Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

http://france.elsevier.com/direct/SOCTRA/

A critical examination of the work

intensification question ☆
Ethnography and history
on the Peugeot–Sochaux assembly line
Nicolas Hatzfeld
Laboratoire d’Histoire Économique, Sociale et des Techniques, Université d’Evry,
2, rue du Facteur Cheval, 91000 Evry, France

Abstract
Using a historical and ethnographic approach to study work at the Peugeot–Sochaux factory during
the late 20th century leads to taking a less unifying, generalized view of work intensification. First, var-
iations in labor rules and the diversity of related problems bring to light the tensions underlying the on-
going issue of workloads. Second, identifying precise moments at which workloads actually became hea-
vier suggests that in order to follow real developments effectively it is preferable to think in terms of a
plurality of periods and tendencies. Above all, study of Sochaux plant shops leads us away from a quan-
titative, abstract view of work intensification. Examining concrete changes in working conditions and
technical components over the long-term makes it easier to grasp the notion of work process intensifica-
tion and makes that notion richer and more relevant for analysis of work worlds.
© 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Work intensification; Assembly line; Factory; Speedups; Peugeot; France; Workloads; Work pace

☆
This article was published originally in French and appeared in Sociologie du Travail 46 (Sociol. Trav.) 2004,
291-307. It has been translated by Amy Jacobs.
E-mail address: nicolas.hatzfeld@univ-evry.fr (N. Hatzfeld).

0038-0296/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.soctra.2007.01.001
e2 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

1. Introduction

During a strike against a management-imposed work speedup on the assembly lines of the
Peugeot car factory at Sochaux in 1981, a heated debate developed among unionists running
the strike about how best to bargain with management. Management had responded to the de-
mand for a slower work pace by proposing detailed discussion of workloads and related rules.
This marked a new attitude; up until then management had refused all discussion on matters of
work organization, which it considered its exclusive prerogative. Certain Confédération Génér-
ale du Travail (CGT) and Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) delegates
wanted to take up the offer to discuss the details of the technical rules and how they were
being combined, how sound they were and recent changes to them. CGT unionists on the
other hand were against moving onto this discussion ground; they considered it a trap and
wanted instead to stick to the terms the workers had chosen for expressing their discontent
and to the demand for a lighter work load. Intuitively, they suspected a technicist trap, and
their perception was right; this was in fact what management had in mind. In the course of
the negotiations, management representatives laid out their technical arguments like a smo-
kescreen; in exchange for a few temporary measures, they obtained confirmation of the regula-
tions that had led to the contested speedup (Hatzfeld, 2002a: 498–500).
This debate among union representatives on how negotiations should be conducted shows
how acutely relevant the question of understanding workload changes is for the very substance
of labor action. The initial obviousness of the demand to reduce workloads proves controver-
sial when it becomes necessary to define the ground of the debate and the criteria for evaluat-
ing workload: do you choose the subjectivity of the factory workers who do the jobs, which is
limited to the authority of lived experience, or do you accept measurements resulting from an
abstract combination of rules that claim to be as scientific as work organization itself, based in
fact on management’s criteria?
The dispute among union activists is an invitation to anyone studying work worlds to ask
the same question. That dispute refers to the intense, persistent concern of many employees at
seeing the degree of discomfort in their work increase; a preoccupation that cannot be ne-
glected or underestimated by researchers exploring changes in work1. It also leads to looking
for particular ways of grasping the problem: as its own reality, of course, but also as it may
reveal the major issues running across work spaces2.

2. Plea for an ethnographic and historical study from the inside

The notion of work intensification is often used as a virtually indisputable way of describ-
ing how work has evolved. This is the case in a major recent statistical survey on well-being
and work that concludes: “Work has intensified. Intensification accelerated considerably in the
second half of the 1980s and continued, though at a slightly slower pace, throughout the

1
Cf. the new impetus given to debate of the notion by a conference entitled “Organisaton, intensité du travail, qua-
lité du travail” held in Paris in November 2002 and organized by the Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi, the CEPREMAP,
the Entreprise-Travail-Emploi doctoral program of CNRS and the Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires, Sociétés
[LATTS at the University of Marne la Vallée].
2
My thanks to Yves Cohen, Pierre Fournier, Cédric Lomba, Jean-Philippe Mazaud, Sophie Pochic, Nicolas Rena-
hy, Gwenaële Rot and Dilip Subramanian for reading earlier versions of this article, whose final form I alone am re-
sponsible for.
 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15 e3

