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
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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 978-1-349-50922-5
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 20022028674
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
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 128

3.2 Assembly-line workers’ relationship to work 150

vi
List of Tables

1.1 Working hours for shops linked to production flow 15

2.1 Content of workstation ‘strengthening
of rear floor’ in MV 33
3.1 Career trajectories 132
3.2 Attitudes of manual workers from
the two teams at MV and HC2 135
4.1 Elections for works council (WC) and
for employee representatives 187

vii
List of Boxes

1 The research and the methods adopted 5

2 Operations sheet: positioning of two
fixing screws for front right-hand shock-absorber 62
3 List of responsibilities, according to one team leader 75
4 Youngsters and veterans: construction of an opposition 123
5 A young CGT candidate argues from his experience 125
6 An inflection of career trajectory: the case of young Bruno 143
7 An inflection of career trajectory:
the case of Patrick, the old-timer 145

viii
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 accom-
modating. 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 assem-
bly 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 exist-
ing lean manufacturing practices. The subtext of the lean production
school, the possibility of the end of social inequality and political exclu-
sion 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 mana-
gerial 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? Auton-
omy is about the brokered social space in which workers find them-
selves 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 sub-
ordination, 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 histori-
cal 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 funda-
mental 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, technol-
ogy 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 develop-
ment 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 inequ-
ality. If work is foundational in general social terms for Naville, sociol-
ogy 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 vari-
ous interactions give rise to historically determined relations of inequal-
ity, 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 auto-
mation will reveal the character of social change since automation
demands certain conditions that are not everywhere available. Automa-
tion 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 con-
traints of the logic of production (Naville, 1963). For Naville, under-
standing 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 pream-
ble 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 orien-
tation. Whether seen from the vantage of either conventional or Marx-
ist 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 assump-
tion 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 neo-
Foucauldians 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 Anglo-
Saxon 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 under-
theorisation in Burawoy’s notion of transparency by counterposing to it
the dynamic process of worker opacity. In the tension between trans-
parency 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 circum-
stances 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 work-
place 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 managerial-
driven 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 identifica-
tion, 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 oft-
overlooked notion that technology, including technology of the assem-
bly 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 coopera-
tion’ 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 interper-
sonal relationships including one’s own sense of purpose. Despite produc-
tion 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 wonder-
fully the extent to which the reproduction of exploitation and alien-
ation at work are necessarily bound by both structural and contingent
characteristics. If, for Durand and Hatzfeld, the politics behind techni-
cal trajectories at work can be seen at play across all forms of employ-
ment 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 flexibili-
ties 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 determi-
nate 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’ estab-
lished 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: Peugeot-
Sochaux, ambiances d’intérieur (Editions Page Deux, 2002).
2. Although Ackroyd and Thompson (1997) do not seek to give it a name, ambi-
ance perhaps could be said to approximate the space in which the autono-
mous 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 com-
plicities between members of the team, a shared history of long employ-
ment, 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
J. Durand et al., Living Labour
© Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld 2003
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 organ-
isation 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 turn-
over 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 repre-
sentatives 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 fragmen-
tation 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 co-
operative 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 expect-
ations. 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 work-
place 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 élémen-
taires de production – basic production units), that is to say with units based on
working groups, something like those at Renault; the reduction in the num-
ber 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 consid-
ered by those responsible for industrial production at the site.
This project was always presented to workers, supervisory staff and man-
agers as a piece of independent academic research, carried out with the agree-
ment 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 con-
cerned for their approval. Carried out by the two authors, the research com-
bined 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 inter-
views 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 Peugeot-
Sochaux’, 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 manu-
facturing 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 produc-
tion 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
J. Durand et al., Living Labour
© Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld 2003
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-the-
range 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 acquir-
ing 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 situ-
ation, 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 produc-
tion 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-the-
range 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 metal-
lurgical 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. Rela-
tionships 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 devel-
opments 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 work-
force, interested in the quality of the product and its price, representing
as important a market as an entire regional division of the sales organi-
sation. 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 develop-
ment. 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 man-
agement – commonly called the Management, or simply Peugeot – was
intensified through the imbrication of occupational and local relation-
ships. 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 indus-
trialised 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 fall-
ing numbers employed. The housing effort was scaled-down substan-
tially: 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 leader-
ship 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 short-
time 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 trans-
formation 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 Shift begins 1318 Shift begins

0700–0730 Meal break 1500 First rest break
(10 mins)
0930 First rest break 1700 Second rest break
(10 mins) (10 mins)
1130 Second rest break 1900–1930 Meal break
(10 mins)
1312 End of shifta 2124 End of shifta

a
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 man-
agement 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 com-
plaining 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 employ-
ment, 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 peo-
ple 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, com-
ing 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 mak-
ing 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 charac-
teristic 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, some-
times 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 con-
tainers. Private coffee-machines, scattered along the line’s edge, provide
foci for informal affinity networks.
The formal and informal structuring of the shop encourages group-
formation 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 Carros-
serie 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 subdiv-
ided 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 house-
keeping: 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 venti-
lation 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 break-
downs and errors associated with it becoming uncommon, line stop-
pages 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 dis-
missals 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 well-
defined 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 indi-
vidual lockers to hold personal effects (previously put down some-
where 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 rep-
resent 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: paradox-
ically, 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 busi-
ness 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 com-
fort, ergonomics, efficiency and productivity, of density of work. At HC,
they say, one works more than in Montage Voiture, even if worksta-
tions 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 com-
fort (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 depart-
ments, 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,’ depend-
ing 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 soli-
darities.
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 free-
dom 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, installa-
tions 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
J. Durand et al., Living Labour
© Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld 2003
 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 mod-
ernising 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 trans-
port, 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 vocabu-
lary 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 signifi-
cance 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, iden-
tifiable 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. Semi-
automatic 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 worksta-
tion: 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 possibil-
ities, 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
32 Living Labour

