83 criteria for promotion to, 79 negotiation, 164 ‘re-named RU2’, 232 role, 80 see also supervisory staff AMAT (Association Montbéliardaise d’Aide aux Travailleurs), 12, 241(n5) ambiance (atmosphere), 235 améliorateur (productivity-improver), 63, 82–3, 84, 85, 108, 166, 167, 169, 177, 178 Arabs, 119 armaments, 178 assembly lines, 1–2, 3, 5b, 14, 19–21, 24, 25, 70, 155, 162, 191, 235, 242(n16), 243(n15) ability to ‘read’, 68 changes in production programmes, 79 departure from, 229 halts/breakdowns, 77, 224, 226, 227–8, 245(n33) improvement in results, 245(n32) progress, 160 rebalancings of line defects, 79 speed, 152, 230 sub-assemblies off the line, 213 trends, 141 twenty-four ‘slots’, 163, 248(n4) upstream and downstream, 227 assembly lines: seen from below, 28–86, 242–5 changes in mode of management, 70–86 from the team to the network, 54–70 workstation: place of arrest and time of subjection, 30–54 assembly shop management, 80, 172, 194

assembly shops, 59, 68, 70, 73, 79, 93, 144, 205, 235, 239 day-to-day life, 157 new, 196 relationships with its environment, 157 social relations, 180 see also Carrosserie; Habillage Caisse; Montage Voiture; Mulhouse; Poissy; Peugeot-Sochaux assembly-line management, 67, 172, 175, 181, 185, 186–7, 216, 222, 224, 234, 236 assembly-line managers, 65, 71, 72, 73, 76b, 81, 85, 116, 158, 202, 203, 250(n36) negotiation, 164 assembly-line work, 118, 129, 136t, 181, 239, 240 constantly demanding nature, 174 difficulties, 237 ‘hard to react to variations’, 174 indignity, 113 principles, 70, 244(n27) assembly-line workers (‘blue-collar workers’; ‘manual workers’; ‘operatives’; ‘workers’), 1, 2, 3, 6b, 11, 17, 19, 25, 28, 29, 36, 41–5, 49–52, 56–8, 63, 65, 67–72, 82–6, 91–6, 115–27, 130–42, 162, 164, 168, 169, 176, 189, 220, 224, 226–8, 235–8, 242(n14–15), 244(n22), 245(n32), 248(n7), 251(n5) accountability/responsibility, 38, 72, 171, 172–3, 174, 177 activities outside work, 51, 53, 133t, 239 ageing, 110 ambivalence in life at work, 53 assessed in terms of quality of work, 173 attachment to the company, 213–14

Index 259

attitudes, 132–4t, 135–9t career advancement/ development, 73, 79, 203, 228, 234 career stagnation, 237 career expectations, 146 chained to the line, 234 complaints, 112, 197 connections and cleavages, 196 ‘couldn’t do two things [occupations] at once’, 48 defence of physical integrity, 109–10 defensive strategy, 48–9, 52 defensive system, 183 demands on the limbs, 44 demotion, 97, 245(n8) differences, 205 disillusioned, 190–2, 219, 229, 234, 237 docility ‘not the only attitude possible’, 198 duality, 113 élite, 244(n22) freedom of movement, 43–4 French and immigrant, 118–20 groups formed among, 147 hope of escaping the line, 94 identificatory references, 146, 147 individual, 170 informal arrangements, 71 Japanese, 245(n34) ‘lack of interest in work’, 35 leaving early, 105, 246(n15) ‘lending body and soul’ to work, 113 lower-paid, 193, 195 mental and bodily resources, 50–1 middle-aged, 190 own resources, 46 perception of team-leaders, 74 permanent, 117 personal points, 130–1, 132–4t, 135–8t, 140, 145, 206 personal problems, 132–4t personnel records, 24 physical wear and tear, 158

potential rating, 78 promotion, 58 relations among, 166 relationship to work, 150f ‘residual capacities’, 184 resistance, 91, 227, 235–6 returned to line/fixed workstation, 95, 190 secondment to Japan, 223, 251(n3) self-valorisation outside work, 149 shop-floor, 72 tensions between, 106, 246–7(n17) turnover, 11, 73, 91, 148, 154, 156, 238 youngsters and veterans, 122–6 Yugoslav, 243(n14–15) see also old-timers; temporary workers; thirty-somethings; youngsters assembly-shop management, 186 Association Française pour l’Assurance de Qualité (AFAQ), 248(n10) Assurance Qualité Automobiles Peugeot (AQAP), 76b, 178, 179 ‘auditors’, 177, 178 audits, 107, 179, 210 quality-related, 77, 245(n32) automation, 1, 44–5, 71, 229, 231, 236 see also robots autonomy, 37, 43, 44, 45, 72, 104, 107, 114, 117, 176, 177, 179, 180, 215, 216, 222, 226, 228, 231, 235, 240 see also ‘going up the line’; virtuosity back pain, 47, 109, 137t, 144b, 148, 244(n18) balancing of the line, 79, 80 Bâtiment C, 21 Beaud, Stéphane, 87, 245(n2–3) benefits, 18 bicycling, 122

260 Index

big business, 243(n10) Billancourt, 8 bonus payments, 47, 105, 165–6, 168, 169, 186, 192, 195, 206, 211, 250(n35) attendance, 184 collective, 173 individual, 146, 151, 250(n35) length-of-service, 206 monthly, 210 ‘new-vehicle’, 210 performance, 47, 209, 225, 250(n38) post-summer holiday, 210 quality, 173, 209 suggestions, 210 ‘thirteenth month’, 210 boquettes (small glassed-in cabins), 21, 242(n15) bord de ligne (line-edge), 21 break-times, 19, 114, 193, 204, 231 high degree of dispersion, 115 meal-time groups, 114–15, 247(n28) meal-times/meal-breaks, 121, 122, 204, 231 rest areas, 25–6, 91, 116–17, 230, 234 rest time, 46, 117, 246(n15) breakdown risk, 170 briefings, 73, 77, 225, 244(n30), 245(n33) between shifts (Japan), 245(n34) Brittany, 118 Burawoy, Michael, 105, 107, 246–7(n16–17) Burgundy, 118 bus service, 123b cable shop, 221 cadencement (sequence), 162 cadenceurs, 109 caïd (‘chief’), 104, 246(n13) California, 223 Calvet, Jacques, 193–4, 195, 202 Canard Enchaîné, 194 canevas (skeleton plan), 108, 162 canteens, 21, 230

