The ethnography of a factory taken over by its employees highlights aspects of unionism that are too often ignored. Union work helps maintain economic activities that traditional investors considered insufficiently profitable.
While social science is not intended to console, it does offer books to read that excite their readers: Maxime Quijoux’s book is one of them. A specialist in workers’ mobilizations in the Latin American cone, he had already devoted a book to the factories taken over by Argentinian workers in the wake of a severe economic crisis. Today, he is moving his field of investigation to the Paris region to analyze the resources offered by union militancy. To this end, he has chosen the case of the Hélio-Corbeil printing house, taken over in a SCOP (Worker Production Cooperative Society) in February 2012, and in which he spent 22 weeks between October 2012 and April 2013 as an intern responsible for improving communication between the new management and employees. This somewhat unusual participant observation, because it is remote from production work, allows him to show the resources that worker unionism represents in these times of deindustrialization.
From liquidation to the founding of a cooperative society
The first part of the book traces the spectacular decline of a printing company specializing in rotogravure printing and which had up to 2,300 employees in the mid-1960s, offering particularly favorable training, promotion and remuneration conditions for the group of workers in a town, Corbeil, which remained a communist municipality until 1995. However, the workforce collapsed from the 1970s onwards, falling from 1,488 employees in 1978 to 643 in 1980, while the French graphics sector lost between 15 and 20,000 jobs, or one in five jobs between 1975 and 1980. Hélio-Corbeil then suffered the fate of many companies, passing from one shareholder to another, first wanting to maximize the return on investment and neglecting any long-term industrial strategy. Circleprinters, the last Canadian owner, is therefore considering closing the company in 2012, which is precisely what the CGT printing activists are refusing. On their initiative, they are founding a SCOPthe capital of which comes from the reclassification bonus obtained by employees who also pay a half-thirteenth month.
Maxime Quijoux therefore sets out to explain this union mobilization, which contravenes the traditional CGT culture, which has long been reserved with regard to cooperative experiences, as demonstrated by his position on the Lip struggle in Besançon between 1973 and 1980. He first identifies the determining role of unionism in the graphics industry, which practices a kind of closed shop with a monopoly on the recruitment and training of personnel. As a result, among this highly qualified workforce, the union brings out “a professional elite whose qualifications and social position in the company lead them to develop their own economic vision of printing” (p. 59). The author thus considers union activists as “industrial intellectuals”, a notion that he borrows from Bernard Pudal, but which he unfortunately does not demonstrate or develop.
In 2012, the printing works was taken over by the employees and the former union leaders were propelled to the head of the cooperative. This transformation of roles and the functioning of the new cooperative are at the heart of the second and third parts of the book, in which Quijoux shows all the ambivalence of the new configuration. It is indeed a question of facing the persistent difficulties, even though the structure of the company has been transformed and with it, its social ambitions. In this context, the support provided by the General Confederation of SCOP which brings together almost all the production cooperatives, is unique. If it helps the printing industry, it is to better mourn the participatory ambitions, with the ultimate objective not of founding a democratic company, but of “forming a new socially virtuous employer class” (p. 178). This is also why the cooperative continues to operate according to a logic of delegation: most employees – although members – continue to rely on the former delegates who have become the new managers. Only the workshop remains a space of counter-power within which criticism is frequently formulated towards management.
Reclaiming the weapons of the economy
As a result, the compartmentalization between administration and production persists, which reflects the persistence of a divide between blue-collar and white-collar workers. Similarly, the cooperative must deal with the implacable laws of the market, the decline of the sector (nearly 700 graphic design companies disappeared between 1993 and 2005), and the weight of competition, in particular from another printing company in the Paris region in Mary-sur-Marne. This is also why the new CEOand former delegate CGTplays a decisive role as leader. He does not hesitate to form an alliance first with the strong man of Corbeil-Essonnes, Serge Dassault, deputy or mayor since 1995, owner of the Figaro who remains a customer of the cooperative, then with the employers’ union of the labor to save jobs. Does this mean that everything continues as before? The whole point of the investigation is precisely to show the changes at work. And first of all the importance of a productive culture, the attachment to the profession and the fierce will to preserve jobs, which is reflected in the recruitment of 13 employees in the first year of the SCOP. Furthermore, while the work itself has not changed, the cooperative has invested and carried out some renovations. Similarly, management chooses to deal with work problems collectively and pays close attention to the social effects of the decisions it is required to make. This new management therefore operates a different management style.
Maxime Quijoux rightly points out the difficulties of the task. Between 2000 and 2016, only 150 cooperatives were born from the takeover of companies in liquidation. President Hollande and his Minister of Social and Solidarity Economy, Benoît Hamon, had wanted a cooperative shock. On this point too, they failed. However, like the cooperatives CERALEP in Saint-Vallier in the Drôme, specializing in high-voltage insulators, and the Fabrique du Sud, which produces ice cream in Carcassonne, Hélio-Corbeil continues its bumpy journey and has just celebrated its seventh anniversary: 90 jobs have thus been preserved at the same time as know-how. The investigation shows how unionism contributes to training activists and equipping them with technical and managerial skills that they know how to put at the service of other employees. If emancipation must be the work of the workers themselves, then their salvation “will inevitably come through the reconquest of the weapons of the economy” as Maxime Quijoux emphasizes in the last words of his conclusion. We must be grateful to him for having firmly emphasized this by supporting the cooperative workers of Hélio-Corbeil.