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 (Strengthen-
ing 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 rou-
tine 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 14

quality-control checklist into printer connected with screw-
driver, then withdraw)
Stamp confirmation of having fitted the anchorage of front right 14
shock-absorber, (insert quality-control checklist into printer
connected with screwdriver, then withdraw)
Lock screw on the anti-torque rod in the engine compartment 27
(using a servo-controlled electrical screwdriver)
Position 2 of 3 front right shock-absorber screws 35
Screw home 3 front right shock-absorber screws, in engine com- 36
partment (using a second servo-controlled electrical screwdriver)
Connect pipe to water pump, when this is fitted in high position, 40
in engine compartment (using special hand-pliers)
Fasten fixing-stud of the airbag logic-controller, between front seats 7
Position and fasten with 3 rivets a reinforcing plate for right side 57
rear floor, beneath back seat (using compressed-air rivetter)
Movement, handling and miscellaneous allowances 26
Total 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 work-
stations, 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 mis-
take. Only those who have the opportunity to remain at the same work-
station 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;
34 Living Labour

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 deter-
mine 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 qual-

ities of different kinds, the variety of actual combinations calls for
a particular mental effort. This is increased by the well-known con-
straints 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 pro-
ductive 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
 The Line Seen from Below 35

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 over-
come 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 vari-
ation 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
36 Living Labour

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 divi-
sion (coupure) between these two registers of work and challenged the
scientific or technological foundation of the control exercised by organ-
isation 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
 The Line Seen from Below 37

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 assembly-
line workers – which gives expression to a double logic of efficiency
38 Living Labour

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 assembly-
line 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 work-
station: 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
 The Line Seen from Below 39

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 com-
partments, 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
40 Living Labour

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
 The Line Seen from Below 41

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 com-
parison 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
42 Living Labour

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 organ-
isation 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
 The Line Seen from Below 43

recall them is to evoke in the most striking manner this organisational

autonomy at work, which was greater in those days; whether the work-
station 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 char-
acterised 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
44 Living Labour

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 depart-
ments 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 assembly-
line 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,
 The Line Seen from Below 45

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 scaled-
down 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
46 Living Labour

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
 The Line Seen from Below 47

those whose physical capacities have suffered, who tend to find them-
selves 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
48 Living Labour

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 tran-
quillisers, 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 occupa-
tion 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 oper-
ations in addition to those laid down on the operations sheet, operations
 The Line Seen from Below 49

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 ex-
polyvalents 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 con-
straint, 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
50 Living Labour

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 inter-
mediate 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 para-
doxical movement of the line, which progresses and remains exactly
 The Line Seen from Below 51

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 rela-
tionship 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
52 Living Labour

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, frag-
mented 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
 The Line Seen from Below 53

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 long-
term 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 oper-
ations 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 commu-
nication. 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
54 Living Labour

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.
 The Line Seen from Below 55

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 motiv-
ation 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 add-
itional 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
56 Living Labour

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 clamp-
downs. 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 multi-
functionality 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 multi-
functionality, 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 manage-
ment 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
 The Line Seen from Below 57

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 adminis-
trative 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 pro-
posals 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.
58 Living Labour

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 organ-
isation 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
 The Line Seen from Below 59

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
60 Living Labour

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 construc-
tion 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 worksta-
tions 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
 The Line Seen from Below 61

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 distin-
guished 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 interven-
tion of a hazard of production, as can be seen in the case of an event con-
cerning 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.
62 Living Labour

Box 2 Operations sheet: positioning of two fixing screws for front right-
hand 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 shock-
absorber 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 broach-
ing 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 oper-
ations 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 (Carros-
serie 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 body-
work, 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
 The Line Seen from Below 63

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 work-
station 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 frag-
mentation 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
64 Living Labour

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 work-
station, 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 multi-
functionality.
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
 The Line Seen from Below 65

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 multi-
functionality. 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. Para-
doxically, worker mobility between teams has a destructive effect: those
arriving on a new team lose ipso facto all the gains in multi-functionality
66 Living Labour

they have made, and every team leader taking in a new worker rates
him as completely inexperienced, while waiting for him to prove him-
self. 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 responsibili-
ties immediately when his colleague suffered the accident.
Finally, the evaluation of attainment is itself to some extent debat-
able. 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 multi-
functionality. 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, corres-
ponding 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 skill-
level 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
 The Line Seen from Below 67

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 identity-
constitution 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 replace-
ment 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.
68 Living Labour

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: master-
ing 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 con-
juncture and on the established relationships within the group. Certain
 The Line Seen from Below 69

cycles are markedly longer – such as those associated with a manufac-

turing 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 accumu-
lation 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 situ-
ation. 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
70 Living Labour

and duration, being to different degrees permanent, ephemeral or

recurrent. Within this complex ensemble, certain networks are particu-
larly 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 motiv-
ate 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
 The Line Seen from Below 71

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 man-
agement 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 produc-
tion 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
72 Living Labour

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 man-
agement (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 rea-
son must certainly have something to do with the burden of technical
responsibility borne by the moniteur, the assembly-line workers them-
selves 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 decision-
maker 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. Further-
more, 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 ambi-
tious 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
 The Line Seen from Below 73

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 defect-
repairer 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. Further-
more, 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
74 Living Labour

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 overesti-
mating 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 juxta-
posed without an obvious pattern of coherence, and the whole gives
 The Line Seen from Below 75

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 countersigna-
ture 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.
76 Living Labour

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 cleanli-
ness 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 neces-
sities associated with the need to prevent a break in the flow to rather more
long-term planning functions (individual meetings and personnel manage-
ment) 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 necessi-
ties 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 differ-
ent 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.
 The Line Seen from Below 77

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 bet-
ter 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 cal-
culated 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
78 Living Labour

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 man-
aging 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 retire-
ment. 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 corres-
ponds 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 poten-
tials 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 nego-
tiated. 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
 The Line Seen from Below 79

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 experi-
ence? 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 pro-
duction 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 empha-
sise 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;
80 Living Labour

