This paper deals with the organization of work and the labor process in large complexes for oil refining and basic petrochemical production. It is precisely the similarity of labor processes (facilities for cracking or other methods, where a “process” is continuously operating, a set of chemical reactions triggered on a large scale and directed from control rooms) that leads us to expect this rapprochement. But it should be indicated that by doing so, we are pushing against the borders of the sectors or industries of production in the economic sense, as well as collective bargaining agreements (the petrochemical workers and oil workers are governed by separate contracts, even in cases where tasks and posts are strictly comparable). Moreover, at the global level of multinational companies, the relationship maintained between the price of oil and the income [la rente] of which it constitutes a significant portion is clearly inverse: the oil producers pocket an income that strikes the costs of basic petrochemicals. A higher price of naphtha puts the oil producers at an advantage and disadvantages the enterprises which use that naphtha to produce ammonia and ethylene. The situation is complicated because petrochemical subsidiaries of oil firms find their basic products being charged at full price by the parent company, representing a higher theoretical net cost at the subsidiary level, but an uptake [incorporation] of profit at the level of the group. 

There remains a related labor process for all of these complexes: the operators of an oil-cracking refinery and those of an ethylene steam cracker are in charge of similar facilities. We will thus draw together here, in order to analyze the organization of work, the production of gasoline, fuel, naphtha, ethylene, butadiene, propylene, etc. – in short, the fuels and basic chemical products derived from oil, and certain products downstream of intermediary substances that they are immediately subordinate to. 

The capitalists of the oil industry – and to a certain extent the petrochemical industry – are, as we know, masters of the art of obfuscation. Who is unaware of multiple examples of this in economic processes? Hidden apportioning of the market between the seven major companies of the cartel, the hiding of profits, dissimulation of the access price of crude oil, as well as the real costs of research and extraction, accounting juggling tricks between parent companies and subsidiaries beyond borders, etc. Fundamentally, the oil industry’s profits draw their source not from the usual mechanisms of the extraction and reallocation of surplus-value, but from the global distribution of the enormous oil rent. Rentier profits, first of all, with their parade of secret negotiations, relations of forces, arbitrariness, speculation. The petrochemical industry largely speculates on differential rents and rapid variations in the prices of products. 

But what is true for economic processes is also true for labor processes. Here too, obfuscation appears as one of the operative conditions of the system of production: to the degree that many workers or technicians when asked about the organization of labor in their petrochemical refinery or production facility responded that there was no organization of labor properly speaking. Of course, there is a hierarchy, an organizational chart, posts, but those all have a largely formal character: the organizational chart is not respected, everyone has to more or less “make do.” There is work organization in the plant, you would often hear, but not at ours. Moreover, a term like “work pace” hardly made sense there: to double production of the product, all you have to do is pull four levers – try doing the same on an automotive assembly line!

An illusion, indeed – and the workers expose it themselves insofar as they clarify the operation of the labor process: this lack of formalism has its laws and establishes a system of constraint all the more powerful since it is unarticulated – thereby providing less leverage for clear-cut resistance. Constraint conceals itself either under seemingly voluntary choices (induced by the atmosphere of risk and environment of collective responsibilities carefully maintained by management) or under the so-called inescapable “technical requirements” (technological alternatives obviously not being brought to the attention of the staff who may try, on the occasion of an accident or a strike, to figure some out: don’t other catalyzer models exist, less sensitive than the one used by the firm, which management has emphasized how dangerous it is to stop and restart?). In this way, the organization of work, internalized by the workers or incorporated into technology, systematically dissolved in the general conditions of the plant’s operations, avoids straightforward description. It has to be reconstructed through analysis, in its hidden principles and effective functioning. 

The very delimitation of the staff – the size of the workforce– contains its own share of mystery. Who is in the refinery and who is not? How many people must the firm have to produce 100,000 tons of ammonia? It might seem easy to answer this question for a determinate production facility, but that is in no way the case. The multiform development of outsourcing and contract work has allowed oil and petrochemical capitalists to “put out” [sortir] a growing number of activities to outside companies: routine or specialized maintenance, repairs, calibration, transportation, materials handling, or even some particular linked production. The staff of the petrochemical firm proper end up forming an organic nucleus [nuclei] around which gravitates a whole periphery of labor-powers highly varied in their skill (from manual laborer to researcher, by way of the highly specialized boilermaker) and status (from the stable employees of contracted firms or intermittent workers temporarily hired by a subcontractor), but who present the common feature of being excluded from the titular workforce of the production facility whose operation they nevertheless contribute to maintaining, often on an ongoing basis. The stable core of the petrochemical firm, whose staff size is easy to know, only forms a fraction, sometimes a minority fraction, of the overall labor-power [force de travail] implemented to ensure production. It even happens that workers from outside firms spend long periods in regular manufacturing posts – though this practice is generally limited by opposition from the workforce and unions. But these outside firms, with variable employee numbers, are not well known, including by the stable core of the petrochemical enterprise. However, the various types of laborers commingle daily in production sites [lieux de production]. But we will see that all measures are taken to maintain their separation. 

The production sites here present specific features which lend themselves to the highly differentiated management of labor-powers [forces de travail], and facilitate certain forms of compartmentalization. In the case of the petrochemical processing industry, the concept of the “cluster” [site], the entanglement of many firms and processes of production in complex relationships, is substituted for the concept of the factory, the industrial production facility common across the majority of industries, and which implies a relatively well-defined workforce and output. For lack of a multiform interconnection that is established with other, more or less geographically distant clusters (and this is most often the case), it becomes extremely difficult for a collective of workers to establish a precise relationship between their labor and a determinate production. Subjectively, a slippage takes place; the labor tends to be seen and described as management [gestion] – or surveillance – by a small group of workers from a fraction of the facilities where a flow of products, a certain number of transformations are maintained, whose nature is not always clear. In these conditions, the very idea of production is wrapped up in a degree of fuzziness [flou]. 

The Workers of the Petrochemical Firm vis-à-vis the Process and Their Control of the Facilities: What Kind of Knowledge? 

The production process seems to be governed by a dual system of knowledge. 

On the one hand, theoretical knowledge: the application of chemistry to a certain number of reactions that are triggered on an industrial scale. At the facility level, the engineers are in principle the assigned depositaries. This knowledge is listed in a series of guidelines/directives which define operations, describe the course of action, set the temperature conditions, pressure, etc., analyze the quantities and qualities of the products integrated into the process, and determine the expected result. The transmission of official orders of operation takes place via the classical hierarchical path, where the chief plays an important role (the daily supervisor makes assessments and transmits directives every 12 or 24 hours): the instructions culminate in their application by the unit group, the team of posted operators (head of post, operators, assistant operators, in varying numbers according to the size of the facilities and the complexity of the process: most often three to five persons in total). This transmission has a very formal character, and entails that it is regularly reported, usually in writing. 