Cap au sud (shop journal), 25 capital of goodwill, 140 capital: social and cultural, 204–5 career: present a moment in, 129–46 career opportunities and expectations, 4 career progress path, 206, 240, 250(n36) career prospects, 208–9, 234 see also promotion; promotion prospects career trajectories, 186, 233 Bruno, 143–4b and composition of identity, 87–156, 245–8 ideal-typical, 140–1 identity and social play, 101–13 leaving the group, escaping the workstation, 88–100 identity and reference: an interference field, 113–26 old-timers, 148–52 Patrick, 145b, 145–6 strategies and trajectories: the present in perspective, 126–56 carpal tunnel syndrome (wrists), 182, 184 Carrosserie, 62b, 70, 82, 84, 87, 93, 135–9t, 143b, 158, 162–4, 171–3, 176, 181, 183, 192–4, 196, 221, 229, 230, 231, 245(n35), 245(n3), 249(n14), 250(n37) ‘group of assembly shops’, 19 ‘heart of Sochaux’, 18–22 two assembly shops, 127 cars, 21, 46, 63, 178 chassis ‘married’ to body, 20, 62, 145b, 219, 230 ‘costly’, 162–3, 164 good-quality, 71 ‘small’, 162 see also Peugeot models casse-croûte break, 19, 20 Castillo, J.-J., 251(n9) certification, 178–80

Index 261

CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), 18, 71, 81, 110, 112, 147, 151, 153, 185, 187, 187t, 189–90, 191, 192, 193, 196, 200, 201, 202, 212, 215, 251(n5) leaflets, 249(n17) membership, 249(n18) previously CFTC, 189 CFE–CGC (Confédération Française de l’Encadrement–Confédération Générale des Cadres), 14, 187, 188, 212, 233, 249(n18) CFTC (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens), 16, 81, 125b, 153, 187, 187t, 189, 190 membership, 249(n18) CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), 12, 14, 16, 18, 71, 81, 88, 110, 112, 121, 122, 132t, 133t, 142, 143b, 144b, 146, 147, 151, 153, 185–7, 189–93, 197, 199–204, 215, 233, 250(n32), 251(n5) leaflets, 249(n17) membership, 249(n18) chain of command, 72, 79 chaîne (line), 29 champions, 103–4, 136t, 155, 246(n14) change organisational, 45 types, 35 châssis, le, 19 Chauvin, J., 228, 251(n3, n6), 253 chef de groupe, 85, 232 post abolished and re-named RU2, 232 chef de groupe/group leader (assembly-line manager), 82 chef-de-ligne (assembly-line manager), 112 children, 125b, 143b, 189, 198, 210, 212 Christians, 189, 203 Chrysler Europe: taken over by Peugeot-Citroën (1978), 9

Citroën, 211, 243(n14–15) merger with Peugeot (1974), 9 clerical workers, 249(n16) clocking-in (abolished 1981), 55, 242(n14) co-gestion (joint management), 190 co-operation, 235 coffee machine, 115–16 Cold War, 16 collective action (action collective), 192, 246(n12) collective responsibility, 232 commandement, 24 communication, 77, 168 channels, 150 efficiency, 72 communists, 189, 250(n30) community of work, 88 company agreements (1973), 242(n13) company unionism: failure to establish, 188 competition, 112 complementary operations (CO), 37, 62b components, 20, 21, 41–2, 61, 161, 219, 236 compromise, 215, 217 computers, 24, 30, 160, 161, 166, 234, 243(n10) statistical control, 80 concentration (mental), 44 conditions of work, 110, 188, 191, 243(n15) reasons workers accept, 105–6, 246(n16) Confédération des Syndicats Libres (CSL), 18 connections, 61, 63, 69 constrained involvement (concept), 52 constraints, 30, 31, 34, 44, 45, 49, 52, 61, 69, 80, 112, 160, 162, 190, 215, 216, 228, 235 contradictory, 110 social, 110, 247(n24) time and quality, 111 contracts (short term), 212

262 Index

contremaître, see AM2 contrôleuses (quality-controllers), 171, 173, 175, 177, 209 Corouge, C., 87, 245(n3, n5), 248(n6) corporate culture, 83 cost of living, 16 cost objectives, 58 cost-reduction, 165, 169, 178, 222, 231 countrymen, 247(n28) countryside, 120 coupelle, 62 Cour de Cassation, 199, 202 Court of Appeal, 201, 202 CRL (Comité Regional du Logement), 12, 241(n5) CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité ), 17, 242(n10) CSL (Confédération de Syndicats Libres), 187, 187t, 198 customer (final), 158 cycle times, 44, 107, 110, 111, 180, 218, 219, 221–2, 231, 247(n23) cycles (production), 49, 51, 69, 160, 163 damages, 200 dealers, 161 debt, 213 defect-management, 234 defect-notification: three essential functions, 172–3 defect-repair, 137t, 171, 172, 248(n9) defect-repairers, 95, 135t, 140, 170, 176, 224 defect-retrieval forms, 172 defects, 47, 75b, 170, 172, 174, 209, 244(n30) avoided, 166 downstream, 174 formal reporting procedure, 175 ‘missed’, 171 Dejours, Christophe, 34, 242(n5) demand, 160 ‘pulled from downstream, not pushed from upstream’, 159

demography, 156, 237 demonstrations, 194, 195 demotion, 122, 131, 140, 141, 142, 143b, 208, 212 demotion to fixed workstation, 196–7 density, 40–6 dépannage, 19, 45 dépanneur, 45–6, 95, 197, 244(n16) departures, 141 ‘depth of field’, 94 derailment (déraillage), 177, 248(n9) design, 41, 63, 251(n6) détrompeurs (physical guides that prevent certain kinds of inversion of assembly), 172 dexterity, 42, 50, 205, 215, 220 die-stamping, 9, 10, 190 ‘stamping-shop’, 201 difficulty, 40–6 dignity/indignity, 113, 125b, 126 Directorate of Social and Human Resources, 182, 208 discipline, 82, 92, 180 discontent, 156, 158 dismissal, 82, 152, 184, 200, 203, 211, 244(n18), 250(n38), 250(n41) risked, 191 division of labour, 242(n4) doctors, 112, 152, 181 company, 199–200 employees’ own, 199–201 see also GPs; occupational physicians documentation, 64 Dodier, N., 243(n10) double workstation, 42 Doubs valley, 120 downstream checks, 171, 173 DRSH, 135–9t Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Simondon, 1958/1989), 247(n25) Durand, J.-P., 76b, 251(n9)

Index 263

Durand, Marcel, 244(n16), 248(n6) dynamic productive compromises, 4–5 EAQF system, 179 early retirement, 10, 14, 93, 119, 127, 134t, 152, 204, 213, 237, 250(n34) ease of work, 221, 225 economic situation, 225 crisis, 152 plentiful employment, 237 recession, 9 Thirty Glorious Years, 118, 206 EDF (électricité de France), 195 education, 210, 216 working-class children, 198 efficiency, 26, 36, 37, 43, 65, 72, 74, 81, 88, 90, 171, 238, 240 effort, 40–6 elections, 151, 153, 187t, 189, 192, 251(n5) employee-representatives (délégués du personnel), 147, 187t, 188, 189, 191, 197–8, 251(n5) employee classification, 130 employee potential, 130, 131, 132–4t, 135–9t, 140 employees, 61 educational qualifications, 132–4t, 135–9t, 153 employer hegemony, 211–15 employers, 2, 241(n5) employment, 5, 11, 13–14, 170 numbers, 8, 241(n2 to ch1) temporary, 9, 229, 241(n2 to ch1) employment legislation, 181 employment policy (Peugeot): paternalism, 11–12 employment trends, 10 energy, 48 engineering, 7, 9, 10, 101, 161, 166, 236, 240 engineers, 10, 36, 42, 45, 182 engines, 219–20 epicondylitis, 182