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 legit-
imate 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 oper-
ations sheet etc.) and of economic pressure (constraints on time).
 The Line Seen from Below 81

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 (responsi-
bility 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, strengthen-
ing 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 never-
ending, 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
82 Living Labour

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. Fur-
thermore, the seniority of most assembly-line workers and their habitu-
ation 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 Carros-
serie: 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
 The Line Seen from Below 83

(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 pro-
duction. 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 pro-
duction 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 opportun-
ity 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.
84 Living Labour

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, out-
side the Carrosserie itself. This gives them a certain formal independ-
ence: 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 work-
study 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 accept-
ability 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
 The Line Seen from Below 85

not get lost among the arcana of administration and the strategic game-
playing 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 productivity-
improver 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 analy-
sis, 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
86 Living Labour

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 dis-
cordant 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
J. Durand et al., Living Labour
© Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld 2003
88 Living Labour

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 signifi-
cance 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 becom-
ing 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 wide-
spread 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 differ-
ent 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 89

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 ‘sugges-
tions’ 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 ser-
vices 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 over-
demanding. 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
90 Living Labour

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 auton-
omy 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 ever-
present 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 91

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 radio-
cassette-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 dis-
cussion 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
92 Living Labour

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 drunk-
enness 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 hide-
aways 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 inten-
sity 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 93

the worst. Other jobs, in certain neighbouring businesses, are the sub-
ject 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 coin-
cides 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 requir-
ing 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 prob-
lematically, 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 hived-
off 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
94 Living Labour

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 flexi-
bility, because it allows the assignment of operatives in response to the
particularities of the situation: the pace of the line, levels of absentee-
ism, the requirements of training, the hazards of supply etc. This multi-
functionality 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 worksta-
tion, 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 par-
ticularly 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, multi-
functionality 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 95

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 insti-
tutionalise 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 devel-
opment explains the often fiercely-held opinions that assembly-line
96 Living Labour

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 worksta-
tion; 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 situ-
ation: 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 97

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 opera-
tive 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, justify-
ing 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
98 Living Labour

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 mis-
takes 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 multi-
functionality, 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 self-
realisation, 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 func-
tional 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 99

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 mis-
takes, 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 hierar-
chy 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 advan-
tage 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
100 Living Labour

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 produc-
tion, 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 accept-
ance 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 assembly-
line 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.
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 101

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 identity-
constitutive 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 partici-
pants 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 condi-
tion 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 equi-
libria 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
102 Living Labour

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 con-
struction 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 for-
bidden, 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 auton-
omy. 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’ work-
station, 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.
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 103

The ‘good’ workstation is negotiated when the line is rebalanced, that

is to say at the monthly redistribution of tasks between all the work-
stations 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 hier-
archy 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 unassum-
ing (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
104 Living Labour

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 – some-
thing that everyone avoids if they can. On the other hand, this compe-
tition 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 auton-
omy. 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 105

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 com-
munity, 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
106 Living Labour

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 media-
tion which masks – at least for the moment – the structural constraints
of wage labour so as to make them bearable, is a not insignificant ele-
ment 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 determina-
tion 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 line-
balancer.
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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 107

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. Histor-
ically, 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 sub-
ordination and of the limits to their autonomy. In other words, ‘ritual
punishment by means of the imposition of rules serves only to reintro-
duce (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.
108 Living Labour

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 quality-
control 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 multi-
plicity of actors increases the uncertainty that lies at the origin of fluctu-
ations 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 tempo-
rary staff (and beyond that to a demand for overtime, or the imposi-
tion 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 worksta-
tions 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)
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 109

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 communi-
cated 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 require-
ments’, 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 medic-
ally 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 cap-
acity. 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 com-
position, 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
110 Living Labour

inequality among workers, depending on their resources; such is the

absurdity of the whole situation, at the very least of the national situa-
tion (where young people are without work while ageing workers wear
themselves out on the job).
At the heart of these contradictory constraints (with medical restric-
tions 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 line-
balancer, 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 work-
station, 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 111

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 pro-
posed (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 assem-
bly 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 work-
stations. The more serious the reorganisation, the more lively the dis-
putes 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 pre-
scribed 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
112 Living Labour

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 consult-
ation 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 113

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 lack-
lustre once out of the shop. For assembly-line workers, however, this
dualism takes on a particular intensity. This is one way of understand-
ing, at least in part, the attitudes manifested when the line is visited by
outsiders, a circumstance described by assembly workers as being particu-
larly 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,
114 Living Labour

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 opera-
tives’ 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 conver-
sational 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. Obser-
vation 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 pri-
vate 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 estab-
lished 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 115

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 friend-
ships, 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
116 Living Labour

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 out-
come 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 stand-
ard 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 organ-
isation 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 man-
agement. 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.
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 117

Whatever the communitarian hypothesis that underlies the establish-

ment 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 hand-
ful 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 organisa-
tion 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 tem-
porary workers taken on for the launch of the 406.28 The latter are look-
ing 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
118 Living Labour

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 for-
eigners. 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 stratig-
raphy 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 work-
force, 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 119

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 immi-
grant 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 dis-
tributed 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 mana-
gerial 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,
120 Living Labour

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 along-
side 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 hous-
ing 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 combin-
ation 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.
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 121

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 founda-
tion 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 neces-
sarily gradually attenuate to give birth to a new, essentially occupa-
tional 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 solidar-
ities 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 non-
strikers, 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
122 Living Labour

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 combin-
ation 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 par-
ticularities 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 consid-
erable, 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 dis-
agreement presented in the box below, between two assembly-line
workers of different generations from the same team in HC1, illumin-
ates 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 untyp-
ical. 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 interpre-
tative 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.
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 123

Furthermore, the arguments combine into two more or less contradic-

tory 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 them-
selves 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 advan-
tages 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.
124 Living Labour

Box 4 (Continued)