On the other hand, practical knowledge, acquired empirically on the fly by manufacturing workers – operators and assistant operators, but also heads of post – a knowledge that they transmit verbally between each other, which does not moreover rule out specificities from job to job. This practical knowledge is first built upon a concrete knowledge of physical networks, of tubes, valves, connections, etc., and is expanded through a wider comprehension of the processes (or at least of the relevant sections of the process) that produces the repeated experiments of facility’s operation and the many incidents which might arise. It ends up structuring and taking the form of a set of recipes [recettes]: to obtain a particular outcome, send this type of product at this moment; avoid heating this particular component at this particular time; watch over the behavior of the steam at this place; to “not be bothered,” maintain that pressure or leave this valve in this position, etc. 

One might imagine that this practical knowledge boils down to a mere industry-specific explanation of theoretical knowledge. But that is not the case: there is a space of divergence. The two knowledges do not match: they are constituted on different bases and maintained by clearly distinguishable practices. There is a split [dédoublement] between the official operation of the production facility and its effective operation. In theory, it would proceed in a particular way stemming from the chemical theory of reaction. In practice, it proceeds differently, corresponding to the “expedient” [commode] operation fine-tuned through trial and error by manufacturing workers. 

The management of the firm is well aware of this split. It even encourages manufacturing workers to learn in a spontaneous process: for example, by assigning installation and preparatory tests to workers, who will then be called upon to work there in manufacturing – an occasion to locate connections, pipes, valves, gaskets, welds, and become aware of the initial difficulties and weak points, an awareness that the majority of engineers will never have. More systematically, it develops “multivalence” (rotation from one workstation to another) and “polyvalence” (the performance, by the same worker, of several manufacturing and maintenance jobs). 

Why is management so content with this autonomy of workers’ practical knowledge which could often come into conflict, to a certain extent, with the theoretical function of plants? Why does it not strive to obtain a stricter application of commands? Likely for several reasons. 

In the first place, this system seems to be the most effective for production. A petrochemical refinery is not merely an expanded laboratory instrument. Performed at an industrial scale, chemical reactions carry a whole aleatory aspect that only practical experience can progressively learn to control. Manufacturing workers’ knowledge of petroleum and petrochemical processing is complete but it is genuine knowledge [un vrai savoir], indispensable to production. The passage from theory to industrial application is not a given. We have seen procedures perfectly worked out in the laboratory unequivocally fail during the passage to industrial scale. A famous example is the failure of the Dow Chemical facilities in the Cubatao petrochemical complex in Brazil. It was discovered that procedures that functioned in the laboratory did not work out for actual production and the investment was lost. This is also a fairly common practice for multinational corporations or engineering companies to test their prototypes in Third World countries that, if necessary, will endure the initial problems, failures, and losses. The practical expertise of petrochemical facilities that manufacturing workers collectively acquire over time constitutes an important asset for the firm and it is de facto strengthened through the development of polyvalence and multivalence, as well as through the relatively lax attitude that management takes toward the labor process. But it ensures, as a result, the prolongation of the fiction of a strict apparatus of directives and procedures conforming to the theoretical course of reactions and instruments of production. 

A second advantage is drawn from this situation by management. In the case of incident or accident, responsibility is almost always diffuse and it is often easy to blame a worker who “did not follow the directives.” Better: the collective worker, continually operating in this atmosphere of illegality tolerated in relation to the formal description of the labor process, whose useful distinctions are endured so as to “not bother with it,” tends in many cases to “shut up” when an incident happens, internalizing a certain culpability. A kind of functional complicity, at the cost of snags and risks, is thus sought out and often won by the management. But there are times when this tacit complicity is broken when workers become aware of serious dangers, or in the aftermath of accidents, or in a general climate of industrial action. The system can then be turned around against the firm’s management, formally warned to respect its own safety regulations. Protest is all the more effective, then, since workers have a concrete knowledge of the effective operations of the facilities, their weak and dangerous points. Resistance can then take the form of “work-to-rule”: operating according to strict safety conditions and adhering to all regulatory procedures. 

Let us listen to the description by a cracking refinery attendant [pompiste] of this double system of knowledge (theoretical and practical) and the double labor process (official and real): 

The plant is so large, with so many details, that the supervisors can’t know all of them. Only someone who goes to that place daily can know what happens there. On the practical level, the one who goes there knows. The other might know the theory, but how that happens, that’s another story…

We have reached a point where the lead operator [chef de poste], who is worth their salt, winds up being more knowledgeable about the facility’s functioning, even when not comprehending the theory of petrochemistry, than the engineer who sometimes makes him do wrong things…And, ultimately, the chief operator is forced to do them knowing very well it’s a mistake. 

There is a tacit agreement between the engineer and the chief operator. The engineer gives an order. He knows quite well that his order will sometimes be interpreted differently; but the other person does not say it – the one who performs the task. And everyone gets away with it alright. The higher-up gives their order, the other interprets it, nobody says anything, and then everything works out like that.

The circumvention of instructions or absence of instructions, empirical know-how: a workers’ autonomy exists in the facility’s functioning. This autonomy factors into management strategy, on the one hand, as well as into trade-union demands. It presents contradictory features: an element of pressure in the case of conflict and argument to obtain material advantages, but also a factor of consensus and integration within the enterprise. 

Although the workers of the central hub of the petrochemical enterprise define themselves in relation to their hierarchy, to the “process,” to the instruments of production, they also define themselves in relation to the system of subcontracting [sous-traitance], if only because the parent company seeks to involve them as a stakeholder [partie prenante] in the organization of subordinate labor-powers and the vast subaltern proletariat employed across the cluster.¹ The integration intensifies a mechanism of exclusion. And here, the systematic division maintained at the national level in the working class between those who have rights and those who do not (a division that today in the main intersects with the division established between national and immigrant workforces) plays a key role. It is to this mechanism that we now turn. 

Petrochemical Workers vis-à-vis Subcontracted Workers: A Feature of Labor Aristocracy? 

An overall analysis of the tendencies of the production and labor process in the petrol-based and petrochemical industry should take into account the set of factors that contribute to the growth of subcontracting: social strategies of the parcelization of labor-power, but also economic, fiscal, and technological strategies (some firms specializing in the maintenance and repair of complex equipment de facto function as technical pools for several refinery or chemical transformation companies, in which they sometimes have holdings). 