épinglage, 243(n10) équilibreur (line-balancer), 34–6, 39, 76b, 83–5, 103–6, 108–12, 148, 163, 164, 180, 183, 185, 186, 224, 243(n6), 247(n24) line-balancer’s listing, 185 line-balancing, 68, 239 see also rebalancing the line ergonomics, 17, 26, 40–1, 43, 44, 182, 228, 230, 231, 237, 243(n13) Est Républicain (newspaper), 200–1 ethnicity, 197 Europe, 20, 213, 214 European integration, 179 European Union, 180 Common Market, 8 facilitators (formerly ‘group leaders’), 222 factory: ‘productive and porous space for construction of identity’, 121–2 family, 12, 53, 142, 194, 197, 201, 204, 205, 211, 241–2(n9) family visits, 212 fatigue, 44, 47, 49, 53, 98, 110, 181, 184, 197, 219, 229, 240, 251(n6) favouritism, 46, 115 fear, 47, 244(n17) Finition (finishing shop), 19, 24, 43, 103, 196, 226 first-aid, 181 first-level unit manager, see RU1 ‘five Ss’ (Japanese), 232 fixed capital, 241(n8) fixed relations, 23, 242(n16) flood (1990), 213–14 Flow Department, 19 FNE (Fonds National pour l’Emploi), 213, 251(n44) FO (Force Ouvrière), 14, 16, 81, 112, 187, 187t, 188, 193, 195, 198, 212, 233 membership, 249(n18)

264 Index

Folz, Jean-Martin, 202, 211 Fonds National pour l’Emploi (FNE), 10 Ford, Henry, 239 Fordism, 2, 160, 206, 221 foremen, 46, 55, 57, 133t, 135t, 136t, 137t, 138t, 140, 142, 151, 174, 176, 178, 179, 180, 183, 184, 185, 190, 197, 208, 226, 228 assembly-worker relations, 205 replaced by ‘facilitators’, 222 fork-lift truck drivers, 106, 116, 143b foundry, 192, 194 fragmentation, 63–4, 156, 239 France, 11, 16, 45, 118, 138t, 178, 199, 212, 213, 214, 228, 229, 237, 246(n12), 251(n5) government, 12, 18 unionisation rates, 188 Franche-Comté, 7, 118 free time (break time), 42, 81, 104 freedom, 44 French, 117, 140 friends, 205 game theory, 246(n13) game-playing, 50 Garniture assembly shop, 19, 222–3 General Motors, 223 general practitioners (GPs), 183, 199–200 Gestion par Interaction (GPI), management by interaction, 24, 75b gesture, 32–4, 36–8, 41, 43–5, 47–50, 53, 61, 65, 83, 88, 93, 100, 111, 165, 167, 176–8, 228, 243(n9), 247(n24) awkward, 43 ‘efficient and graceful’, 38 forbidden (yellow sheets), 185, 249(n17) repetition, 48 gift and counter-gift (Mauss), 89 ‘going up the line’, 98, 100, 102–5, 106, 114, 136t, 137t, 150, 151, 155, 246(n15)

good conduct, 81 graduates, 238 Grain de sable sous le capot (Durand, 1990), 244(n16) group leaders, 73, 83 replaced by ‘facilitators’, 222 disappeared, 222 group pressure, 47 Groupe Avant, 19, 160 groups, 67 growth, 249(n22) Guillaumin, Èmile, 141, 248(n36) Habillage Caisse (HC, 1989–), 10, 19, 38, 39, 40, 68, 69, 73, 77–9, 92, 98, 102, 116, 117, 127, 155, 160, 162–6, 173, 183, 196, 197, 209, 213, 231, 232, 234, 235 HC0, 90, 137t, 140, 155, 191, 226 HC1 assembly line, 23, 36, 45, 47, 48, 59, 96, 117, 122, 140, 149, 152, 160, 164, 166 HC1 Charter, 225–6 HC2 assembly line, 6b, 23, 41, 47, 49, 88, 90, 136t, 148, 151, 154, 155, 160, 207, 226 aborted Japanisation (1989–), 223–30 age distribution of workers (January 1996), 128f first electoral college (1996), 187t, 188 ‘long metallic shed’, 22 management, 244(n30) new building (2000–), 218, 219 ‘not like it used to be’, 22–7 training school, 227 see also Montage Voiture Habillage Moteurs, 160, 219–20 hancho (Japanese group leader), 70, 71–2 Haute-Saône, 247(n28) hazards of production, 58, 61–4, 68 health and safety, 17, 39, 75b, 110, 166, 191, 197, 249(n17)

Index 265

hierarchy, 4, 24, 29, 54, 55, 56, 58, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 90, 92, 115–16, 131, 145, 158, 163, 167, 170, 188, 202, 205, 218, 224, 232 blue-collar, 99, 103 holiday, 17, 123b, 184, 192, 204, 213, 226 last days before, 175 paid, 16, 250(n41) Honda, 223, 224, 245(n32), 251(n6) horizons, 61, 62b, 67–70 housing, see accommodation human resources, 56, 130, 223, 232, 250(n37) identity, 113–26, 130, 142, 218 defence of, 215 factory, ‘productive and porous space for construction of identity’, 121–2 multiple identificatory points of reference, 117–20 relations of interference, 247(n29) rest and elective affinities, 114–17 work and rest: lending and recovering, 113–14 youngsters and veterans: unprecedented polarisation, 122–6 see also identity-constitutive social play identity-constitutive social play ( jeu social identitaire), 101–13, 235, 246(n12) going up the line, 98, 100, 102–5, 106, 246(n15) functionality, 105–7 uncertainties of rebalancing the line, 107–13 immigrants, 61, 115, 118, 133t, 134t, 140, 150, 152, 189, 192, 195, 211, 249(n19) housing, 12, 241(n5) workers, 11, 14 individual progress interviews, 77–9, 82, 137t, 173, 207, 208 individualisation, 28

individualism, 88, 112, 126 individuality: worker robbed of, 97–8 individuals, 50, 66, 246–7(n17) inequalities, 204 industrial action, 15–18 industrial peace, 81 industrial reform, 30 industrial relations, 16, 95, 142 industrial unrest, 11 informal adjustment just-in-time production, 159–65 labyrinthine complexities, 157–217, 248–51 medical restrictions on work, 180–6 quality: normativity and autonomy, 169–80 ‘skeleton-plan’, 159–65 suggestion system, 165–9 trade-unionism and industrial militancy, 186–204 worker involvement and social integration, 204–17 informal affinity networks, 21 informal arrangement: reduction in space left to, 179 informal rules, 110 information, 90, 161, 169, 224 information technology, 165, 236 injury, 47 repetitive strain injury, 182, 232 injustice, 126, 168 intellectual capacity, 34 intellectual regression, 51–3 intensity, 40, 58 intervenant qualité (quality technician), 75b, 83, 84–5, 108 interventions: fragmented technical, 83–6 interviews, 5–6b, 50, 76b, 132–4t, 135–9t, 216, 244(n18) irregular practices (pratiques anormales), 202 Individual Holiday Savings Plan, see PIEC