Two representations of working life

Didier, the veteran Gabriel, the young worker

Views of work – everyone has his own – logic of virtuosity:
workstation, with it’s not given to
polyvalents to cover everyone to work fast
them all
– respect working – only the clumsy have
methods, ensure accidents
quality for a quiet life
The other age – unaware of the need for – unaware of the needs of
group assembly-line workers the business and the
to defend themselves demands of competition
– threaten historic gains – egotistical old men
– naïve and hyperactive – a dead weight and
a threat to the business
Working – improvements won from – improvements granted
conditions the bosses by the company
– improvements imposed – better at Peugeot than
by State and by joint elsewhere
employer–employee
bodies
– being worn away at
Peugeot
Type of – workers’ solidarity – solidarity with the
solidarity – protective role of company
public authorities
Trades unions – the necessity of – militant unionists are
and strikes militant trade- just lazy
unionism, yet joining
a union is a loss of
individual freedom
– the ‘independent’ union – for a responsible,
is a tool of manage- non-striking
ment and acts against unionism that
workers’ interests protects the company
– it is strikes that bring – strikes endanger the
gains: the 1989 strike business; that of 1989
allowed the recruit- sabotaged the launch
ment of young workers of the 605
– paralysed by
austerity policy

Source: Based on a document provided by a team-leader and confirmed by interviews and

observations by J.-P. Durand.
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 125

The trade unions are aware of this generational rupture, and are making
efforts to attract younger workers. In the course of the election of work-
place 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 progres-
sion’: 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
126 Living Labour

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 individu-
alism. The penultimate line shows a hardening of the argument on the
theme of promotion that is central to the debate: the promised promo-
tion 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 experi-
ence, 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, conjunc-
tural 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 distin-
ction 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 127

a non-striking position and rejecting militant unionism. This distinct-

ive 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 work-
force 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 distri-
bution 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 recruit-
ment, 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
128 Living Labour

Montage Habillage
Voiture Caisse
18 1 1
19 1
20 1 4
21 6 6
22 7 8
58
23 5 13
24 8 13 56
25 9 16 54
26 16 27 52
27 9 28 50
28 20 26 48
29 15 32 46
30 6 21 44
31 10 22 42
32 9 16 40
33 5 9 38
34 17 24 36
35 30 42
34
36 36 64
32
37 43 67
38 45 66 30
39 35 61 28
40 31 68 26
41 30 65 24
42 28 44 22
43 38 66 20
44 42 89 18
45 56 100 0 20 40 60 80 100 120
46 58 85
47 65 93 Montage Voiture Habillage Caisse
48 66 86
49 56 70
50 39 57
51 46 66
52 48 41
53 31 43
54 36 38
55 34 38
56 9 12
57 3 3
58
59

Figure 3.1 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 129

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, accus-
ing 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 super-
visors, 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 con-
sidering 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’ interpre-
tations 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 possi-
bilities 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 classi-
fication 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 assembly-
line 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 inter-
views 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 indi-
vidual 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
Table 3.1 Career trajectories

132
Source Trajectory Entry Age Post and attitude Points Potential Educ.
qualifications

1994 21 Temp., hoping for permanent job 170 CAP

I/v 1995 22 Temp., hoping for permanent job 170 CAP

1995 22 Temp., hoping for permanent job 170 Voc. Bac.

I/v 1995 27 Temp., hoping for permanent job 170 CAP

I/v 1995 22 Confident in future, patient, with a relative in 170 Voc. Bac.
management Engineering

I/v 1995 23 Problems with difficult workstation, fearful of being 170 200− BEP Bodywork
left there

N’bour 1994 26 Recent recruit, already Polyvalent 170 190−

1992 27 ? Atypical youngster, an enigma, transferred 170 190

from other workshop, easygoing but a glutton
for training

I/v 1989 29 Moniteur, ex-militant 190 215− HGV

I/v 1989 31 Well set for promotion to polyvalent but after 190 215
repeated transfers stopped making progress. Anxious

(?) 1989 32 Personal problems; contact with CGT? 180 200− CAP Turning
N’bour 1979 34 Career drifting; personal problems. 200 225− CAP Fitter

Meal 1978 37 Polyvalent; recent take-off. 190 215−

1978 37 Had promising future; problems with work and 190 215−
with foreman; Algerian immigrant.
1974 39 Moniteur 200 240

Meal 1977 39 Prioritises life outside, no ambitions for work 180 190+

I/v 1976 40 Wanted to become polyvalent, but no longer; 190 200−

N’bour part-time agriculturist
I/v 1978 40 Wants to become polyvalent to some degree, and to 180 200
rise one grade; Moroccan, active outside work
I/v 1975 40 Asks for nothing, hopes for nothing: 180 190 Brevet
committed CGT member
I/v 1977 42 Polyvalent, hoped to become moniteur; 190 215
Meal now doubts he will; works on the side
I/v 1978 42 Would like variety of workstations; striker in 1989 190 200−

(?) 1977 44 North African immigrant 190 200+

I/v 1970 45 Moniteur; Yugoslav immigrant 215 240 Bac. Equivalent

N’bour 1970 45 Ex-moniteur on other team, asked to return 200 240+

to previous job after conflict with foreman

133
 134
Table 3.1 (continued)

Source Trajectory Entry Age Post and attitude Points Potential Educ.
qualifications

(?) 1972 46 Yugoslav immigrant 180 190+

N’bour 1970 47 Does not wish to become polyvalent, wants unprob- 190 215+
lematic job in pit; but a promising past

1966 47 Disorganised; personal problems 190 200−

(?) 1969 53 North African immigrant 190 190+

N’bour 1969 54 No ambitions; Moroccan immigrant 190 200

I/v 1967 54 Was off-line defect repairer; wants to take early 200 215+
retirement

(?) 1975 54 Turkish immigrant 190 200+

(?) 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.
Table 3.2 Attitudes of manual workers from the two teams at MV and HC2

Name Age Years at Points Potential Educ. For/against Trajectory Attitude to business and to post
Peugeot qualifications 1989 strike occupied

IM 20 2 170 190− BEP non-eng Young recruit. Bought a big bike, lives
with parents. Very energetic, hopes for
promotion. Old-timers hope to calm
him down.