We can nevertheless immediately distinguish between two types of labor-power employed through subcontracting in the petrol-based and petrochemical industry: on the one hand, very skilled personnel in maintenance, research or clerical personnel, commercial personnel (the subcontracting of a part of commercial management and marketing). On the other hand, the mass of unskilled workers from outside firms, to whom the lowliest tasks, the most unsanitary, the hardest, and often the most dangerous labor was relegated. In this mass, immigrant workers generally made up the majority. Still, there were also other recruitment sources: particularly in Southwestern France (Bourdeaux, Lacq, Aquitaine), there often seems to be unskilled French workers fresh from the countryside, or even students who have taken a temporary job – or young educated unemployed people. And women everywhere play an important role in subcontracting and temporary office jobs, at lower levels. But beyond this diversity, it appears broadly that the development of outside firms permanently employed across the cluster effectively transforms the division of labor in a thoroughgoing manner, more or less insidiously changing the function of workers of the petrochemical enterprise, and in many cases coming to load the position of the working class in this sector with ambiguity – posing a problem (more or less assumed) to industrial and trade union action. 

For although on paper well-defined tasks are legally subcontracted, (cleaning, maintenance, shipping, etc.) in practice, one observes all over the place an extensive workforce, poorly protected, not directly employed by the refinery or plant, often composed mainly of immigrant workers, and which is responsible for the bulk of the work that is still manual. Where does maintenance end and manufacturing proper begin? In petroleum and petrochemical production, matters are far from clear. When manufacturing normally takes place, as we have already indicated, there are in principle few manual jobs to carry out. A slippage operates in this way: the manual tasks that are roughly tied to manufacturing are considered to be maintenance. A tendency arises to make the workers “from the enterprises” present in the complex – most often immigrants – do the largest number of manual jobs possible. In this regard, the French worker at the petrochemical refinery or plant will play in some cases the role of a de facto supervisor. 

It is important to emphasize that, even in large petroleum and petrochemical facilities, the permanent shop floor personnel are never completely disengaged from manual tasks and might at any moment find themselves abruptly submerged in multiple demanding physical tasks – in the case of an emergency stoppage, for example. There exists, moreover, a hierarchy of participation in manual tasks among the permanent workers: the lower the level of “occupation” (assistant operator for example) involves a greater presence in the “structure,” inspections of installations, etc. The most sought-after promotion was a place in the control room, without any obligation to outside jobs. But the distribution of manual tasks or the external supervision of the “structure” also depends on the consensus established within the work team. 

Here is how manufacturing workers of an important ethylene production facility describe their relationships with workers employed from outside firms in the cluster: 

– Until now, when there were repairs to do, manufacturing personnel did the following: if there was a repair on a section of piping, they isolated the entire part in question, degassed it, and when the apparatus was inert, no longer at risk of exploding or causing problems, they gave the green light to make the appropriate repairs. But they absolutely did not care whether it was this specific joint, if the tapping [piquage] was at this particular spot…But now, they tend to make us do that. To make us inspect and verify that it’s done right. But in principle, that’s not our job. Ultimately…it concerns us to the extent that if it is poorly done we will perhaps be embarrassed. But we shouldn’t be forced to go check if they made good seals or things like that (because in the end we are urged to do that). 

– What do you monitor there, the outside firms? 

– The outside firms. In any event, here, other than the maintenance of pumps and monitoring devices, everything is subcontracted to outside firms. 

– In sum, they want you to be both workers in the main enterprise and supervisors of others? 

– Ultimately, we no longer know if they are the ones who want it. What is serious is that, since everything is done on the fly, it becomes habit. [ça entre dans les mœurs]. 

Another: 

– Here, if you like, it’s the labor aristocracy, so the guys, you just have to push them a bit…And then there are a lot of immigrants. 

– This gives a very precise content to the term labor aristocracy, if people are put in the position of monitoring the work of immigrants from outside facilities…

– And then, let’s say some things bring us into the circle. For example, there are safety jobs that are done: welding, machines like that. Okay. It’s clear that we are still closely affected by this. Insofar as we have a practical joker who walks around the facility with a blowtorch, there is a big risk: you can never say that there is never any gas in the facility. It is obvious that the guy (the manufacturing worker), when he goes to do a rotation in his sector, if he observes something that is out of the ordinary, he will instinctively flag it. It starts there and spreads further and further. 

As a point of departure, there is the feeling of ongoing risk and a certain collective responsibility toward the facility (it happens that one hears a worker say: “I was still entrusted with a thing worth so many tens of millions…”). As the worker says in the interview, it is the beginning of a “circle.” You inspect to make sure everything is alright. Then you inspect a little more quickly. The already existing idea of superiority among workers of the permanent core strengthens this position. Management adds to it, maintaining a strict difference in status between its personnel and workers from outside firms, even if it means wielding a racist atmosphere when subcontractors’ employees are largely immigrants. A trade unionist remarks with some sense of powerlessness: 

There are guys from the firms who work in appalling conditions, day and night, with no safety, without anything…But we can’t do anything about it [on n’a aucun moyen là-dessus]. At the level of the central enterprise and subcontracting plants, there is a safety committee. The unions have requested to participate in them, but that has been refused. They were told it didn’t concern them, it was not their enterprise…

You see a guy working in a location without a safety belt: if he goes down, he is going to crash down ten meters below. For some, obviously, this doesn’t raise any problems since “they are Arabs”…It should not be forgotten that as many of them are North Africans or immigrants, a problem of racism exists. 

The plant, or rather the complex, reproduces here in a caricatural fashion the mechanisms of civil society as a whole: a status takes on so much value that it operates as a mechanism of exclusion and the rejection of immigrants serves the integration of the stable workforce in the parent enterprise. 

What becomes clear is that Arabs are the only ones who do shit [faire des saloperies], what the people from this company won’t do…

We still have fairly good relationships with some Arabs because they’ve been there a long time and know the manufacturing people. But it’s always the relationship between a superior and a subordinate. It’s always that. They’re the guys who are there to do what we don’t do. What’s serious is that we feel that these people are afraid…He’s hurt, he feels bad, he’s going to take a dirty rag and wrap it around so it doesn’t bleed, and he’s going to trudge on so he doesn’t upset the crew chief…It’s perhaps logical, but we feel that they have a mentality of suffering, who suffer almost voluntarily in a sense, ultimately. Maybe it’s all the people around who do it, but in the end they suffer. When we cut ourselves, there’s no problem, we go see the shift supervisor, go to the infirmary. We’re divided about it: a piece of dust in the eye, you go to the infirmary. And they, on the other hand…a death, they’re taken away in the ambulance, it’s not a big deal, in any case, there will be another 150 or 200 who will enter. It’s appalling, ultimately. Like it or not, people in France are racist and that’s it. That happened to an Arab, so it’s no big deal.