1990s” (Baudelot and Gollac, 2003: 321). This study, based on extensive questioning and in-
terviewing not to mention remarkably rich analyses, has the great merit of putting the empha-
sis back where it belongs: on work as experienced and recounted by those who do it. The
authors’ material derives from statements made by a category of speaker that has been thor-
oughly neglected in public debate—as well as in some scientific debate—in recent years. They
also cite other studies where scientific measurements are used to demonstrate the intensifica-
tion of work (p. 223), judging that statistical surveying is “the most appropriate approach for
fully encompassing the contradictory nature of the relations that individuals entertain with their
work and the extreme diversity of those contradictions” (p. 15).
Other studies, such as Retour sur la condition ouvrière (Beaud and Pialoux, 1999), show
that there are different ways of grasping the complexity of a world centered around work
issues3. The authors’ exploration of work in the Sochaux–Montbéliard factory, with the related
educational issues, tensions of local life, and the activism crisis, weaves a dense representation
of this working world, exercised by crises. Centered around the biggest factory in France, this
ethnographic study pays close attention to questions that in other texts tend to get lost in the
social landscape. Here too the issue of increasing workloads is taken up, at times rather fleet-
ingly as a basic given (pp. 51, 56, 59), at others as the effect of new pressures and new prac-
tices that appear in identical configurations in respondent accounts over a stretch of several
years (pp. 57–58). The study used a “situated context” approach where the assumption is that
the resulting analyses are exemplary; it was done almost entirely through in-depth interviews.
Workers’ discourse is thus simultaneously an account of lived experience at work and a move
of self-reappropriation by the sociologist’s interlocutors, who recreate a distance between
themselves and the factory.
The two approaches are quite distinct, but they both remain outside the work premises.
Their commitment and close attention to what workers have to say constitute a source of ex-
tremely valuable analyses. But does this attachment alone allow us to grasp everything that is
at issue? I do not think so. While I am fully aware of the significance of entering the factory
on approval from senior management, immediate on-site observation, and participation in the
work world one is studying, seem to me extremely valuable complements to interviews. It is
true that the researcher using this approach may isolate “what goes on in the company from
what goes on outside it” or study “the decisions made by managers and their effects within
the company” separately from “the socio-cultural characteristics of employees” (Beaud and
Pialoux, 1999: 18). In exchange, however—since no viewpoint can be total, it seems to me—
being present at the heart of the factory, in the shops, is a means of giving respectful attention
to workers and gaining direct, non-substitutable access to a work reality whose permanent fea-
tures, not to mention the changes in it, need to be continually, carefully reexamined (Textbox
1). However, this reality does remain singular or at best exemplary, meaning that other “situ-
ated” research studies are also needed.
It is worthwhile presenting in some detail the reference to ethnography (Dodier and Baszan-
ger, 1997). Ethnography uses empirical research and materials that allow for a reflexive plunge
into the world one intends to study without any preestablished research framework. It is also
important in this kind of research to leave it to the actors to determine their actions and shape

3
Outside the university sphere, it is worth noting the many recent films on the world of manual workers, many of
them documentaries; also the artistic and ethnographic work done in 2002 by Stéphane Gatti’s “Entre-tenir” associa-
tion on the workers and factories of Saint-Dizier.
e4 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

Textbox 1
I began this research in 1996 with Jean-Pierre Durand in the framework of a sociology-of-
work study to be done in the assembly shops of the Peugeot–Sochaux car factory (Durand
et al., 1999). It was done with the support of factory management, who probably wanted to
have an external, impartial study of their shops and who were getting ready to implement
several reforms, including changes in worker group arrangements and industrial moderniza-
tion of assembly shops. The study was always presented to workers, foremen and lower
management as an independent university project being done with the assent of senior man-
agers and scheduled for public diffusion. Because there were two of us working on the pro-
ject, the research encompasses a variety of methods (Durand and Hatzfeld, 2002). For my
part, I worked at several places in the assembly line during 3 months. At the time, my par-
ticipant observation concentrated on the team in which was my workplace. In addition, I
interviewed or followed team leaders and foremen, directly above workers in the hierarchy
or very close, approximately 10 technicians and nearly as many mid-level managers, most
of whom I met outside scheduled workteam hours. At the end of each period I carried out
interview–conversations with more than 10 operators of each team to obtain greater knowl-
edge of the work station. This led to a complex comparison of interviewing and the ap-
proach that consists in sharing the work. Lastly, thanks to relations outside this focused net-
work, we were able to broaden the scope of the research and gain access to the managerial
and technical documents on human resources, labor relations and production organization
that we wanted to consult. Moreover, from 1996 to 1999 my research took on new sub-
stance: in addition to the ethnographic study, I wrote a doctoral thesis in social history on
the automobile factory during the second half of the 20th century using archives from the
Sochaux site, the Peugeot SA company, and the “Aventure Peugeot” museum at Sochaux,
union and private sources, as well as the oral sources that had developed into a network in
the course of my investigations, questioning, and contacts.