LF 22 2 170 200− – Very positive and enthusiastic. Has

learnt 10 or so posts to become moniteur.

AM 24 4 190 200− – Polyvalent (28–30 posts). Productivity

welcome, but thought to lack real
ability. Ill thought of by old-timers,
who await his discomfiture.

DO 24 2 170 190− – Polyvalent

AC 26 2 180 200 CAP eng. Trained as defect repairer, then put on

line. Very embittered at the work and
at unkept promise of 190.

P 32 7 190 200− CAP eng. Finds workstation overloaded

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

135
 136
Table 3.2 (continued)

Name Age Years at Points Potential Educ. For/against Trajectory Attitude to business and to post
Peugeot qualifications 1989 strike occupied

UC 37 17 200 215+ CAP eng. For Medical restrictions. 1981 strike.

ID 36 17 190 200− – For Non-unionised but militant. Keeps

company with ‘mates’ from old team.
Gets personal points and good
workstations (‘Champion’).

ED 38 21 200 215− CAP eng. For Sees an increase in stress over last decade.
Regrets inability to go up the line.
No resources to get himself off the line.

UO 41 18 200 225− – Complains of difficult workstation. Explains

how workers come in, even when ill.

UD 44 20 n.k. n.k. – – Doubtful about assembly-line work and

of his own position within it.

ID 39 21 200 225− – For Polyvalent. Worried on arrival at HC2

because of faster rate of work. Abandoned
strike of 1989 because of union division.

AM 38 21 215 240+ – Against Moniteur (stands in for AM1). Foreman’s

‘blue-eyed boy’. Younger than other
moniteurs, has every chance of success.
AP 44 21 240+ – Against Moniteur. Believes work here is
(240−) easier than at HC0. Presenteeist.
Frustrated at not being favoured
moniteur.

AB 45 27 215 240+ CAP eng. Against Moniteur. Enjoys working at Peugeot.

Understands strikers of 1989. Thinks
individual interviews are pointless.

ED 43 23 200 215+ – Against Very sympathetic to management, SIAP

(225+) member. Champion at going up the
line. Never any problems with the
foreman!

RB 44 24 180 200− – Against Very sympathetic to management.

Often absent (backache, no
disability). No bonus on account
of absence.

OK 46 24 200 225− – Against Long-standing SIAP member. Backache,

(240) eczema on hands (no medical
restrictions). Easy workstation, often
seated. Vain requests for transfer to
defect repair.

OM 46 23 180 190− – Against Frustrated at inability to go up

(190+) line. Refuses over-burdening of
workstation. Involved in Portuguese
Association.

137
 138
Table 3.2 (continued)

Name Age Years at Points Potential Educ. For/against Trajectory Attitude to business and to post
Peugeot qualifications 1989 strike occupied

OS 46 18 190 200+ Bac. Equiv n.k. Rather isolated in shop. Complains of

(220=) increasing rate of work. Was striker,
under pressure from others.

AM 47 25 180 190− – Against Medical restriction ignored.

Individualised conflict with foremen:
the union is useless.

AR 48 26 180 190+ – For In bad health, complains of work rate.

(190−) Foremen more rigorous than they used
to be. Risks the sack. Complains about
youngsters.

AL 49 27 200 210= Terty CAP n.k. Seems not much liked by colleagues,
(215−) as he has an easy ‘woman’s’ job
(so theirs are overloaded).

ED 50 23 190 200+ – n.k. Accepts the way things are.

(215−)

OB 51 18 180 190− – n.k. 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.
Legend

on the ascendant career progression halted with long-term stagnation (as in the
case of polyvalents who have returned to fixed workstation
rather than becoming a moniteur.

ascendant but uncertain long-term levelling off of career trajectory in comparison to

expectations

ascent followed by recent fall permanent career stagnation

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

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, start-
ing 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 man-
ning 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 staff-
ing 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 generalisa-
tion 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, pro-
motions. 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 consider-
ation here, that is, those who remained basic-grade assembly-line workers
at the time of the research, still have recourse to prospects and to inter-
pretations 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 sec-
ondary 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 motiv-
ated 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 object-
ives, 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 consider-
ably 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 super-
visor 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 represen-
tation, ascribing a class character to the worker milieu, that is to say,
an identity essentially based on the contradictory relation to the bour-
geoisie, 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 legit-
imacy 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 com-
ments 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 work-
stations, 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-a-
half 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 polyva-
lent 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 per-
sonnel. 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 team-
leader, 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 worksta-
tion, 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 trade-
union 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 con-
trario, 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 atti-
tude put his own value into question in a quite iniquitous way.
Notions of justice and dignity take us very quickly to powerful ele-
ments 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 accommoda-
tion. 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 combin-
ation 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 pers-
pectives 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 assembly-
line 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 relation-
ship 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 occupa-
tion 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 trajec-
tory 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 super-
visory 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
148 Living Labour

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 pro-
files 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 charac-
teristics. 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 work-
station: 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 line-
balancer finds appropriate solutions. It is all the easier for them to do
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 149

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 encoun-
tered 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 old-
timers 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

Disillusioned
Lively youngsters Thirty-somethings old-timers

Committed Promoted
Senators

Faithful

Anxious
Expectant
Recruited
more Conciliators Recruited
recently Disappointed 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 remain-
ing 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 151

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 with-
drawal.
152 Living Labour

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 eco-
nomic 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 153

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 some-
times 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 qualifica-
tion than the BEP, such as the Brevet de Technicien or the Bac Professionel.
They believe – and in this they have the agreement of their fellow-
workers 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 con-
stitute 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 involve-
ment and commitment, competing with their peers to win a place of
favour in the eyes of their supervisors.
154 Living Labour

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 behav-
iours. 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 conjunc-
ture, 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 oppor-
tunities 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 dis-
appointed 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
 Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity 155