We perceive through this disenchanted account the degree to which the system of segregation in the labor force, one of the functions of which is to strengthen the integration of permanently employed workers, thoroughly penetrates the personnel. 

To overcome these separations, the trade unions in the enterprise have to be re-examined and envisage organizations at the level of the cluster, open to all workers. Such a transformation – which is sometimes raised by oil and petrochemical workers – would entail a veritable ideological upheaval [bouleversement]. 

Is the systematic division located in the petrochemical industry specific to that sector, or does it also constitute one of the current tendencies of capitalist work organization? The mechanisms of subcontracting and satellite firms in steel works need to be analyzed. And are we not observing similar phenomena in light manufacturing, too? The garment industry, for example, is seeing outsourcing and home-based work develop massively, at times clandestinely. Outsourcing should also be approached comprehensively, including through its international aspects. 

An article by André Fontaine on Italy published in the March 6-7, 1977 edition of Le Monde discusses other forms of segregation in the labor force, through different routes, tending toward a dualist structure comparable to what we have encountered – a relatively protected core group and a peripheral mass with a subordinate status: 

In the face of state incapacity, already burdened by audacious social legislation with too many encumbrances of all kinds, addressing underemployment, instant solutions have emerged. Millions of Italians work today “off the books” [au noir] at extremely low wages, for semi-illicit [à moitié clandestins] employers, who do not pay taxes or social security payments. 

[In contrast to this sub-proletariat, there are the] “millions of workers in heavy industry, and more generally the workforce of the “protected” sector, benefiting from the sliding wage scale as much as the almost total guarantee of employment: the latter is such that we see employees who stop working sell their job post as elsewhere one might give up a ministerial officer position.²

The capitalist system of production reorganizes itself, as we know, through crises and the development of training mechanisms, and the transfer of surplus-value and profits, constantly traversed by class struggles. We often talk about the “new international division of labor”: would it not be appropriate to expand the analysis to all the modes of fragmentation of the production process, work, and labor-power, encompassing the labor force within the borders of a capitalist country? 

– Translated by Patrick King

This text first appeared in Robert Linhart et al. (eds.), Division du travail: colloque de Dourdan, 9-11 mars 1977 (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1978), 21-32. 

The translator would like to thank Patrick Lyons for invaluable assistance with the translation draft.

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This article is part of a dossier entitled “Robert Linhart and the Circuitous Paths of Inquiry.”

The post The Labor Process and the Division of the Working Class (1978) appeared first on Viewpoint Magazine.

We carried out an inquiry in a hospital located in the south of France, at the time of the transition to the 35-hour workweek and the broader context of the modernization of hospitals, where computerization was implemented to allocate and control budgets.¹

We are in late 2001. The reduction of working time, the transition to the 35-hour workweek, has to be implemented in 2002. National and regional directives have been given. Documents have been handed out for everyone to describe their activity. There are questions about losses of time. Doctors have a separate questionnaire to fill out. 

The job duty of hospital practitioners (whose status is defined by relatively new written documents) is 10 half-days per week (the number of hours for a half-day not being fixed), six days per week. Sunday is a work day like any other. Duty furthermore entails one shift per week (Sunday, overnight, and standard, no more than two Sundays per month). After each shift, there is a (theoretical) obligation to recover the next day. There are three types of shifts: on-site duty where the doctor is in the ward (with a monthly ceiling cap); on-call sessions where the doctor must be able to be contacted and arrive right away; and standby, where the doctor is not on-site but quickly reachable. The on-site shift pays best, followed by on-call sessions, and lastly, standby pays the least. 

The duties these different shifts refer to vary according to the hospitals and within them except for the emergency room, where there is always an on-site shift. In this hospital, doctors in on-call or on-site duty include anesthesiologists, cardiologists, surgeons, and radiologists. In infectious diseases, oncology, pharmacy, and the laboratory facilities, there are only standby shifts. During the day, the hours are 8:30 am to 6:30 pm. 

We observed an increasingly overbearing accounting process for the allocation of budgets. There is a modernized measurement scheme that did not previously exist. No activity should be spared from bookkeeping austerity, even those activities which hitherto responded to needs that seemed antithetical to this kind of calculation, particularly in healthcare. The reasons for this are multifaceted: obviously financial, in an attempt to cut back by controlling constantly rising healthcare spending, which are digging into a growing Social Security deficit; but also legal, in order to protect against future complaints and lawsuits in the case of failed operations, misdiagnoses, or wrong prescriptions. And managerial: because administrative officials are trained in modern management techniques and look to apply rigorously monitored follow-up measures 

The procedures proliferate, formalization is generalized; everything must be communicated, verified, accounted for. Moreover, since there is a wariness of the pitfalls [dérives] of excessive bureaucratization, there is a doubling down on the process of multiple audits, checks of various kinds intended to evaluate the effects of these numerous procedures. Some of these procedures, always time-consuming, can be useful to medical staff, particularly doctors, with records becoming more easily accessible for instance with information technology and office automation. And knowledge storage improves too, as a Department of Medical Information (DIM) secretary explains: “the encoding of the records made it possible to see what was really happening. For example, people thought that we were seeing a lot more elderly patients, but in fact we were seeing a lot of young people, so we have a more precise view of what we are doing. For example, there are no longer heart attacks but more cardiac arrhythmias.” In addition, it makes it possible to set up comparisons between hospitals based on normed criteria and thus eventually reduce funding inequalities. But beyond this aspect, which might ultimately turn out to be positive, there are effects and risks which are widely perceived by the hospital staff. Apart from the time it takes away from everyone, to constantly fill out paperwork, this transparency allows responsible bodies and officials to set objectives, giving them a legitimacy to get these objectives done which does not always correspond to reality. The point is that this transparency does not always reflect the complexity of the work that medical staff perform. Measurement, objectivation, the search for uniform standards, all tend to diminish [estomper] some of the many facets of the specific people-oriented labor that is health care. The standards selected, in the official records of the time spent on a particular task, do not respond to certain still-fundamental concerns of medical workers. Again, we are faced with the different kinds of practical investments and choices of the time worked. The DIM secretary explains that “at times people have difficulty understanding the point of all this encoding; they believed the effect of the PMSI (French Medical System Database) would be more significant, in other words that it would allow for the hiring of more staff where the need arose; to hire more staff or gain better skills in infectious diseases, they call on us but, for example, we are doing more outpatient visits but its not having the desired effects.”