the meanings they attribute to the rules, situations and acts that mark their social and working
life; and to understand that these meanings are inscribed in social spaces and temporal
schemes of varying breadth and scope. The present text aims to reexamine and reformulate
the notion of work intensification on the basis of how it is used by actors in work situations
and relationships. The historical aspect of the approach is due of course to the considerable
time span covered by the research—the second half of the 20th century, a time span that I
see as particularly relevant for dealing in concrete terms with a notion that presupposes a tem-
poral dynamic. But here again, method and point of view cannot be dissociated: it is also im-
portant not to reduce the traces of the past to brief glances that a faintly curious present may
make at it, confining it to a fluctuating category called “before.” Work intensity was an issue
then, too, as was intensification (Fridenson, 1986). The discomfort and pain endured by work-
ers today should not move us to treat lightly the discomfort and pain of preceding generations;
in our thinking today we have to be able to dialogue with yesterday’s results. The historical
approach, with its concern to gain access to and unfurl the content of past spaces, leads to
accepting a non-linear dynamic also, a complex and perhaps multiple back-and-forth move-
ment. Lastly, the historical approach leads us to compare and consolidate sources, drawing all
the substance out of each without overstepping its limits or scope of application.
Peugeot–Sochaux assembly lines are an excellent observation field for reexamining the no-
tion of intensification, a classic notion for unionists (Hatzfeld, 2005) that has now been taken
 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15 e5

up by sociologists. They are an emblematic place that has long been invoked to illustrate the
intensity of manual labor. Moreover, they involve particularly complex, precise work organiza-
tion, perhaps the most sophisticated type of organization, and we are in a particularly advanta-
geous situation when it comes to finding traces of organizational arrangements, systems, re-
forms, and labor conflicts around the issue of work intensification.
The analysis is in two parts. First, it examines the above-cited definition of intensification
as an increase in workload. Second, it considers another avenue, also suggested by workers’
comments on their experience, where the focus is shifted from the person doing the work to
the system that person is caught up in; in this case intensification of the factory as a whole.

3. Ever faster? Questioning what seems an obvious fact

3.1. The expression of an incessant worry

Regardless of whether assembly workers are questioned on the point or take it up sponta-
neously, they all often speak of an increase in workload. The idea is sometimes expressed
without being fully formulated, as by a worker I met with again 2 years after he had trained
me at the job I was to replace him in. In the midst of references to changes in his job, he broke
off: “In any case, you can see for yourself since you started coming here that it has been get-
ting worse and worse.” Upon which he immediately mentioned as perfectly obvious evidence
of this state of affairs the fact that an operation had recently been added to his workplace on
the occasion of the monthly task redistribution plan determined in accordance with the produc-
tion schedule.
In this kind of ordinary denunciation of workload change, workers’ recriminations may
focus on a variety of situations. As in the case just mentioned, they may criticize the incessant
redefining of work station operations by the “methods department.” Every month a technician
determines the numbers of workers required on a given assembly line in accordance with fac-
tory production program changes determined from an estimate of the variety of cars to be pro-
duced. Then he distributes the operations among the various work stations. Increased produc-
tion implies that cars go through the assembly line faster, the assembly cycle is shorter,
number of personnel greater, and that on average there are fewer operations to be performed
on each car at each work station. Reduced production means the opposite: longer cycle time,
fewer workers, more operations per station. Though these changes do not necessarily affect the
average theoretical workload as defined in the technical specifications4, they do require that
workers make an ongoing effort to learn new operations, and this is especially wearing given
that what is learned can very well become useless in later operation distributions.
Furthermore, overall workload stability in no way means that all workers come out even;
some win and other lose. Foremen implement operation distribution determined by strict calcu-
lations; they know from experience that these calculations do not always closely follow actual
work practices, and they also take into account what they think the unit of teamworkers—
called an elementary unit—will accept given its composition and traditions; i.e. as a function
of the essential notion of collective work “atmosphere” (Textbox 2).

4
Theoretical workload plays an essential role: it is established according to strict, complex rules and is used by
management to establish goals previously defined by the methods department and the relation between labor intensity
for workers and desired results.
e6 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

Textbox 2
The notion of atmosphere is a mystery for research, or a paradox. Present everywhere in
work contexts, this term is of precious value in characterizing the cohesion of an instituted
social group or community. It can be applied as readily to a family group as to a work or
sporting collective, and may even describe the set of people living in the same apartment
building, for example, or a political group. Specifically, it is used to designate the voluntary
or intentional aspect of this kind of social group, its part of cohesion produced by the indi-
viduals who compose such a group, and not accounted for by the role of the institution that
governs it. In this sense atmosphere evokes aspects characteristic of an open society within
these more or less restrictive institutions—aspects that refer to the freedom postulate. Often,
in noting the different terms used to qualify various characteristics of a given group atmo-
sphere, one gets a direct glimpse into the issues and tensions running through it. Workteam
atmosphere is likely to be judged differently depending on whether the person assessing it
is a young, enterprising boss, a female temp worker born to immigrant parents, a long-time
and old worker, a unionist, etc. The variety of evaluations is to be grasped in relation to
more or less distinct and highly relative solidarity networks. Paradoxically, sociologists
and managers who attach great importance and pay particular attention to the concept of
autonomy in the studies they conduct within companies seem to sidestep the notion of at-
mosphere. In contrast to autonomy, atmosphere refers to ramifications external to the space
and moment in which issues get expressed. Because it encompasses variations in social and
temporal scale operative in workers’ situations, the notion of atmosphere is a means of
avoiding the noted risk of creating barriers between different research approaches.