266 Index

ISO 9000, 178–9, 248(n10) Italians, 118, 119, 189 Japan, 25, 70, 72, 213, 223, 225, 244(n28), 251(n3–4) Japanese car factory, 30 Japanese companies, 30 Japanese influence, 245(n32) Japanese model, 77, 165, 220, 245(n34) Japanisation, 3 aborted, 223–30 jeu social identitaire, see identity-constitutive social play job-losses, see redundancies jokes, 53–4 Jura mountains, 120 just-in-time production/supply, 38, 158, 159–65, 223, 230 production and sales: two distinct logics, 160–2 skeleton-plan as defence for the shop, 162–5 Kanban system, 160 Kopff, Alain, (192), 249(n21) kuka zones, 23 kumicho (Japanese team-leader), 72 Kyushu (Japan), 23, 245(n34) labour, 167 absenteeism, 11 informal, 86 organisation, 157 physical, 147 rationalisation, 24, 27, 107 see also assembly-line workers labour management: methods, 88 labour transformation, 101 law, 190, 203, 212–13 drawn into industrial conflict, 198–204 lay-offs: temporary, 211, 214, 250(n41), 251(n42) layout, 41, 45 leadership role, 71 lean production, 23–4, 220, 231, 236

learning, 33 leave, temporary, 55 legitimation, 82 life-long employment, 212, 228–9, 234 ligne (line), 29 line of command, 70, 151 line management, see assembly-line management line-balancer, see équilibreur Linhart, R., 40, 243(n12, n14) loans, 249(n22) locker-room, 114 logic, 32, 50 technical and social, 61 Lorraine, 118 Lutte Ouvrière, 189 lycée technique (technical high school), 12 machinery/machines, 28, 70 macro-social conflict, 158 maintenance workshops, 23 management, 6b, 13, 14, 16, 26, 42, 45, 56, 65, 94, 96, 98, 105, 106, 107, 108, 125b, 129, 137t, 143b, 147, 156, 158–9, 173, 179, 180, 181, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205, 210, 225, 226, 240, 242(n16), 245(n3, n8), 247(n17), 249(n16), 250(n32) assembly shop, 66 board-level, 203, 220, 235 changes in mode of, 70–86 contremaîtres as managers, 79–83 factory/plant, 5b, 29 fragmented technical interventions, 83–6 front-line, 70, 112 hierarchy flattened, 232 local, 245(n32) middle, 3, 187 moniteurs, 70–3 overburdened team leaders, 73–9 participatory, 168

Index 267

production targets, 110 senior, 158 Sochaux, 3 style, 186, 233 top down, 223 ‘management’ (use of English word), 24 managerial discourse, 88 managerial domination, 247(n17) managerial skills, 79 managers, 2, 165, 167, 169, 251(n4) manique (strap), 38–9 manual workers, see assembly-line workers manufacture American, Japanese, Italian, British, 45 system of, 68 market, 161, 225, 228 role of quality discourse, 180 saturation and volatility, 160 market demand, 108, 109 marriage, 143b mass production, 8 materials, 167, 168 Mathiot, Pierre, (192), 249(n21) Mauss, M., 89 meal-times, see break-times Mécanique Nord, 19 mechanics, 20 media, 123b medical counter-indications, 109 medical problems, 39, 243(n11) medical profession: ethical code, 200, 250(n32) medical restrictions on work, 110, 112, 136t, 138t, 148, 155, 158, 237 epidemiological analysis, 181 issues at stake, 183–6 occupational diseases of automobile assembly, 181–3 oscillation between coercion and consensus, 186 prevention is better than cure, 181 when the marginal becomes central, 180–6

medicine: drawn into industrial conflict, 198–204 medium-sized businesses, 243(n10) memory, 32 mental effort/fatigue, 48, 53 Mercedes, 227, 242(n16) Métallo, Le (CGT newspaper), 125b metallurgy, 11 methods of production, 41 Metz, 9 militancy, 90, 112, 127, 132t, 136t, 142, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 249(n19), 250(n30) industrial, 70, 81, 186–204 mission and tasks, 78 mistakes, risk of, 35 mobile racks (servantes/ ‘waitresses’), 44–5, 107, 231 see also overhead conveyor mobility, 31, 60, 67, 93, 141, 148, 152, 154, 205, 232, 237, 238 modernisation, 10 modernity, 23 modules, 56, 64, 66, 67, 70, 96, 107, 145, 166, 171, 174, 209 moniteur, 31, 41, 57–60, 64–8, 70–3, 74–8, 85, 88, 91–2, 94–9, 104–5, 108, 114–16, 119, 121–2, 125b, 129, 131–3, 135–7t, 139t, 140, 142, 143b, 145b, 145, 146, 149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 163–6, 168, 171–8, 180, 190, 193, 206, 208, 216, 224, 225, 226, 237, 245(n8), 246(n9, n15) monitoring, 34, 71, 80 monotony/boredom, 51, 94, 184, 190, 221, 240 see also repetition montabilité (ease with which components are fitted), 41 Montage Voiture (MV), 5b, 6b, 19, 21–2, 26, 32, 35, 38, 44, 58, 64, 66, 68, 69, 73, 77, 90, 99–100, 114, 117, 127, 140, 142, 148, 163, 166, 173, 209,235, 242(n16), 243(n13), 244(n24)

268 Index

MV1, 231 MV2, 231, 234 accommodated within Habillage Caisse (2000–), 218 age distribution of workers (January 1996), 128f frugal modernisation, 230–3 new (2000–), 218, 219, 230–3 transformation decided (1996), 230 see also Habillage Caisse Montbéliard, 7, 194 local politics, 198–9 Montbéliard: Criminal Court, 202 Montbéliard: District Urbain du Pays de Montbéliard, 120, 198 Montbéliard: employment tribunal, 199, 200, 201 Montbéliard: Inspector of Employment, 202 Moreau, Dr, 249(n154) Moroccans, 119, 133t, 134t, 150 Morocco, 11, 211 mortgages, 143b Morvillars, 25, 225–6, 228 motion: subjectivity tiring, 111 motivation, 69, 70, 132–9t, 145, 149–52, 166, 168, 205, 207, 209, 211, 226, 236 motorway A36, 10 movement, 37, 45 MTM (Method–Times– Measurement) method, 38, 84, 165, 243(n9) Mulhouse, 8, 9, 13, 18, 192, 195, 242(n16), 248(n37) multi-functionality, see polyvalence multi-functionality chart (tableau de polyvalence), 65, 96, 99, 245(n8) municipal councils, 198, 239 musculo-skeletal problems, 109, 243(n11) Muslims, 119, 175 MV, see Montage Voiture