An Intrusive Informatization

The setting of the annual budget at the hospital’s disposal has since 1985 been based on spending over the prior three years, carrying out an equalization across the different services and proposing for the following year an overall allowance for operating costs (dotation globale de fonctionnement, or DGF) with some adjustments. Previously, there was a daily pricing scheme, by specialization (general medicine, maternity, surgery, intensive care), and when a patient was discharged, their bill went to social security for reimbursement. At the same time as the DGF system was being implemented, information on treatments had to be gathered. Hospitals have had to provide the information to the ministry since 1989, every six months: admissions, ages, length of care, diagnostics, records, other illnesses covered, outpatient care, prescription for costly medications. Then came the PMSI. This system allowed for greater precision in expenditure reporting and comparisons between hospitals. In principle, it should have also made it possible to reduce inequalities between hospitals, but those inequalities remain. As the doctor in charge of computer tracking explains: “everything comes from an American, [Robert] Fetter, who has consolidated a wide variety of diagnosis codes, with 50,000 locutions at the start, that the WHO has transformed into 10,000 rubrics. In France, with the PMSI, we crunched all that together to arrive at 580 diagnosis-related groups: the DRGs.” This means that illnesses that generally have the same diagnoses at the same costs are grouped together. “This consolidation obviously poses several problems, as within each group there exists a greater or lesser spread, but if you multiply the groups, that becomes too complicated, so there’s a compromise. The PMSI involves sending each illness in a DRG. Each DRG has a scale of costs. You then look at the costs by DRG and by patient, on the basis of 30 healthcare institutions that serve on a panel. Everything is included: doctors, staff, laundry, meals, care, medications, etc. At the end, you have a relative scale in Francs or in Composite Index of Activity (ISA) points, totaling so many Francs. When you have arrived at an overall total of ISA points according to the hospital’s activity, you estimate a theoretical DGF which makes it possible to compare the expenditures of one hospital to another. You look at the average point value in the region and compare the expenditures between hospitals. This is also the basis of discussion for the DGF. In other words, you come up with the total PMSI expenditures, then you calculate in DRGs and ISA points which provides the ISA point for a given hospital. At our hospital the ISA point is low, which means we are underfunded; this system should make inequalities disappear, but at the same time it is the region that redistributes budgets, but the rich ones never have enough. They only leave us crumbs, so you never make up the gap since the DGF are capped according to what was previously spent.”

This DIM lead aptly reconstructs the digitization, monitoring, and supervision imposed on their hospital. All this translates in reality to the fact that “there are fewer of us, and we always need more: to be careful, to spend less, plan for the 35-hour workweek, all while being more effective, more available, more friendly. It’s hard to deal with.” The young doctors struggled to accept this change. “They were tense, they were angrier than we were about their working conditions. Before, there had been more bonhomie, things were calmer, we had better recognition of patients, the public, of the administration, we felt less threatened.”

The overall situation is deteriorating. The population is aging and is consuming care at a higher rate. In this hospital with more than 1,000 employees, a new director introduced at the beginning of 2001 an even more accounting-based vision (it may be noted that the director is not a doctor, but has management training). Faced with accreditation requirements, and in the framework of a quality improvement process, he has given precedence to a demand for discipline that does not come easy to staff confronted with humanly complex, sometimes nearly inextricable, situations. There is a repository of activities in a certain number of areas (like patient care, the efficacy of prescriptions, service delivery) and accreditation visits have taken place, performed by an independent accreditation and health evaluation agency, which includes peers, administrators, and executives it has recruited. They come to evaluate the findings in relation to the objectives, spending several days, and release a public report which contains recommendations according to the findings. A deadline is then set for solutions to be provided. But the situation is all the more precarious since the hospital is chronically understaffed, incidentally a result of the formalized aspect of the ISA points. There is a ratio between the number of staff according to patient-time or per ISA point. “We realize that we are less staffed, which means fewer nurses in services.”

An ongoing obsession with measurement, objectivation, and calculation. A transition from a culture of spoken communication to that of writing and statistics. To render work measurable, to return comprehensive and quality data – such is the overarching aim of modernization in the hospital as well as other sectors of activity. Here, the trap of over-information [la sur information] must be avoided. “When the patient is discharged, you close the record, you classify it by date of birth. Then, there are retention policies: lifetime or longer (for hereditary conditions), for 40 years (HIV), or 70 years (gynecology). You indicate how long it must be retained, you put a barcode on the record with the patient’s Permanent Patient ID number, you check the placement of documents in the record, and you update the information on where the record is. We input it on Castor, we try to avoid inputting too many things, because the more things there are to do the greater the chance for mistakes: errors can arise in classification, date of birth and date of admission next to each other, you switch them. We’ve had a hard time conveying to reception that you don’t have to fill in too many details, that’s the source of duplicates.” Furthermore, it is not always the same people who enter the data: depending on the length of stay, sometimes it is nurses first, then doctors, then physical therapists. 

In the emergency room, they do not always have the time to fill out the documents. A DIM secretary says: “Right now we are behind on the revaluation [revalorisation] of what is done in the ER. There are not enough people. There are four-page documents to fill out just for a minor injury.” There are quality checks every quarter. “They take records drawn at random and they look at how we are coding. If we code highly, that brings in more to the hospital: as an example, for HIV, when it is detected, you input the code and then you reenter the same code each time the patient returns. But we are criticized for coding on the lower end. For example, in heart attack cases we do not know which DRG it falls under and we follow the doctor’s diagnosis, we mark what he tells us, but he forgets the associated diagnoses. And we lose money. We call the secretaries ten times to get more information, but in some instances they invoke confidentiality,” the DIM secretary laments. Moreover, secretaries and doctors who do not always see the stakes of the DRG often indicate the symptom instead of the disease. 

Malaise

“When you say it must be done this way for everyone,” says the DIM doctor, “it backfires a little bit, a malaise sets in, you enter into the culture of the check list² and that takes time, you enter into a formalized thing that is not as easy as what was done previously.” Procedures and criteria are stepped up, but in the same movement you become wary of them and thus checks are carried out even more frequently. “The North American experiences which increased the development of useless procedures led to the idea of better controlling what we do and seeing if we are progressing, rather than applying an ISO 9000-type standard.³ It is a matter of disclaiming measures implemented to improve patient satisfaction, to show we are concerned with that.” 