Adjustments similar to those done by team leaders are also done at the scale of the whole
assembly line, even the shop as a whole. In addition to the incessant effort to adapt, workers
are continually called upon to defend their positions within the various collectives to avoid los-
ing out in new distributions5. Self-defense of this kind, against not only the organization but
other workers, is similar to the Eigensinn, the sense of self as defined with regard to 20th-
century German workers (Lüdtke, 2000). It produces complex relations among workers. First,
it leads to the affirmation that there are informal but highly meaningful hierarchical rankings
within teams, related to certain individuals’ ability to get assigned to desirable work stations
or obtain favorable arrangements (Durand and Hatzfeld, 2002: 102). Second, implemented pro-
cedures and behavior are subjected to others’ judgment. When these frictions among workers
remain within the limits of the acceptable, they are smoothed over by the fact that all criticize
the system and work intensification. But these social arrangements do not originate with
changes in average workload.

3.2. Productivity: situated techniques

Gains in productivity raise another type of problem. Productivity increases are constantly
being devised directly by methods department technicians and engineers. To this must of

5
This game can be compared to the one that teachers engage in during annual meetings to allocate classes and
schedules before the school year begins. In both cases there is conflict between the individual and collective dimen-
sions, strategies clash, actors jockey for position, the results say something about each player, and decisions influ-
enced by hierarchical position help determine the “atmosphere” of the given school or workshop.
 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15 e7

course be added all suggestions and proposals for increasing productivity preferred by workers
themselves in exchange for payment by the company, though it is important not to overesti-
mate the industrial efficiency of these suggestions. There have been several varieties of this
time-honored practice since the 1930s, the most recent of which was the Japanese kaisen,
which had its moment of glory in 1980s managerial discourse. But according to Japanese se-
nior managers and consultants, the reasons for implicating workers were essentially ideologi-
cal: the primary aim was to get them to work to realize the major increases in productivity de-
vised by technicians and engineers (Shimizu, 1999). Already in the great productivity period
of the 1950s, technical reports were showing that worker suggestions represented no more than
10% of the gains devised by methods departments (Hatzfeld, 2002a: 314–319).
While planned productivity gains do not modify personnel’s theoretical workload, they give
rise to incessant changes in operations, and they very often eat into the moments of rest within
those operations that workers have managed to arrange for themselves thanks to their gestural
know-how and the little schemes they devise individually or among themselves—and that they
continue to devise in response to incessant variations in parts and equipment. The result is an
undercurrent of tension that haunts life in factory shops. Some companies fail to take this ten-
sion into account and let methods department technicians act as they wish with regard to
assembly workers, counting on the labor market to regulate the resulting friction (Gorgeu et
al., 1998). During high activity periods, turnover among these operators functions as a kind
of safety valve, and when jobs are scarce, fear of unemployment causes a sense of resignation.
The balance of power and overall bargaining relations at the most basic level of operations
also play a role. A former operations timekeeper at the Poissy Chrysler factory recalls that
some of his fellow timers “did their job staked out on platforms or hiding behind a pole”—
irregular methods reproved by the head of the methods department. This timer himself
recounted how a shop foreman had hung him from a hoist by his smock collar 1 day; the fore-
man was furious at reductions in regulation times for certain operations, precisely because
those reductions seemed likely to set off explosive protest among the workers (Loubet and
Hatzfeld, 2001: 169). Other firms choose the opposite strategy, overseeing methods depart-
ment research and implementation of productivity gain measures. At Peugeot, for example,
worker suggestion systems are strictly regulated: only personnel assigned to a given work sta-
tion have the right to suggest ways of improving it; this is to give the impression that produc-
tivity gains are being fairly distributed and to preclude the sense that work is being intensified
“cynically” (Hatzfeld, 2004). Similarly, from the 1960s to the 1990s operation timekeepers
were only allowed to modify the allotted time for an operation if the operation had been mod-
ified for ergonomic reasons or in connection with equipment or preparation. They had a
sophisticated protocol to comply with: it was forbidden to time a worker who did not usually
work at the given station (a virtuouso who was likely to “break”—radically reduce—allotted
times, for example); workers had to be told in advance that they were going to be timed and
reminded of the operation description (the prescribed “operating mode”); the worker was
allowed assistance from a delegate, etc. The point was both to legitimate the neutral, scientific
image of operations timers and the allotted times they were there to determine, and to encom-
pass them in a convention-governed relation. This twofold aim was only partially attained, and
workers’ habitual wariness led them to resist this attempt to win them over (Goux, 2003; Dur-
and, 1990).
Operation timekeepers’ work was codified in different ways not only by the company but
also by how it was situated historically. Before the late 1950s in the major automobile fac-
tories, assembly line workers’ wages were calculated in terms of yield (Rolle, 1962). Techni-
e8 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