negotiation, 159, 195, 235 and interpretation, 215–17 production and sales departments, 161 networks, 74, 86, 120, 121, 130, 236, 239 hazards of production, 61–4 horizons of variable scope, 67–70 see also teams Neuville, Philippe, 244(n28) Nissan, 223 Normal Progress Zone (Zone d’évolution Normale), 206 North Africans, 12, 115, 117, 119, 133t, 134t, 189 North America, 105 nostalgia, 41, 243(n15) NUMMI Group, 223 nurses, 180, 181 occupational classification, 131 occupational disease, 181–3, 200, 249(n17) cost to Peugeot, 182 occupational instability, 61 occupational medicine, 41, 54, 148, 150, 181 occupational physicians, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 249(n15, n17) see also doctors; GPs office hours, 82, 183, 249(n16) Office National de l’Immigration, 11 office work, 184, 213 old-timers (‘old hands’, ‘older workers’, ‘veterans’), 41–2, 78, 89–90, 94, 95–6, 110, 115, 117, 135t, 141, 144, 145, 156, 180, 191, 192, 210–11, 213, 236, 237, 238, 243(n15), 245(n3), 246(n9), 248(n37) ageing, 152 attitudes towards work, 149–52 career trajectory, 149 conciliators, 150f, 150–1 disillusioned, 147–8, 148–52 embittered, 150f, 151

Index 269

faithful, 149–50, 150f frames of reference, 126 militants, 150f, 151 Patrick, 145b, 145–6 senators, 149, 150f shipwrecked, 150f, 152 sub-groups, 149 and youngsters: polarisation, 122–6 opacity, 173–6 operations sheet, 39, 40, 44, 83, 107, 166, 167, 176, 177, 178, 185, 210, 227, 247(n24) operatives, see assembly-line workers opportunities, 144, 166 orders: monthly cycle, 161 Ordre des Médecins, 199 organisation and methods (O&M), 7, 8, 10, 32, 36, 39, 41, 43, 44, 54, 62b, 63, 83–4, 159, 162, 163, 166, 220, 227, 251(n6) organisation and methods manager (responsable du bureau des méthodes de l’atelier), 83 organisation of work, 95, 216, 218, 233, 234, 237, 239 ostracism, 126 overhead conveyor, 22–3, 70, 219–20, 230, 231, 242(n16) see also mobile racks overtime, 14, 108, 192, 214–15, 226, 237, 249(n22) annualisation, 204 ‘P’ (Peugeot team-leader), 73, 74 P1, 242(n13) P1F (skilled manufacturing worker), 242(n13) pain, 47, 140, 148 paint shop, 162 parental leave, 250(n38) PARI (Progrés par l’Amélioration et la Réalisation des Idées/Progress through (Productivity) Improvement and the

Realisation of Ideas, 1996–), 167–9, 232 Paris, 119, 195 Paris employment tribunal, 201, 202 partially-incapacitated worker (PIW), 182, 249(n16) participant observation, 3, 6b, 32, 62b, 113, 114, 124b, 132–4t, 135–9t, 216, 235 parts, 43, 44 paternalism, 88, 205 pay, 18, 95, 186, 188, 191, 201, 204, 206, 207, 213, 216, 229, 233–4, 249(n22), 250(n35) basic, 211, 249(n22), 250(n35) days laid-off, 211, 251(n42) earnings, 241(n7) extra, 24 hourly rate, 8 individualisation, 131 monthly (1973–), 199 salary, 202 wages, 11, 16, 125b, 126, 240, 242(n13) pay demands: strikes, 192–8, 249(n20) Pays de Montbéliard, 7, 13, 250(n30) peace of mind, 38, 51 penalty points, 109, 170–1, 180, 209 performance: improved, 223 performance bonus (prime d’objectifs), 47, 209, 225 ‘can be lost’, 250(n38) peri-articular occupational disease/instance (1993–7), 182, 249(n14) peripheral shops: alternative forms of organisation, 219–23 permanent physical incapacity (PPI), 182 personal points, 206–8, 211, 250(n35) misunderstandings, 207 potential score, 208, 209 personality, 52, 142, 144

270 Index

personnel department, 58, 82, 95 130, 166, 208, 244(n23) personnel management, 76b Peugeot (PSA/PSA Group), 7–8, 45, 56, 71, 72, 117, 118, 123b, 124b, 126, 128–9, 135–9t, 150, 152, 160, 165, 179, 190, 195, 201, 202, 211, 243(n10), 244(n27), 250(n34) assembly plants, 8 career and promotion opportunities, 13 company history, 7–10 internal communications, 17, 83 market share (1979–82), 9 occupational medical service, 181 output, 10 plants, 175 profits, 9, 192 promotion, 73 reputation, 200 restructuring plans, 189 security of employment, 200 social and welfare activities, 11–12 sponsorship of new recruits by existing employees, 13 subsidiaries, 11 wage bill, 131 Peugeot: Mulhouse Production Centre, 248(n37) Peugeot Apprenticeship school (1930–70), 11, 12, 189, 203, 241(n4) Peugeot board, 181, 186 Peugeot models, 69, 155, 157, 159, 162, 216 104 (1975–), 8 203 (1948–), 8 204 (1965–), 8 205, 10 305, 92 306, 10, 102, 212 403 (1954–), 8 404 (1960–), 8 405 (1987–), 10, 42, 49, 129, 152, 164

406 (1995–), 41, 42, 58, 66, 97, 117, 152, 210, 212, 222 604 (1975–), 8 605, 123b, 124b, 127, 129, 152, 212, 214, 220, 221, 222, 227 changes of, 182 concessionary sale to employees, 13 hot-climate models, 108 new, 47, 79, 166, 183 right-hand drive, 108, 164 top of the range, 8, 221, 227 see also cars Peugeot-Sochaux, 5b, 3, 28, 70, 85, 87, 93, 105, 179, 181, 186, 192, 194, 195, 199, 201, 203, 219, 238, 247(n27), 249(n19), 250(n30) ‘biggest factory in France’ (1972–), 7, 8 Carrosserie (heart of Sochaux), 18–22 change, 218, 235 company doctors, 199 diversified recruitment and social integration, 11–14 flood of 1990, 213–14 ‘in HC, it’s not like it used to be’, 22–7 heart of the region, 11–18 industrial action and plant agreements, 15–18 new situation (1980s), 14–15 number of employees, 193 organisational reform (1998), 245(n31) Peugeot’s manufacturing backbone, 7–10 plant-region relations, 198 ‘relative decline since 1980’, 11 solid inheritance and incessant change, 7–27, 241–2 trade unions, 188, 249(n18) unionisation rates, 188 see also Sochaux Peugeot-Sochaux museum, 212 Aventure Peugeot museum, 6b Peugeot-Talbot, 9