To reduce costs and meet goals, quick fixes are tested. With the goal to reduce patient bed-days, day hospitalizations and home care increase, “which makes it possible to manage lines, but these are additional services, required of the hospital, with the illusion of costing less.” This is not visibly the case: “day hospitalization consists in cramming tests often done over three days into one day: the patients turn around faster.” For staff, the work is more intensive, time is increasingly overloaded; for the patients, it is often more exhausting. “Staff do not have any reprieve, equipment is being used day and night, orderlies are coming in three times instead of one. In fact it’s a matter of paying less for more work. More staff have to manage this increased amount of work. This isn’t taken into account and it’s implied that everything can be done with outpatient care.”

The aim of computerization is to have one record per patient whereas previously there were records according to the services where the patient was treated. There is now a single record for all visits in general medicine, obstetrical care, and short visits elsewhere. For each patient, there is a diagnosis coded by disease according to GRMs, which allows for an understanding of who is treated and at what cost. In principle, this procedure aims to lessen the differences between hospitals, but according to the DIM secretary, we have the lowest funding and what’s more, we are penalized because the next time a new hospital is built, half the operating credits serve the new hospital.”

From now on, accounts are permanently retained, and medical staff see their time regulated according to these accounting criteria, and no longer only on the basis of what seems most urgent to them, medical priorities or patient care. Staff are liable for their time, outside of critical response situations. 

One of the prerogatives of the profession disappears since an external monitor, an intermediary, intervenes in the evaluation of how that time is used. This apparatus, this formalization, has profound effects. Not only are the staff accountable, but they possess an understanding of what they are doing, of what is being done to them, and that fact introduces a distance. “There is no quality measurement,” the DIM secretary says, “and information is unreliable because all the staff is not convinced of the utility of these ongoing measures. They do not lead to more credits. Doctors are not interested in the quality of information they provide because it is burdensome for staff to manage and there are no repercussions.”

In this way, the job is changing for doctors. As one pulmonologist explains: “You are supposed to be paid for work as a doctor, but that’s only 60% of the time, the other 40% is administrative work. We’re between a rock and a hard place, between the budgetary constraints demanded by management on the one hand and patients on the other.” Economic rationality imposes its rule and weighs heavily on everyday life. “What’s excruciating is daily experience, when we can no longer operate, when we ask for some piece of equipment or other that takes eight months to arrive, like a small computer for endoscopy applications to type reports directly.”

The multiplication of codes and checks has its setbacks, according to some. “By dint of wanting to put everything on a fixed track [sur des rails], the hospital takes away the responsibilities of [déreponsabiliser] many actors, we do what is written, we forget the rest, for example seating people in wheelchairs. We forget that elderly persons have to be given fluids,” a doctor says. A comprehensive vision is lacking, because a very limited approach to problems is on offer. “We’re always stretched. We tend to get rid of people as quickly as possible because queue management is given priority: they’re sent off. But it’s often too soon. The problem would be to provide the means.” This idea of delegating responsibility can also apply to several peer groups that work on a range of issues. Hence this caregiver who is part of a project team on equipment: “With sterilization, we look at what we are lacking, we take inventory and we have to make do so that nothing is missing, we do the small fixes ourselves. Before everyone did it, now the group serves as a reference. That’s a big word. It might take way the responsibility of others.”

There are more doctors and secretaries but the doctors do more procedures, things turn around faster. “Before, for phlebitis, we kept the patient for three weeks; now it’s three days. In neurology, we treat, we rush, we talk about quality, listening to patients when we don’t have the means and we’re going too quickly. We concentrate the examinations on one day, the patient comes out exhausted, especially if they are older.”

An Impediment to the Quality of Work

The staff, in general, continually gauge the constraints tied to the lack of time, personnel, equipment and space, the productivity/quality dilemma, to the contradictions besetting them. The emergency room crystallizes all of these difficulties. Life-saving interventions are taken there, as well as human actions in the face of people in distress. It is critical to know how to be quick and effective but also how to sacrifice, lose time [sacrifier, perdre du temps], because sometimes people have a vital need to which time is devoted. “In the ER, you listen, you don’t say ‘goodbye’ or stand in the way.” It is because the functions of ERs are gradually changing. Alongside life-threatening emergencies and routine emergencies (small fractures, fevers, etc.), there’s a sense of urgency: “They need to talk, they need creature comforts, all these emergencies have to be treated, but we’re rarely given the means. We have never so much as talked about partnerships, networks, when there are dysfunctions and we’re going until exhaustion. The ER is becoming the supermarket [la grande surface] of care, and it’s a development that we will not stop.” But they lack personnel, and the budget is delayed. There are fewer emergency medical technicians, and recruitment is impossible. 

This head nurse is criticizing an organization that is not always functional even though it is adhering to the objectives of modernization. The traceability of the patient’s record seems like an interesting objective, and he contributes to it by leading a committee called the caregiver information system. “It is a matter of treating a person who is sick and not an illness alone.” Here we find a tendency toward personalization and focus on the user or client. But he does not think the hospital has the capacity to carry out this policy. In the ER, he explains, reception and referral are absolutely decisive: “Caring is about differentiating between people. You have to triage cases and subsequently negotiate with services for support. This requires having competent staff in reception, staff that is lacking. “The hospital cares for what is cheapest and we object. As luck would have it, the staff is becoming feminized and younger, we have many pregnant women who are not replaced. We need replacements but we don’t have the money. Yet reception is a fundamental job, it requires a great deal of expertise, it’s a critical relay.” The head nurse takes the objectives that have been set seriously. “Care needs to be individualized. But that has ramifications, it requires time and skilled people. The nursing assistant provides support and preventive health services. If there is an elderly person who has broken her hip, and we learn that she walked with a cane, for she spent three hours walking per day, then we know that the muscular strength is good and the physical therapist can rely on that.” He feels that the disorganization, the lack of space and staff, as an impediment [une entrave] to the quality of the work, whose victims are the patients. “The difficulties come when we no longer have a nurse at reception and it’s one secretary or someone else who opens the door. There are expectations for triage…it’s an elderly person with multiple chronic conditions: there are terrible negotiations to get them anywhere. There is a shortage of beds for everyone, plus during the summer, services close so there are additional burdens. This is when there is less internal staff and fewer fallback solutions. What is already problematic during the rest of the year becomes catastrophic in the summer” (this interview was conducted in July 2001, two years before the deadly 2003 heat wave). 

In his view, what is “most urgent are the facilities, then the definition of tasks. At the same time, we are told that we are a public service and to “be profitable.” We are in structures that hide the real problems, to increase the quality of service would cost too much.” It should be said that in the ER, there isn’t the PSMI, “but filling out another sheet for the doctor is extra work, the computer system needs to be updated.”