cians allotted a given amount of time to each task after it had been timed, and foremen orga-
nized the work so as to be consistent with those times. But workers could exceed the fixed
production quantity and receive a bonus, an increase in pay for that period. In giving workers’
an incentive to increase their own work intensity, the organizers acknowledged that their esti-
mates were in fact unfixed approximations, and this in turn was a way of granting themselves
permission to reduce them, after a purely formal retiming procedure, when the bonus proved
too easy to earn. On the assembly lines, where work pace is collectively determined, the prac-
tice of exceeding production goals was ratified by productivity calculations and pay in the
form of a collective bonus. But from year to year, work organizers refined their measurements,
seeking to facilitate overall activity coordination. Above all, they wanted to categorically assert
their authority over the factory shop people. The practice of paying workers on a yield basis
was gradually phased out; it was ultimately abolished in 1960. This change was carried out
about the same time at Sochaux and Renault (Moutet, 2003) and apparently earlier than for
other European automobile manufacturers, as if the aim of the French rationalizers had been
more radical than those of their German or Italian counterparts (Hatzfeld et al., 2004)6. These
changes were followed by stabilization of required part quantities and work paces. Insufficient
individual productivity continued to incur difficulties for the worker in question, but working
faster than the required pace became a gratuitous (non-remunerated) gesture, an assertion of
virtuosity, a conspicuous reconquest of self through reinvention of the lived moment (Mouli-
nié, 1993; Dodier, 1995). Moreover, by claiming that their measurements were scientific,
methods departments precluded themselves from correcting those measurements without a
change in work procedure. This meant that any future reduction of allotted performance time
was caught up in transformation of the activity as a whole.
But organization technique codification evolved further. In the 1980s, computerization be-
gan affecting modes for establishing regulation times; most were no longer determined by op-
eration timing. Contrary to what might be thought outside the factory shops, this development
was in no way a loosening of the grip of time nor did it make the forms of that grip any
milder; rather it was a means for the timekeepers to avoid direct confrontation with workers
and the friction, bargaining, self-justifications that such contact implied. The new time-
makers wanted to sideskirt the labor regulations that their predecessors had instituted. In this
connection, a recent film on the Le Mans Renault factory shows the devastating effects of di-
luting production rules and goals for new workers, then reinstating them abruptly after it was
observed that the hoped-for “excess” productivity had not occurred (Poirier, 2002). Effacing
certain rules in no way attenuates constraints on workers.

4. Productivity and intensification: the limits of arithmetic

4.1. Identifiable moments when workload was increased

Whatever the form, the constant productivity gain dynamic has always given workers the
sense that the definition of their work is under incessant attack and made them fear contrac-
tions of allotted times and margins. For most, the quest for increased productivity represents
a threat of workload increase. Is this confirmed by measurements in factory documents? For

6
Industrial enterprises with much less powerful and sophisticated methods departments than the French continued
to pay on yield, a fact which disqualifies the thesis of historical or technological determinism.
 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15 e9

some periods it is, particularly over the 1950s, a time when the quest to increase productivity
was intense in Europe (Barjot and Reveillard, 2002). The documents show that during the
“work-simplification” movement, Sochaux’s methods departments (like those of other major
car manufacturers) were monitoring and framing worker production and labor ever more clo-
sely and precisely each month.7 They show how they managed to incorporate a stable produc-
tion increase, with the corresponding bonus, into the new workload and wage specifications.
The productivity gains-work intensification tie shows up again in archives for the early
1980s, when French automobile companies in the depths of a major industrial crisis (Loubet,
2001) took emergency measures to obtain productivity gains (Goux, 2003). First Renault, then
Peugeot turned to consultants who used rudimentary observation methods in the shops to iden-
tify and assess the proportion of non-worked time in workers’ groups. The non-company status
of these consulting agencies enabled them to engage in such practices—which methods depart-
ment technicians and engineers considered shameful—and to recommend reducing the number
of workers in the shops. During the same period, 1982–1983, Peugeot “bought” outright from
workers a number of maneuvers likely to increase productivity (Hatzfeld, 2002a: 500–502). In
this way the factory appropriated the worktime reductions between two timings observed by
operation timers, reductions that were not due to any change in method, equipment or product.
Bonuses for suggestions followed a preset scale and were high enough to allow cuts in free
time to be imposed without protest. Lastly, at the scale of the Peugeot SA Corporation, harmo-
nization of time calculation methods across Peugeot, Citroën and Talbot led to reexamining the
arithmetic of some allotted times and abolishing certain local concessions.
Clearly at these two precise moments the organization rationalization that was producing
substantial productivity gains was also increasing workers’ workloads. In both cases the
“social effects” are clear: strikes, and strike demands focused on the issue of increased work-
load. As mentioned in the introduction, the 1981 strike at Peugeot–Sochaux began in the
workshops most affected by the increased workload, and the question has been at the center
of discussions ever since. But the strikers did not win the point. In 1960 and 1961 there had
been strikes at the factory against “hellish work paces” and certain related worker demands
had been met: a time-reduction coefficient was applied to allotted times by workday length;
and assembly line workers were granted relief breaks, called “helps”, where each worker had
a turn to be relieved by a substitute. Do help breaks constitute an easing of the workload or
compensation for the increase? While the unions denounced the situation, activist workers
were careful not to determine the answer arithmetically, and in retrospect they analyzed the
concessions they obtained then as their “first success, which has to be valued for what it is,
but also illustrates the appalling working conditions” (Minazzi, 1978).