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 rela-
tionship 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.
156 Living Labour

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 age-
composition 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 demo-
graphic conjuncture. They are taking a gamble on the future: the thirty-
somethings 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 indus-
trial 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 stand-
ards 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
J. Durand et al., Living Labour
© Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld 2003
158 Living Labour

logics penetrate the whole hierarchy inside the plant, from senior man-
agement 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 legitim-
ate them.
To attain the goal that has in this way been set for the shop, assembly-
line 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 conjunc-
tion 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 ten-
dencies, company unionism winning the allegiance of a not insignifi-
cant 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 159

control, and their outcome cannot therefore with certainty be deter-

mined 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 produc-
tion, 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 encour-
age 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.
160 Living Labour

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 organisa-
tion 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 maximisa-
tion 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 contradic-
tion 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,
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 161

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 adjust-
ing 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-in-
time 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
162 Living Labour

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 production-
process 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 skeleton-
plan, 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 pro-
duction. 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 163

increase in stress at work as a consequence of unfortunate successions

of ‘costly cars’. This dilemma has led to the development by the organ-
isation 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 some-
times 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 com-
pensated 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 pro-
duction-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 bal-
ance 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
164 Living Labour

negotiating with them a temporary breach of the provisions of the skeleton-

plan. 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 skeleton-
plan 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 skeleton-
plan has something of the Ten Commandments, offering justice and
protection. Assembly-line workers’ problems always arise from infrac-
tions 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 165

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 perman-
ent 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 respon-
sible 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
166 Living Labour

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 sugges-
tions, 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 tech-
nician 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 opportun-
ity 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 encour-
age 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 167

and their skill at detecting the existence of major reserves of productiv-

ity. 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 partici-
pation 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 respon-
sible for productivity is in general a welcome visitor to the line. Further-
more, 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
168 Living Labour

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, choos-
ing 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 simplifica-
tion 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 involve-
ment 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 bounty-
hunters 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 work-
study 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.
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 169

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 mani-
fest 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 amélior-
ateurs: 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 reduc-
tion, 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 identifi-
cation 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
170 Living Labour

seeks to connect commitment to quality to the prosperity of the busi-

ness 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 hier-
archical 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 assembly-
workers 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 defect-
repairer, 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 con-
sequences: 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 171

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 quality-
control 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
172 Living Labour

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 prin-
ciple 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 sequen-
cing, 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 explan-
ations, 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 print-
ers 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 173

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 adjust-
ment 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
174 Living Labour

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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 175

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 quality-
control 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 assembly-
line 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
176 Living Labour

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 the-
oretical 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.
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 177

The dangers of getting it wrong are explained, together with its con-
sequences: ‘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 rep-
ertoire, 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
178 Living Labour

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 stop-
watch 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 devel-
opments 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 179

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 sup-
pliers should also be applied within the company. Secondly, European
integration led to the replacement of type approval on a country-
by-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
180 Living Labour

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 self-
inspection, 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 congru-
ence 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 manage-
ment, becomes the locus of confrontation and negotiation over the seri-
ousness of medical problems and their consequences, and the medical
restrictions that may be appropriate. Occupational physicians, nurses, super-
visors, 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 181

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 assembly-
line 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 morn-
ing 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, bal-
anced 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 occupa-
tional 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 tempo-
rary 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 epidemi-
ological 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
182 Living Labour

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 occupa-
tional 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 funda-
mental 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.
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 183

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 rebal-
anced 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,
184 Living Labour

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 occupa-
tional physicians, why they hesitate to certify unsuitability for assembly-
line 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 incap-
acitated, 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 185

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 work-
stations 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 oper-
ations sheet, the line-balancer’s listing, tables of operation times etc.) in
186 Living Labour

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 com-
pany’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 manage-
ment 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 187

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 Con-
fédération des Syndicats Libres (CSL). The prime function of this company
union was to counter the influence of so-called oppositional (con-
testataire) 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 middle-
management. 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% 47.48%
CFDT 13.2 61% 13.68% 61.16%
FO 11.77%
CFTC 17.7% 26% 5.89% 25.45%
CSL 8.3% 7.79%

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

188 Living Labour

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 deteri-
oration 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 weak-
ness of militant unionism. Employment relations at Sochaux are thus
characterised by the low profile of the trade unions, which are overshad-
owed 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 super-
visory 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.
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 189

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 sym-
pathisers 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 ‘working-
class consciousness’. This dichotomy, however, hardly survives examin-
ation 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 immi-
grants, 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’
190 Living Labour

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 mid-
Eighties, 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 him-
self 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 work-
ers feel fragile and vulnerable: disappointment, arrogance, an ill-received
remark or the repetition of incidents, all can lead to a rigidifying of posi-
tions. 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 191

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 repre-
sentative. 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 representa-
tives, 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 represen-
tatives often makes them important figures, if not exactly stars, who
sometimes even succeed in forging a group identity for the line con-
cerned, despite the mobility of assembly-line workers. Of course, this
recognition and this popularity were also extremely costly to the activ-
ist, 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 represen-
tative, 20 hours a month for a health and safety representative). This fact
is seized upon by supervisory staff, who see it as evidence of representa-
tives’ 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
192 Living Labour

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 line-
speed 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 col-
lective 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 193

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
194 Living Labour

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 demon-
strations 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 network-
mediated 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, organ-
ising 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 neighbour-
ing towns, and support from elected members of the local authorities.
‘This is coming after years of job-losses, the resettlement grants that
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 195

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 press-
shop 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
196 Living Labour

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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 197

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 work-
force 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 repre-
sentative 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 oppositionally-
minded 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 representa-
tives from oppositional unions on other lines come and lend their support
to the strikers. In the negotiations, their employee representative will
198 Living Labour

stand behind the men, allowing them to explain their complaint: the
workload, non-observance of the skeleton plan with too high a fre-
quency 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 con-
nection 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 institu-
tions, 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 199