Index 271

Peugeotland, 7 pharmaceuticals, 223 physical capacity/incapacity, 47, 112, 148, 151, 200 physical effort, 43, 93 Pialoux, Michel, 87, 245(n2–3), 248(n6) PIEC (Plan Individuel d’Èpargne Congé), 210 piece work, 8, 105 ‘pit’, 143–4b ‘has disappeared’, 230 Plan Individuel d’Èpargne Congés (Individual Holidays Savings Plan), 17 planning, 161 planning functions, 76 plant agreements, 15–18 plant management, 55, 56, 90, 116, 126, 231, 244(n23) ‘play’: polysemy of word, 101 Plazanet, Ivan, 248(n37) Poissy, 9–10, 175, 211, 242(n16) Poles, 118 political sympathies, 82 politics, 239 drawn into industrial conflict, 198–204 local, 198 polycellular organisation, 224 polyvalence (multi-functionality), 51, 56–7, 66–7, 85, 148, 151, 225, 232, 244(n23–4) ‘many called, few chosen’, 92–7 network, 64–5 ‘promise’ or ‘source of disappointment’, 95 polyvalent (multi-functional worker), 31, 49, 55, 57–60, 63, 75b, 79, 89–91, 96–9, 123b, 124b, 125b, 129, 131–6, 139t, 140, 143b, 152, 154, 156, 164, 166, 177, 190, 191, 193, 196, 206, 224, 237, 244(n22), 245(n8), 246(n9), 248(n35) returned to fixed workstations, 208, 212

polyvalent d’atelier, 57, 95, 98 polyvalent de ligne, 143b ponce (individualised stamp), 171 Portugal, 11, 211 Portuguese, 117, 119, 137t, 189 poste, 30, 31 pot, 91 poverty, 125b power, 215, 239 preparation, 83, 89 prescription, 37, 243(n8) press shop, 162 Prévention Amélioration Surveillance, 71 price, 160 prime d’objectifs (performance bonus), 47, 209, 225, 250(n38) prime de rentrée (post-summer holiday bonus), 210 process audits, 177 production, 4, 6b, 9, 21, 29, 43, 55, 61, 82, 85, 87, 100, 156, 158, 170, 173, 193, 195, 198, 222, 226, 227, 240, 244(n18) day-to-day, 161 downstream and upstream, 68 downturn, 197 flexibility, 157 high quality, 76 ‘improbable encounter’, 244(n28) new techniques, 10 organisation of, 83–4, 245(n35) quality and volume, 3 roles, tasks, powers, 83 ‘skeleton plan’, 108, 162 ‘three major logics’, 157–8 trends, 10 production control department (service du flux), 159, 161, 162, 163 negotiation, 164 production control managers, 163–4 Production Department, 161 production directorate, 251(n4) production problems, 244(n30)

272 Index

production process, 180 ‘lungs’, 162 production process sheets ( gammes de montage), 108 production staff, 159 relations with quality control staff, 175 production targets, 228 production technicians, 249(n17) production-flow department: compromise with production workers, 163 productive activity, 28 productive compromise, 158 productivity, 9, 15, 16, 18, 26, 35, 43, 56, 58, 63–4, 68, 80, 83, 90, 98, 107, 108, 128, 129, 135t, 149, 155, 158, 162, 165, 167, 168, 177–8, 185, 186, 189, 190, 193, 220, 221, 223, 226, 229 productivity-improver, see améliorateur professionals, 241(n5) profitability, 157, 159 profits, 18, 168 programme controllers ( pilotes programme), 162, 163–4 promotion, 91, 93, 123b, 125, 126, 131, 132t, 135t, 144, 148, 149, 154, 156, 190, 197, 212, 226, 228, 237, 238, 249(n16) promotion prospects, 89, 95–6, 97, 140 see also career prospects promotion system, 141–2 PSA Group, see Peugeot public funds, 237 Purchasing department, 166 quality, 46, 70, 105, 111, 149, 150, 151, 158, 186, 197, 208, 220, 221, 223, 226, 232, 239 certification, 178–80 improvements, 178 monitoring, 145 normativity and autonomy, 169–80

policy, 176, 209–10 problems, 79, 83 self-inspection, 170–3 suggestions, 166 training school, 176–8 transparency and opacity, 173–6 quality assurance policy, 217 quality circles, 57, 69, 76b, 80, 119, 165, 168, 173, 248(n7) quality-control, 50, 67, 68, 72, 89, 97, 159, 170, 174, 176, 222, 236, 248(n6) quality-control department, 157, 171 Quality-Control Service (Qualité Sochaux), 173 quality-control staff, 172, 174 relations with production staff, 175 quality-control technician (intervenant qualité), 75b, 83, 84–5, 108 quality-controllers, 170, 236 see also contrôleuses Rabillon, C., 228, 251(n3, n6), 253 racism, 119, 138t radio-cassette players, 91 rationalisation, 165, 179 rattrapage (defect retrieval), 171 Ravi chain (food-shops), 12, 14 re-adjustment, 235 rebalancing the line, 103, 151, 155, 156, 184, 185, 197, 217, 224, 225, 227 uncertainties, 107–13 see also équilibreur Recor system, 160 record-sheets, 172 recruitment, 5, 80, 127, 128, 150f, 156, 215, 225, 238 diversified, 11–14 foreign workers, 118–19 recruits, 125b new, 153, 211, 250(n34), 251(n44) recent, 132t, 206, 248(n35) young, 81–2, 89, 135t, 192, 205, 239

Index 273

redundancy, 9–10, 189, 194, 197, 249(n22), 251(n44) reference identity and (‘an interference field’), 113–26 identificatory, 120 reform, 5b reformism, 190 Renault, 5b, 16, 201, 203, 232, 242(n13) Renfort de plancher arrière (strengthening of rear floor), 32, 33t, 37, 61, 63 reorganisation, 233, 240 repatriation, 118 repetition/repetitiveness, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50–1, 52, 94, 172, 174, 218, 229, 231 see also monotony repetitive strain injury, 182, 232 research: doctoral, 6b research and methods, 3, 5b–6b resentment, 154, 164 respect, 47 Responsable d’Unité de premier échelon (RU1): formerly AM1, 232 rest, 61, 113–14 elective affinities, 114–17 rest time, see break-times restructuring, 197 retirement, 119, 122, 127, 129, 182, 213, 238, 252(n13) retraining, 173 revenge, 46, 244(n16) Reynaud, Jean-Daniel, 106, 247(n18) Rhône–Rhine Canal, 10 risk: prevented, 166 robotics, 230 robotisation, 218, 227, 236 robots, 23, 45, 223 robustness, 35 RPR (Rassemblement pour la République), 198 RU2, 232 rules, 2 unwritten, 113 rules of the game, 101, 106, 107, 156, 216–17, 226, 246(n13)

sabotage, 147 safety defects, 170–1 safety standards, 23 sales, 158, 249(n22) Sales Department, 160, 161 sales staff/people, 159, 160, 164 sanctions, 210–11 sanitary facilities, 21 satellite (mechanised warehouse), 162 Saturday work, 226 screwdrivers, 38, 75b, 102, 106, 107, 246(n15) screws, 38, 49, 53, 61, 62–3, 243(n10) self-affirmation, 31, 46 self-inspection, 175, 179, 180, 218 defect-repair, explanation, or accountability?, 170–3 three levels, 170–2 self-organisation, 105, 224 senior management, 185, 186, 188, 200, 202 senior supervisors, 197 seniority, 195, 202, 234, 238 sequencing, 172, 186 service economy, 2 service-providers (external), 14 sex, 147, 248(n38) share-croppers (métayers), 141 sheet-metal, 9, 10, 236, 248(n35) shift system, 15, 120, 237, 241–2(n8–9) double-shift system, 48, 149 shift work, 1, 82, 241(n1 to Introduction), 250(n38) ‘almost as much of a stress as assembly work itself’, 249(n16) shifts, 73, 185 shock absorption, 61, 62b, 62 shop management, 76b ‘shops’ (assembly shops), 15t, 18 see also Carrosserie shops (retail), 11 short-time working, 14, 16, 108, 149, 168, 211, 237, 248(n7)