4.2. Time regulations are first and foremost social techniques

The fact that the unions kept repeating their arguments is perplexing. In 1981 union leaflets
denounced the imposition of inhuman speedups, but they had already done so in the 1970s and
even more clearly 10 years earlier. At that time the CGT (one of France’s most militant leftist
unions, partially identified with the French communist party), at the forefront of the struggle
“against inhuman speedups” (Hatzfeld, 2003), stressed how far-reaching the rationalization

7
Cf. the Sochaux factory manager’s remarkable monthly technical reports for the company’s senior managers.
These archives are accessible at Sochaux’s “Aventure Peugeot” museum.
e10 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

moves were. As a CGT spokesman at Sochaux indicated in 1963: “Not a month goes by, and
sometimes less, without work stoppages around the problem of speedups, work loads.” The
Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC) of the time (Christian workers’
union) joined with the CGT in the 1960–1961 strikes at Sochaux. This makes it difficult to
take the repeated denunciations at face value, to think of accentuated workload as an objective,
cumulative long-term process. Why should the 1961 declarations be considered any less cred-
ible than those made in 1981, when the substance of both is that tolerable limits have been
overstepped? And what weight should be given later to statements that “it is getting worse
and worse”? In fact, with the exception of the moments just reviewed, where all elements con-
cur (management and union documents, participants’ accounts and events), there is little in the
way of clear markers for assessing the evolution of workloads over the long-term. And there is
even a document that suggests the possibility that the opposite dynamic was at work. In 1971
individual “help” times increased. When the Sochaux and Mulhouse factories were harmo-
nized on this point, the less generous factory, Sochaux, adopted the more generous proportion
of substitutes and substitution times in effect at Mulhouse; times which “there seemed abso-
lutely no reason to refuse at the time,” to quote a company official of the period (Hatzfeld,
2002a). It is as if there had been a tendency to make concessions at precisely the moment
when criticism of internal work paces began gaining ground again in worker opinion (Vigna,
2003).
The point is that quantitative indications have to be complemented by representations (Con-
inck, 2001). Denunciations of speedups bring to the fore the subjective and social component
inherent in what is called rational organization. Workers and work organizers, who know from
their daily job just how debatable speed assessment is—the famous coefficient by means of
which operation timers weighted the measurements they arrived at in accordance with their
deepest convictions and shop foreman’s recommendations—knew this well. Technicians’ pre-
cautions are simply incapable of resolving the problem of variations in speed assessment over
a long period of time; nor can they resolve the question of effects of durations and work sche-
dules on workers’ speed and technicians’ estimates of it. Above all, such measurements cannot
be dissociated from the situations that a factory as a whole is caught up in, situations that
reflect the social relations among persons working in a given workshop, particularly those
obtaining between assembly workers and production overseers. In 1960–1961, Sochaux
assembly line workers protested against speedups at the very moment they were being moved
into a system of alternating schedules called “doublage” (one team in the morning, another in
the evening), a particularly trying schedule which in itself should have been enough to make
intolerable the paces that had been tolerated until then. According to the reports, a high pro-
portion of the protesting workers were young men recently recruited in the surrounding coun-
tryside and still not accustomed to their labor as unskilled workers. In the early 1970s, high
turnover, hiring difficulties, and the “May 1968 effect” on factory life moved management to
improve “help” times rules for workers. The intensification noted for 1980–1981 corresponded
on the contrary to an economic context of zero hiring, falling turnover, and employees’ worry
about the future of the company and their jobs. In sum, there are two serious limitations to a
strictly arithmetic view of the question. First, with the exception of specific moments when
rules and measurements may be relatively dissociated from other work characteristics, it is
hardly possible to study work intensification from a strictly quantitative viewpoint. Second,
changes in the rules reflect the modes used by workers and work monitors—the latter working
for senior company management—to get back into position after sizing up a change in the
overall situation.
 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15 e11