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 exam-
ination, 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 develop-
ments, 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 judge-
ment, 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
200 Living Labour

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 author-
ity 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 man-
agement 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 trade-
unionists, these are workers who are suffering from occupational dis-
ease (recognised or otherwise), kept on the line at workstations that
may or may not have been adapted (there being fewer and fewer prep-
aration 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 con-
nection 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,
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 201

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 discrimin-
ated 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.
202 Living Labour

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 con-
victions 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 discrimin-
ation 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 203

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
204 Living Labour

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 dis-
appearance 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 deteri-
oration 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 organ-
isation 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 205

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 immedi-
ately 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 oppos-
itional 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/assembly-
worker relations are at the heart of the life of the shop: whence the figure
206 Living Labour

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, pay-
increases 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 supple-
mentary 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 system-
atic 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 min-
ima 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 207

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 attri-
bution. 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 some-
what 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 com-
parison 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
208 Living Labour

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 indi-
vidual 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 poten-
tial, 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 possi-
bilities, 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 209

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 obliga-
tions, 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 intern-
alisation 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 ration-
alistic defect-hunting adherence to operations sheets: this is also the
210 Living Labour

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 half-
year), 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 tech-
nicians 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 211

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 inef-
fective as regards motivation, when compared to the personal supervisor-
worker 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
212 Living Labour

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 lecture-
theatre 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 exten-
sively 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 provi-
sional 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 213

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 sub-
contracted 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 insur-
mountable 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 investi-
gators: 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
214 Living Labour

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.
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 215

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 deter-
mination 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 out-
come 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,
216 Living Labour

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 organ-
isation 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 (them-
selves 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
 Labyrinthine Complexities of Informal Adjustment 217

suggestions system or of quality assurance policy, and tomorrow per-

haps – 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 charac-
terise 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 modern-
isation (clipping a part rather than screwing it, the introduction of dif-
ferent 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
J. Durand et al., Living Labour
© Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld 2003
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 219

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 equip-
ment, 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 pos-
ition 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 gear-
box 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.
220 Living Labour

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 auto-
mated 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 over-
all 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
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 221

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 work-
stations 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
222 Living Labour

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 perform-
ance 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 tra-
ditional 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
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 223

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 demon-
strates 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 mod-
ernisation 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 organisa-
tion 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 trans-
plants, however, were of particular interest to senior management, for
their demonstration of Japanese organisational techniques and principles
224 Living Labour

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 defect-
repairer’ 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 dis-
ciplinary 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
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 225

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 moni-
teur 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 recruit-
ment 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
226 Living Labour

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 con-
firmed 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 grad-
ually 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 every-
where. 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
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 227

never really involved in drawing up their own operations sheets: deter-

mined 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 enor-
mous 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 valid-
ated 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 circum-
stances 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
228 Living Labour

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 diffi-
culties encountered in production. While the project called for leader-
ship 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 exploit-
ation 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 con-
firmed by all available analyses of the Japanese automobile industry. 7
The recruitment of workers to life-long employment involves a number
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 229

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 self-
defeating.
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 reser-
vations 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
230 Living Labour

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 rela-
tion 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 transform-
ation 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,
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 231

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 pro-
ductivity and economy of investment. Experience of the actual costs of
automation, including those represented by breakdowns and main-
tenance, 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
232 Living Labour

autonomous management of production by section. This is accompan-

ied 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 associ-
ated 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 manage-
ment 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 com-
munication (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 alterna-
tives to work on the line, after the tightening of flows through a new
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 233

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 partici-
pative 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 reorgan-
isation 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 trajector-
ies 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 manage-
ment, 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
234 Living Labour

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 manu-
facturing 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 imple-
mentation 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
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 235

of observation, by the ceaseless change which traverses institutions and

social arrangements: a workstation once analysed becomes unrecognis-
able 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 inten-
tional 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 rela-
tions 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 imple-
mentation 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
236 Living Labour

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 auton-
omy? 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 tech-
nology 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 effec-
tive 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 engineer-
ing. 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 contra-
dictory, form of organisation of work relations and the ensemble of
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 237

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 age-
structure might bring about a kind of demographic transition over the
coming years. The first question is, in what conditions will the old-
timers 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 Eight-
ies 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 prob-
lems. 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 chal-
lenging such rigidities as the 2 x 8 hour shift system and the accumula-
tion 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 thirty-
somethings, 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
238 Living Labour

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 manage-
ment 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, how-
ever, 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
 Possible Futures of the Sochaux System 239

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 line-
balancing 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 respon-
sibilities, in particular the integration into the work of the assembly-line
operative of functions now made peripheral and attributed to ‘white-
collar’ 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 alterna-
tives 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.
240 Living Labour

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 trans-
formed 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

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.
10. The wage-strike in 1948 lasted five weeks. Although long-lasting, it was very
restrained (absence of violence, involvement of the public authorities, suc-
cessive 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.
11. Jean Louis Joubet, Automobiles Peugeot . . . op. cit.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. It was at this time that clocking-on for manual workers was abolished.
15. 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.
16. 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 plas-
tic 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 disorganisa-
tion 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 assump-
tions derived from his own representation of the activity, one of the nor-
mative 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 depart-
ment) 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 gen-
erally 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 super-
visor 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 regret-
ting 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 whole-
plant 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 tem-
porary 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, Jean-
Philippe 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 pro-
duction 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 work-
ers 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 statis-
tique)’, 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 enter-
prise 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

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 engen-
dering 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 them-
selves against managerial domination?
17. Jean-Daniel Reynaud, Les règles du jeu: l’action collective et les règles du jeu,
Paris, A. Colin, 1993, p. 31.
18. 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.
19. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing . . . , op. cit., p. 175.
20. On this, see Chapter 4.
21. The number of workstations on a line varies in fact between 80 and 100.
22. Times are expressed in minutes and hundredths of minutes, not in seconds.
23. 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.
24. This expression of Gilbert Simondon’s comes from his Du mode d’existence
des objets techniques, Paris, Aubier, 1958 (republished 1989).
25. 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.
26. 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 Peugeot-
Sochaux, 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. 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.
31. 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 gestion-
naire’, 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 ressou-
rces humaines chez les fournisseurs de l’automobile et de l’armement aéronautique,
 Notes 249