274 Index

sick-leave, 199–200, 250(n32) certification, 183–4 pay, 199 sickness, 250(n38) Simondon, Gilbert, 247(n25) single men, 12, 241(n5) SIAP (Peugeot Cars Independent Union), 14, 81, 124b, 137t, 149, 152, 153, 187, 192 affiliated (late 1970s) to the CSL, 187 ‘now called the CSL’, 123b SIAP-CSL, 187, 191, 211 skeleton plan: defence for the shop, 162–5 skilled workers, 189, 205 ‘P2’, 140 skills, 205, 222, 240 sleep, 15 slipped disc, 182, 184, 201 smallholdings, 48 snappons (rubber seals), 182 Sochaux, 45, 48, 56, 118, 125b, 127, 147, 158, 160, 178, 183, 189, 211, 244(n27), 247(n29) see also Peugeot-Sochaux Sochaux: local industrial employers, 234 Sochaux Centre, 130 Sochaux management, 237 Sochaux model, 81 Sochaux Production Centre, 70 Sochaux system, 211, 215 alternative forms of organisation in peripheral shops, 219–23 employment relations, 205–6 future, 218–40, 251–2 new Montage Voiture: a frugal modernisation, 230–3 opening of HC1: an aborted Japanisation, 223–30 renewal, 233–40 Sochaux-Montbéliard conurbation, 189 social class, 142, 189, 247(n17) social class-consciousness, 190 social cohesion, 81 social conflict, 158 social construction, 87

social control, 82 social equilibrium, 73, 97 social facilities, 230 social friction, 82 social groups, 112 social identity, 142 social inequalities, 204 social integration, 11–14, 158, 204–17 social life, 15, 92, 107 adjustments, 101 social networks, 1, 4, 169 social order, 5 social organisation, 80 social peace, 5 social play, 101–13, 130, 235 see also identity-constitutive social play social policy, 14 social rank, 5 social relations, 25–6, 29, 36, 67, 83, 87, 91, 167, 188 social rules, 110 social security, 81, 199 social structure, 28 social system, 237 social transparency, 26, 47 social unrest, 16 social value, 67 sociology of enterprise, 246(n12) of work, 28 solidarity, 92, 125b, 126, 174, 179, 196, 209, 210, 218, 224 types, 124b South of France, 118 space, 31, 67 spatial proximity, 32 speed, 32, 35, 40, 50, 227, 231, 251(n6) sports clubs, 198 standardisation, 176, 179 stepped negotiations, 158 Stewart, P., 251(n9) strain: cumulative, 48 strategies and trajectories: the present in perspective, 126–56 force of conjuncture, 126–9

Index 275

the present: a moment in a career, 129–46 young pretenders, disillusioned old-timers, thirtysomethings, 146–56 stress, 155 strike of 1989, 115, 123b, 124b, 135–9t, 150, 151, 247(n31), 251(n5) still not forgotten, 192–8 six weeks of conflict, 195 strikes, 16–17, 18, 53, 81, 113–14, 121, 124b, 133t, 143b, 147, 242(n10), 242(n13), 250(n38) ‘stoppages’, 82, 192, 193, 203–4, 215 mini-stoppages, 197–8 non-strikers, 193, 194, 195, 196 structural instability, 36 students, 247(n29) sub-contractors, 11, 222 suggestion system, 63, 158, 165–9, 217, 224 bounty-hunters, 168 1988–96 system, 165–7 PARI (1996–), 167–9 ‘people played more often than they won’, 167 rate of reward, 166 recomposition of a social relation, 165–9 suicide, 201 supers, 55, 57, 64, 79, 96, 98, 197, 244(n22) supervisor–worker relationship, 211 supervisor’s manual, 24 supervisors, see AM2 supervisory staff, 50, 65, 72, 73, 83, 90, 95, 105, 107, 111–13, 119, 131, 142, 147, 183, 184, 186, 188, 191, 194, 202, 203, 206, 207, 210, 212, 224, 225, 227–8, 234, 237–8, 249(n17) supplementary employment, 120, 133t, 183 suppliers, 161–2, 178, 179, 180

supplies, 30, 37, 70, 75b, 89, 222, 224 supply: hazards of, 94 surveys, 77 Sweden, 236 Switzerland, 123b symbolic capital, 104–5 Syndicat Indépendant des Automobiles Peugeot, see SIAP ‘system effects’, 246(n12) systems, 130 tableau de polyvalence (chart of multi-functionality), 65, 96, 99, 245(n8) tables of operation times, 185 tasks, 31, 34, 35, 49, 51, 57, 89 fragmentation of, 4 fragmented and repetitive, 52 Taylorism, 2, 36, 85, 221, 239 of quality, 178–80 team identity, 115 team spirit, 224 team-leaders, see AM1; kumicho teams, 5b, 29–30, 54–70, 79, 80, 107, 148, 153, 170, 174, 182, 207, 235, 244(n23–4), 248(n38) cohesion, 77 composition, 58 domain of team leader: reconciliation of discordant requirements, 55–8 fluctuations in size and composition, 59 from the team to the network, 54–70 incomers, 59 internal cohesion threatened, 59 mobility between, 65 networks and hazards of production, 61–4 networks and horizons of variable scope, 67–70 partially recognised network of multi-functionality, 64–7 split into ‘groups’ or ‘modules’, 56 unstable group of shrinking numbers, 58–61

276 Index

technical activity, 4 technical conflict, 158 technical departments, 6b technical diplomas (BTS, DUT), 73 technical functions, 150 technical groups, 57 technical lay-outs (installations), 2, 61 technical staff, 85, 245(n32) technical supervisors (chefs techniques), 71 technicians, 3, 10, 14, 29, 40–3, 45, 54, 62b, 63, 67, 77, 82, 90, 106, 116, 162, 166, 167, 168, 176, 205, 220, 241(n5), 251(n6) technology (innovative), 221 temporary workers, 58, 59, 80, 108, 112, 129, 132t, 143b, 152, 212, 243(n13), 244(n27), 247(n28–31), 249(n19) hope for permanent employment, 117, 247(n30) willing to endure situations that others would not, 117–18 tension, 59, 180 textiles, 11 thirty-somethings, 140, 147–8, 154–6, 237 anxious, 150f, 154 career trajectory, 154–6 disappointed, 150f, 154–5 promoted, 150f, 154 time, 31, 33t, 49, 50, 51, 54, 61, 80, 82, 92, 93, 97, 108–9, 110, 111, 114, 150, 163, 176, 178, 219, 220, 222, 225 prescribed and real, 36–40 see also cycle times; ‘going up the line’ time and motion, 40, 44, 83, 239, 243(n9) time work, 1, 241(n1 to Introduction) time-value, 243(n9–10)