5. Why a qualitative approach?

5.1. Another definition originating with workers: not as uncomfortable but more difficult

The difficulty of strictly circumscribing increases in workload does not invalidate the idea
of intensification, but it does call for shifting point of view. If we return to the source, i.e. re-
presentations of work that the relevant workers give when surveyed ethnographically, we see
another way of approaching the problem. In these workers’ discourse, increasing workload is
not actually always presented as an obvious fact but often integrated into a more ambivalent
view. “It used to be more uncomfortable, but the workload was not as heavy” is what certain
fitters with at least 15 years on the job answered when questioned on how the work has
evolved. With this definition they are referring to two contradictory developments.
Less uncomfortable, unpleasant work. Most long-time factory workers, those over 37, men-
tion that ergonomic information has gradually been taken into account. Physical positions,
equipment, and work components are being more carefully studied overall. Muscular effort is
less intense than before, and the loads that have to be manipulated are lighter; there are fewer
awkward movements, stretching movements, etc. Since the 1970s at Peugeot—much earlier at
Renault (Perriaux, 1998; Rot, 2000)—ergonomic concerns have played an increasingly explicit
role in work adjustments and they have significantly reduced muscular effort and amount of
energy expended. Due to changes in the way worker trajectories are managed, this decrease
cannot really be measured. Before the 1980s, the tradition was that workers who were still on
the assembly line at age 45 were reassigned to less wearing and uncomfortable jobs. The effect
of these implicit arrangements and the resulting changes in activity meant that injuries were
not likely to show up. In the 1990s, by contrast, with hiring and promotions blocked, workers
were increasingly forced to remain on the assembly line until retirement, and in some cases to
return to it. Up against this new, disturbing and destabilizing constraint (Gaudard, 1996;
Laville, 1996; Gollac and Volkoff, 2000), having an occupational doctor certify injury was a
favored means used by older workers to get taken off the assembly line (Durand and Hatzfeld,
2002: 180–186). However this may be, the locus of demands made on workers’ bodies has
shifted. Integrating the progress made thanks to ergonomics, those demands are now concen-
trated on the organs involved in contact, part positioning and related communication. While
new installations and equipment spare the chest, more is demanded of the hands and forearms.
The representation of increased difficulty is linked to the fact that cycles were shortened;
cars-in-the making now pass through the assembly line more quickly. Workers’ accounts refer
to an earlier image where they had much greater latitude and where anyone with a moderate
degree of dexterity could squeeze more free time out of work. They mention assembly cycle
length. Whereas in 2002 cycle length on normally working assembly lines was 1–2 min, a
few decades earlier it had been 3 and even 4 or 5 min. Furthermore, given the difficulty of
breaking down certain tasks, some workstations were “double-duration” (occasionally triple-
duration), a situation that enabled brilliant workers (Linhart, 1978: 34) to relay each other,
one resting while the other worked. In general, cycle length made it fairly easy for workers
to accelerate their work and thereby gain moments of rest through self-intensification. Redu-
cing cycle time has also reduced the extent of “working back up along the line”. This devel-
opment is hard to assess on the basis of participants’ accounts: speakers refer to their youth at
the time and may thus minimize the difficulties of the work.
e12 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

5.2. A neglected type of intensification, that of the factory as a whole

Underlying reduced cycle times is a tremendous advance in methods department control

over the shops. To obtain this new power, engineers and technicians had to develop the major
new work-simplification method mentioned above; i.e. ever more fine task breakdown, making
it possible to control not only entire tasks but elementary operations down to single gestures.
This is more than composing a set of measured, repertoried units; it is based on a transfer of
gestural know-how toward parts and supplies, equipment and installations. The greater part of
methods department work has been to materialize the essence of the worker esthetic; i.e. exac-
titude in carrying out the prescribed operation while sparing the body; exactitude that is both
efficient and pleasant to see. Borrowing notions from Gilbert Simondon (1989) on the evolu-
tion of technical objects, the worker activity was increasingly hemmed in while the factory be-
came increasingly dense along with the intertwining of factory components (plant, tools, rules,
supplies). Not only were methods departments and organizers refining their knowledge of
workers’ activity but they were continually reducing the specificity of that activity; i.e.
worker’s interaction with matter. In this way they reduced the temporal, spatial, and cognitive
margins that had been necessary until then to accomplish production (Iseres-CGT, 2001).
Though the factory worker has not been replaced by robots, he has been dispossessed of the
concrete richness of his activity. The comparison with automobile worker operations a few
decades earlier is quite revealing. To fit out a car body interior, an assembly line worker in
the 1960s cut out a piece of material to the specified format and positioned it, adjusting it to
the millimeter to avoid visual defects and ensure water tightness—all on the line itself. The
operation required great dexterity and mental concentration. Now the worker merely shoves a
piece of premolded material into place. The implications of this development have been con-
siderable: it allows for reducing cycle times, increasing repetition, tightening the focus of
activity on the manufactured object, fragmenting operations and demands made on the body.
This development too—more than increases in work pace—is what makes particularly disturb-
ing the rise in muscular–skeletal disorders in the zones of workers’ bodies solicited by these
movements.
Clearly time is only one aspect of intensification. Space has also been reduced, whereas the
independence of the worker’s judgment is itself increasingly caught up in quality systems.
Worker’s activity is monitored with precision and increased security by the devices that have
accompanied these new norms (Rot, 1998). The ever more complex enmeshing of each
person’s activity in the overall system is concretized by an increasingly dense network of spec
sheets, screens, cables, more or less automatized equipments, specific programs, and coordi-
nated flows that require fragmented, dispersed, multiform vigilance. A comparable advance in
organization has occurred at the level of manufacturing coordination. Industry computerization
makes it possible to smooth over with astounding efficiency the production hitches linked to
variations in flow organization. And mastering just-in-time manufacturing has a direct impact
on work intensity: with the spectacular reduction in the uncertainties of production program-
ming accomplished in the early 1980s, production organizers were able not only to genuinely
pacify ordinary workshop life, but also to drastically reduce worker number and operation time
margins, which had been maintained at all levels from worker to shop foreman precisely in
order to compensate for the high degree of production uncertainty (Loubet and Hatzfeld,
2001). Meanwhile organizers were eager to obtain fuller control over the fit between work
time and break time; they set about getting a tighter grip on relations among work group mem-
bers, sought to individualize hierarchical relations (Hatzfeld, 2002b); the work atmosphere
 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15 e13

became an increasingly explicit concern of work organizers. From this perspective, work inten-
sification seems to amount to tightening and integration, i.e. an ever more powerful grip of the
factory on workers (Cottereau, 1998; Cohen, 2000). In this respect, the new assembly line
workshops set up in 1989 and later in 2000 represent a fundamental transformation of assem-
bly line work (Pialoux, 1996).