In maternity, the staff is not convinced of the legitimacy of the developments aiming to reduce costs by limiting the duration of hospital stays, either. One midwife who has worked in maternity for 28 years, for example, believes that the “limitation of the number of days hospitalized is not a guarantee of quality. If we send them home after 3, 4 days, that’s not good or else there should be home-based support. When we can keep them for longer, we do so.”

“The number of deliveries is increasing: 793 in 1997, 806 in 1998, and 856 in 2000. We’re exploding: we will have between 900 and 1000 this year.” The supervisor for the maternity ward experiences constant stress. However, she handles the obstetric PSMI herself, which she is indeed behind on, and which should in fact lead to appropriate solutions. “It is protocolized, written out, typed, but the PMSI provides nothing further, I do it to make sure that the record is really complete.” She values the team’s skills and the equipment but the understaffing exhausts them. “What is hardest is the amount of work: everything is done in a rush, we are short a midwife, a caregiver, a hospital service agent. They jump on me, we have meetings.” She wonders how long they will be able to manage to provide treatment. “The midwives are confident and motivated, but what a workload! They drop like flies, they are sometimes called back at 6 pm and they’re the ones with on sometimes they are the worried ones, so they call back.”

The staffing shortage impacts medical practices. So we induce labor most often, “because there are not many of us and we want more deliveries to take place during the day, but when we induce labor it takes longer.” Nights are hard: “When you are the only one working at night for twenty or thirty mothers, it becomes an exhausting job. Generally, there isn’t too much treatment or care except for C-sections, but after there is counseling and support, training is difficult to quantify for human resources. They are aware of it but they take a piecemeal approach.” 

Here too, the reality is resistance to numbers, to quantification, And the repercussions fall on both employees and patients. Everyone is worried about the future, especially since the announced 35-hour workweek changes were not yet implemented at the time of our inquiry. 

Gerontology, medium- and long-stays, is also a site where contradictions and tensions over the usage of time crystallize. 

“We often have the impression of a job unfinished,” a service agent soberly notes. “We work too quickly, the people get heavier and heavier, more and more ill, and we are forced to work faster: 10 to 15 minutes to undress them, wash them, get them up, make the bed, if they are men they have to be shaved, escort them to the mess hall, make sure they drink, some have to be taken to the bathroom, those with dementia go back. Soup arrives at 11:25, we have to ensure everyone is ready, we bring them on an ongoing basis, 75% of them are in wheelchairs. Then we go to the laundry, clean the carts, empty the cabinets, and they take turns using the showers. The agent performs a frenetic set of activities aiming to be rational and time-saving without forgetting that they are dealing with people: “It’s too bad because it can be an enriching experience working with the elderly, they’ve lived a life, a past, and we don’t have the time to enjoy talking with them. We’re always pressed, tired, if we begin to take a little time with one of them it’s a coworker who has to increase their workload.” The agent experiences a great weariness: “It’s a tough job, we get run down. The reduction or limiting of staff needs to stop, there may have been abuses before, but it shouldn’t get any lower. We have people, living beings to take care of, therefore we would want to say stop!”

Another woman, a custodial service agent, complains about a reorganization that has accelerated the pace of work: “Before we were more present, we could talk with them, now it’s a mad dash.”

But what sustains them all is the group cohesion [esprit d’équipe] that resists individualizing modernization where one-on-one meetings are routine. In these very difficult workplace situations, all the agents interviewed indeed stressed the importance of the group. The existence of a genuinely solidaristic [solidaire] and very active work group functions as a shock absorber for those temporal tensions and multiple dilemmas that are the daily lot of full-time staff on the razor’s edge.

– Translated by Patrick King

This text first appeared in Danièle Linhart and Aimée Moutet (eds.), Le travail nous est compté: les constructions des normes temporelles du travail (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 335-44.

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This article is part of a dossier entitled “Robert Linhart and the Circuitous Paths of Inquiry.”

The post The Time-Sick Hospital (2005) appeared first on Viewpoint Magazine.

The “offshoring” to the Third World of certain basic industries of the major capitalist countries, and the whole operation commonly referred to as “technology transfer” (the sale of industrial equipment, licenses, patents, know how, “turnkey” factories or factories with “produced in hand” contracts¹) have been the subject of an abundant literature for several years. Most studies focus on trends in the international division of labor, the internationalization of capital and certain production cycles, and the “offshoring” of large multinationals. On the other hand, the concrete functioning of those industries which have been “offshored” or set up by “transferred technology” in Third World countries has hardly been studied in a systematic way, and we only have scattered and disparate data on this subject. It is regarding this concrete process that we would like to make a few remarks.

The following comments are essentially based on a research trip to Algeria in April 1974 at the invitation of the general secretary for planning. During this trip, several production units in eastern Algeria (the Annaba region) were visited, where the steel industry in particular is concentrated. This area is considered by Algerian planners as a major or even the principal “pole of development.” This trip also involved a trip to the city of Guelma, a secondary point of development in the same region.

Two facts were overwhelmingly evident during this trip. First, the reality of the Algerian industrialization effort. To an observer who rediscovered this area some ten years after his previous visit, the physical transformation of the landscape was striking, as was the emergence of a new generation of young executives vigorously engaged in the problems of technology and the organization of production.

But the other salient fact was the underutilization of newly purchased industrial equipment. Out of the four factories we visited, two were completely stopped due to supply chain disruptions, one was partially stopped due to technical incidents, and only one was functioning normally:

– The SN Metal unit in Annaba, a medium-sized factory producing wheelbarrows and towing equipment, was operating normally 

– The hot rolling mill of the El Hadjar steel plant (Annaba) was halted by a technical incident;

– Production of the very modern chemical fertilizers plant of Annaba was stopped for lack of sulfur supply 

– The ceramic factory at Guehna was stopped for lack of supply of imported feldspar.

The only factory to function normally, SX Metal was also, out of the four units visited, the only old factory inherited from colonization – all the new installations that we visited were in poor operation. This is an observation made without any statistical value, of course, but the magnitude of which excludes mere coincidence. All the more so, since our interlocutors reported similar difficulties in other factories in the region. These facts drew our attention to the problem of supplying newly imported industries, and generally, the problem of inserting industrial complexes purchased abroad on turnkey contracts or otherwise into a determined socioeconomic space.