Noisy-le-Grand, Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi, Dossier de recherche No. 31,

1990.
12. J.-L. Lamprecht, ISO 9000, se préparer à la certification, Paris, Afnor Editions, 1994.
13. Frederik Mispelbloom, Au-delà de la qualité: démarches qualité, conditions de
travail et politiques du bonheur, Paris, Syros, 1994.
14. Automobiles Peugeot, Centre de production de Sochaux, Bilans sociaux:
1993, 33 cases; 1994, 55 cases; 1995, 65 cases; 1996, 92 cases; 1997, 82 cases.
15. Dr. Moreau, occupational physician at the Carrosserie, Sochaux, L’Usine
nouvelle, No. 511, 15 December 1995.
16. To the partially incapacitated workers must be added at least 200 clerical
workers whose promotion was connected to similar incapacities: the man-
agement 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.
17. 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.
18. 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 flat-
ter 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.
19. 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’.
20. The previous strike over pay was in 1965, which goes to show how unusual
an event it was.
21. 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 Peu-
geot-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 exten-
sively drawn upon here.
22. 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 add-
itional earning that this had made possible had given the impression of an
improvement in pay without resolving the question of basic pay. The diffi-
culties 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. Automobiles Peugeot, Supervisory Board, 16 October 1989.

24. Pierre Mathiot, ‘La grève Peugeot-Sochaux . . . ’, op. cit.
25. Idem.
26. Gilbert Marion, one of the strikers’ spokespersons, in ‘Peugeot-Sochaux: le
sens d’un grève’, Collectif, No. 9, November 1989.
27. Cited in P. Mathiot, Etude socio-politique d’un conflit ouvrier . . . , op. cit.
28. Bernard Cuny, a CFDT employee representative, quoted in ‘Peugeot-Sochaux:
le sens d’un grève’, Collectif, No. 9, November 1989.
29. Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour . . . , op. cit.
30. 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.
31. Pierre Mathiot, op. cit.
32. 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.
33. Tiénot Grumbach, advocate, interview, May 1998; Bruno Lemerle, CGT activist
at Peugeot-Sochaux, interview, November 1998.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. 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’.
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. Brochure distributed to employees by the Directorate of Social and
Human Resources, Sochaux, entitled: Le Bulletin de paie, informations
pratiques.
40. Danièle Linhart, L’appel de la sirène, ou l’accoutumance au travail, Paris,
Le Sycomore, 1981.
41. 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 recruit-
ment of 3,135 young workers:

Year 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

Posts lost 2,597 4,023 – 1,760 2,816

Covered by FNE n/k n/k – n/k 1,481
Young recruits – – 2,300 835 –

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 com-
parable 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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Index

Key: b = box; f = figure; n = note; t = table.

absence/absenteeism, 56, 59, 64, 206, 208, 209, 225, 242(n15),

77, 94, 172, 184, 200, 201, 244(n24), 245(n8), 246(n9)
210–11, 224, 244(n18), content of work, 74
250(n41) ‘extensive management
accident, 22, 66, 123b, 124b, role’, 78
250(n38) held responsible for defects, 72
accommodation, 119–20 list of responsibilities, 75–6b
flats, 12 measurement of calibre, 74
hostels, 12, 241(n5) mental burden, 76
housing, 11–12, 14, 120, 211, multi-functional, 206
213, 239, 241(n5) overburdened, 73–9
affinity networks, 151 personnel management
age, 13, 14, 15, 39–40, 47, 50, 51, role, 75b
53, 93, 97, 109, 110, 122–6, recomposition of role (1998),
132–4t, 135–9t, 147, 148, 245(n31)
149, 182, 197, 201, 207, reconciliation of discordant
208, 212, 228, 229, 237, requirements, 55–8
246(n9), 250(n36) renamed RU1, 232
force of youngsters/old-timers route to the post of, 73
conjuncture, 126–9, 130 self-perceptions, 74–9
ageing, 48, 155, 182, 193, 205, supervision of production and
213, 237 team leadership functions,
agencement, 234 75–6b
agriculture, 11, 13 ‘substantial technical
AGV (automated guided vehicle), responsibilities’, 78
220, 221 technical role, 75b
alcohol abuse, 92 twenty-minute addresses, 77,
Algerians, 118, 119, 133t, 140 245(n33)
alienation, 52 AM2 (contremaître/supervisor),
Allan River, 10 3, 6b, 14, 20, 29, 43, 46, 55,
Alsace, 118, 120 56, 65–7, 70, 71, 73, 75b,
ALTM (Association pour le Logement 76b, 78, 91, 97, 103, 104,
des Travailleurs Montbéliardais), 106, 108, 113, 129, 143b,
12, 241(n5) 148, 150, 151, 153, 155,
AM (agent de maîtrise/supervisor), 29 158, 168, 169, 172, 173,
AM1 (chef d’équipe/team-leader ), 175, 180, 181, 188–91,
20, 21, 25–6, 29, 43, 47, 51, 194, 205, 206, 208, 214,
55–8, 59–60, 63–7, 70–82, 91, 227, 235, 243(n13),
92, 96, 97, 103–6, 109, 111, 244(n22, n24, n30)
112, 115–17, 121, 122, 129, abolition of post (1998),
136t, 142–6, 148–9, 154, 169, 245(n31)

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

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
Index 259
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

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
Index 261
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)

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
Index 263
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)

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
Index 265
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

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
Index 267
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

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
Index 269
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

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
Index 271
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

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)
Index 273
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

the present: a moment in a
career, 129–46
young pretenders, disillusioned
old-timers, thirty-
somethings, 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
Index 275
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

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
Index 277
‘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