6. Conclusion

It seems difficult to conclude this inquiry without coming back to Marx’s definition of
work intensification. As he saw it, the worker was forced to make an “increased expenditure
of labor within a time which remains constant, a heightened tension of labor-power, and a clo-
ser filling-up of the pores of the working day, i.e. a condensation of labor, to a degree which
can only be attained within the limits of the shortened working day” (Marx [1867], 1990: I, 2).
First, he saw intensification as capitalists’ response to the reduction of legal work hours that
had been won through worker struggle and combat. Second, he saw this tendency at work in
the accentuated discipline and surveillance aimed at reducing slack time, and he identified it as
the effect of technical progress: increasingly, machines were forcing workers to match machine
pace. Marx wrote this before timekeeping had been invented, before factories had been trans-
formed by electricity, conveyor belts and computerized systems—all differences that suggest
we should be cautious about adopting his observations. Still, those observations were the basis
for complex technical and social analysis, a dialectic vision of developments that affect work
situations of a sort that remains highly relevant for understanding factory realities.
Alongside activist use of the notion of work intensification—which remains legitimate for
labor action—the tutelary reference suggests the importance of renewing research on work in-
tensification and broadening its scope beyond the issue of pace. That problem has certainly not
disappeared. The authority of measured time has hardly diminished in work relations and is no
doubt moving into activity sectors long governed by other criteria.8 But one frequently en-
countered representation holding that workloads are continually increasing seems debatable to
me for several reasons. First, this trend has yet to be demonstrated for the long-term on the
basis of activity measurements, assuming such a demonstration could be realized. Statistical
surveys of workers at consecutive moments in time use a different approach, and their reflex-
ive rigor brings out the degree to which the figures produced result from the survey conditions
themselves (phrasing and ordering of the questions, choice of interviewers and interviewer–re-
spondent relation), while the work of data correction and interpretation have produced fine-
tuned analyses of workers’ relation to their work at these different moments (Gollac, 1997).
But these analyses and interpretations remains focused on the substance of that relation itself;
on respondents’ representations of their occupational mobility, for example, the fragility of
their jobs, social recognition. Work intensity is shaped by these representations. However rig-
orous criticism within the statistical surveys may be, the surveys themselves should be cross-
checked and compared with situated research anchored in actual practices.
This ethnographic and historical study of work in the Sochaux factory is not a case study
strictly speaking. The results suggest that it is worthwhile departing from a unifying, general-
ized vision of work intensification. While the study identifies moments at which workloads

8
One striking example is the powerful new role of normed time in the truckdriving occupation (Audouin-Desfon-
taines, 2002).
e14 N. Hatzfeld / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e1–e15

were indeed accentuated—such as the 1980s in the automobile industry—it also suggests we
should be cautious when speaking of other periods, when pressure was less overt and perhaps
not as intense. This distinction brings another in its wake—between work spaces. In the auto-
mobile sector alone, manufacturing systems are being reorganized, and they are making new
and varied use of the legal outsourcing of increasingly integrated work segments. In a way,
the factory itself now runs through the business company. But in shops that have been out-
sourced, the workload seems much heavier, a state of affairs deriving from low-security, low-
wage jobs and much heaver constraints than in the central company (Gorgeu and Mathieu,
2003). Recognizing the plurality of both synchronic and diachronic trends makes it possible
to attend to real developments. This in turn allows us to accord the same respect to current
lassitude as to earlier experiences of discomfort and pain.
Above all, studying Sochaux factory workshops suggests that the commitment to the quan-
titative, arithmetic view of work intensity and how it develops should be reexamined and mod-
ified. The limitations of approaching workload in abstract terms independent of the composite
modes that work actually involves should not in any way lead us to dismiss the question of
work intensity, which is an omnipresent issue in work relations. On the contrary, it is impor-
tant to be aware of and to understand in concrete terms the changes affecting work due to the
transformation of employment conditions and the techniques and technical modes used in ac-
tivities. Over time, the intensity of life and work in factory society has decidedly increased and
come to assume a tighter hold on the people active in it. These developments, far from making
the notion of work intensity impossible to grasp, give it a new substance and relevance for
analysis of work worlds.

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Film cited

Poirier, A., 2002. L’usine désenchantée. Color, 52 minutes, production-distribution VM Group (with TV 10 Angers).