toolbox, 49 toolchest (portable), 39, 40 tooling, 222, 224, 232 tools, 21, 30, 37, 40, 43, 44, 61, 70, 75b, 83, 167, 219 total quality, 56 Toyota, 23, 70, 71, 223, 245(n34) trade unionism, 81, 82, 127, 144b, 146, 158, 186–204, 233, 245(n3), 249(n19) oppositional (contestataire), 187 at Peugeot-Sochaux, 187–9 politics, medicine and the law, 198–204 strike of 1989, 192–8 union activist and his image, 189–92 weakness of militant, 188 see also militancy trade unionists, 3, 6b, 16, 98, 180, 243(n13), 250(n30) activists, 189–92 discrimination against, 202, 203 oppositional, 203 trade unions, 5, 54, 83, 90, 93, 103, 112, 123b, 124b, 125, 142, 149, 153, 181, 215, 241(n5, n7) anti-union discrimination, 159 company-friendly, 205 leaflets, 25 membership, 188, 249(n18) militant, 188, 189 oppositional, 205 see also named individual unions traditionalism, 73 training, 6b, 25, 32, 37, 55, 57, 65, 69, 73, 75b, 94, 96, 132t, 160, 166, 170, 172, 222, 225, 237, 240, 250(n38) ‘shop-floor’ method, 176, 177 training methods, 36 training school, 31, 84, 179 guardian of gestural norm, 176–8 transfer, 140, 141, 143b, 213 transparency, 117, 164, 169, 173–6, 180, 210, 234, 236 transport, 11

Index 277

travail en chaîne, 28 travail en groupe (work in groups), 30 travail en poste (‘work at the post/station’), 28, 30 travelling (to and from work), 120 trimmers, 93 trimming operations, 39 Turkey, 11 Turks, 119, 134t Tuve plant (Volvo), 220 Uddevalla, 220, 236 UEPs (unités élémentaires de production/basic production units), 5b, 235 UGICT: membership, 249(n18) uncertainty, 38 under-production, 16 UNEDIC, 212, 251(n42) unemployment, 11, 123b, 148, 156 fear of, 184 uniforms, 227, 251(n5) Unit Committee, 168 United States of America, 12, 16, 165, 178, 213, 223 Unités élémentaires de Production (UEP), 232 upstream, 74, 83, 161 vacancy of mind, 53 vacation work, 247(n29) Valenciennes, 9 Verguet, D., (228), 251(n3, n6), 253 veterans, see old-timers violence, 215 virtuosity, 50, 244(n19) hopes and challenges, 97–100 visitors, 113 voluntary sector, 152, 198, 239 volunteering, 225 volunteers, 214 Volvo, 35, 220–1 Volvo-Kalmar, 242(n16) Vosges mountains, 120 wage relation, 233, 251(n9) wage-labour, 54, 106 wages, see pay

‘watermelons’, 251(n5) weekend, 15 white-collar staff, 14, 52, 67 wine, 91, 92 wiring, 221, 222 women, 20, 52, 117, 171, 175, 177, 193, 201, 221–2, 223, 248(n38) women’s workstations, 110 work individualisation, 4 intensification, 43 organisation, 2, 130 prescribed, 48 ‘present-tense’ systems, 130 relationship to others, 88 and rest, 113–14 vacuity, 53 see also assembly-line work work fragmentation, 218 work groups, 235 work relations, 173, 218, 233 work situation, 52 work time, 45 work-enrichment, 49, 221, 225, 234, 236 work-study, 231, 239 work-study office, 83 work-study technician (agent d’étude des temps), 83–4, 85, 108, 109, 167, 178 worker behaviour, 56 worker group (groupe ouvrier), 87 worker groups, 185, 231 worker-involvement, 158, 204–17 difficulties of pay-based employee-involvement, 206–11 employer hegemony and social integration, 211–15 negotiation and interpretation, 215–17 worker-participation, 149 worker-peasants, 120 worker-representation, 187 worker/supervisor relationship, 82, 188, 212 workers, see assembly-line workers workers: teams, 3 workers’ identity, 29

278 Index

workforce, 18, 238 working atmosphere (ambience), 24 working class, 5 working clothes, 25 working conditions, 23, 124b, 125b, 126, 155, 181, 225, 249(n19) working environment, 17 working group (collectif de travail) leaving, 88–100 multi-functionality, 92–7 not same as ‘worker group’ (groupe ouvrier), 245(n3) outcome in permanent contestation, 88–92 social cohesion, 91 virtuosity, 97–100 working hours, 14, 204, 214, 241(n7), 250(n34) workload, 48 workplace layout, 181 Works Council (WC), 12, 14, 25, 153, 187, 187t, 188, 190, 191, 212 workshop management, 23 workstation, 20, 21, 55–60, 62b, 63, 64, 66–9, 76b, 80, 83–5, 93, 94, 96, 111, 116, 123b, 133t, 135t, 143b, 147, 149, 151, 159–61, 166, 168, 176, 177, 181, 200, 208, 219–22, 225, 232, 235, 242(n4), 243(n13), 249(n17) abstract assemblage of varying lifespan, 31–6 acceptance of badly composed, 186 between pleasure and pain: paradoxes of life on the line, 46–54 change of, 182, 197 demanding, 248(n35) demands, 155 density and difficulty: two aspects of effort, 40–6 difficult, 112, 132t, 136t easy, 137t escape, 88–100 ‘good’, 102, 103, 109, 150, 155

improvements, 184 less tiring, 148 meaning, 88 number, 110, 247(n22) object of analysis, 30 place of arrest and time of subjection, 28, 30–54 prescribed time and real time, 36–40 recomposition, 185 redistribution of tasks, 172 specially-adapted, 183, 184 three rules, 163 worst, 117–18 World War I, 7 World War II, 118, 165, 178 German occupation, 8 Resistance, 16, 203 ‘yellow sheets’, 185 youngsters/youth, 13, 14, 16, 18, 39–40, 41, 48, 50, 60, 61, 72, 74, 78, 81–2, 94, 97, 103, 110, 114–15, 117, 138t, 140, 145, 189, 190, 191, 205, 208, 210–11, 212, 236, 237–8, 243(n13), 244(n27), 246(n9), 250(n36), 251(n44) Bruno, 142, 143–4b, 146 committed, 150f, 152–3 ‘competitive advantage’ (vis-à-vis old-timers), 129 discouraged, 150f, 153 expectant, 150f, 153 hopes collapse, 126 lively, 152–3 pretenders, 147–8, 152–3 price for ‘climbing’, 126 system of reference, 126 and veterans: unprecedented polarisation, 122–6 Yugoslavia, 11, 211 Yugoslavs, 117, 119, 133t, 134t, 140, 150, 189 zone de raccordements et mises en place (adjustment and positioning sector), 6b