The so-called ”technology transfer” problem is currently the subject of broad discussions. A “symposium” was devoted to it in Algiers in October 1973: the resulting report contains particularly interesting communications from representatives of the Algerian National Companies. It is now commonplace to point out the multiple difficulties which arise in factories bought by newly independent countries from “engineering” companies: significant delays in setting up production – which sometimes never reaches the expected level; frequent stoppages and unforeseen difficulties of all kinds. Some countries purchasing equipment are trying to overcome this obstacle by refining the contracts: contracts “produced in hand” instead of “turnkey” contracts; more precise penalty clauses in case of delays or malfunctioning, etc. However, this legal aspect of technology transfer often remains a dead letter to the extent that the relations of power are unfavorable to the buyer. The seller evades the penalty clauses by blaming all causes for delays on the buyer, and the buyer often hesitates to apply penalties for fear of open or camouflaged retaliation. The complexity of the blockages resists simple contractual precautions.

Some of the difficulties arise from causes internal to the imported production unit: production methods may turn out to be ill-suited to work habits and to the training of local labor; there is a lack of specialists and technicians; in some cases there is even a phenomenon of withholding information on the part of the “engineering” firm which, although it has undertaken to do so, does not reveal all of the manufacturing secrets …

However other causes of the blockages must be found in the totality of the economic and social environment, and the existing structure of global markets. We will now focus on this point.

It is still possible to reproduce in North Africa an exact imitation of the buildings and machines of a specific chemical factory that is currently operating in France or West Germany. But it would be an illusion to believe that we will find the same factory in Africa, simply because the plans are identical. A seemingly similar production unit functions very differently when it is located in different socioeconomic spaces and linked to different communication systems.

Modern heavy industry of the capitalist countries is today increasingly based on rapid circulation and large-scale raw material, semi-finished and finished products. This is a relatively new situation, which took shape a few years after World War II. This is due in part (and we insist on this in general) to the emergence of transporting giants which have greatly reduced the cost of freight shipping, which has disrupted the transport economy and profitability calculations in procurement policy. But it is also determined by other factors, notably the strategy of capitalist heavy industry groups, eager to use foreign trade on a massive scale to shatter internal monopolies, including those held by their own working class – especially those held by miners. Supply diversification appears as a guarantee vis-à-vis suppliers and as a weapon in case of social tension.

This trend has increased with the instability of the major world markets and the diversification of speculative mechanisms. In intensifying their foreign trade, steelmakers or chemists who “go to sea” or work with major communication routes are trying to guard as much profit as possible from abrupt fluctuations in world markets, particularly as concerns raw materials and standardized semi-finished products. This policy also puts them in a position to seize, at the lowest cost, any major technical innovation which involves changing the combination of factors of production: substituting gas for coal, one type of ore for another, etc. It should be added that these major industries generally operate continuously and that in some cases a production shutdown can result in rapid deterioration of facilities: adding another incentive to ensure the regularity and security of supply by facilitating its arrival and diversifying its origin.

For all these reasons, this type of basic industry currently requires special attention to relations with the outside world. In developed capitalist countries this requirement is met in a complex way:

– development of large industrial port zones and important road communications infrastructure, waterways and railways;

– dense telecommunications networks and systematic use of computers (keeping the order book, programming production, managing stocks, etc.; the complexity of the system is such that at the time of the merger of the two large French steel firms De Wendel and Sidelor in 1967, it took more than a year of efforts to unify their information systems and main management mechanisms);

– development of an increasingly complex system for the commercialization and circulation of capital; the growing role of commodity markets and commodity exchanges, all the more difficult to penetrate now that we see the development of increasingly speculative methods, whether it is a matter of raw materials, scrap metal, or basic petrochemical products.

It is by taking advantage of this whole system that the basic industries of the capitalist countries guarantee their regular functioning and their place in competition.

It is clear that the large heavy industrial units of the same type implanted in North Africa for instance find absolutely none of this infrastructure and environment, which correspondingly modifies their functioning and their competitiveness. We can verify this through the following two points:

1. The Ports

Fundamentally, Algeria is rather well endowed with ports. But the potentialities of the Algerian port system are, at present, (and despite recent efforts at improvement) only partially exploited. Efficacy is limited on the one side by physical impediments, on the other hand by irrational management. In terms of equipment: there is a lack of lifting, unloading, and pumping instruments, as well as of means of storage. Generally, this shortage of port equipment limits the use of the most convenient methods – for example the bulk transport of a whole set of products. In terms of management: transit of goods at the port is usually very poorly organized. Thus, there is no provision for any form of penalization of National Companies for excessive delays in taking charge of goods at the docks: hence, they tend to use the port as a temporary storage place for goods that they do not immediately need. Hence the congestion of the docks, an aggravation of the storage shortage. Waiting times for boats are lengthened before unloading, and some urgent supplies cannot be unloaded on time. There is a very slow turnaround of ships, a general scourge of Third World ports. It has been estimated that traffic jams – that could be avoided by simply rapidly removing goods stored at the dock – on its own reduces the capacity of the port of Algiers by 20 to 30%! A commission of inquiry on the port of Algiers recently drew up a heavy toll of the financial losses caused by overcrowding, and revealed real scandals: a small imported production unit had been forgotten on the port for a year and quietly abandoned machines rusted without anyone coming to look for them.

Added to this is the fact that the secondary ports (e.g. Ghazaouat, Mostaganem, Ténès, Dellys) are underutilized, all traffic being concentrated on the three main ports: Algiers, Oran, Annaba. According to Algerian statistics, Algiers alone recorded in 1970 more entries of goods than all the other Algerian ports. In large part, it seems, for reasons of administrative centralization.

All this difficult operation of the port system has, of course, a direct effect on the cost of freight, burdened with heavy demurrage.² More seriously: in the event of tension on the freight markets, it happens that the shipowners of the capitalist countries outright refuse to send their boats to the so-called “underdeveloped” countries, preferring to make full use of their fleet between highly mechanized ports and thereby avoid problems: in Rotterdam, one can be sure that a boat will not wait more than 48 hours. Thus, in Algeria in 1974, one could see factory managers lamenting the blockage of their production because purchased cargo remained in Marseille or elsewhere awaiting transport. Conversely, when the freight market is depressed, shipowners may find it advantageous to come and cash in excess at a particularly congested port: this policy recently turned into a scandal in Lagos, forcing the government of Nigeria to take radical measures against a veritable armada of boats of all origins who tranquilly profited from a massive traffic jam they had caused …

Costly and irregular freight: insecurity of supplies, subject to the vagaries of the arms market. Here too, the balance of power is often unfavorable to Third World countries and the law of profit is difficult to thwart. The capital markets for sea freight are highly oligopolistic, with the organization of “shipping conferences” between the various companies on the main lines. Faced with this cartelization, it is very difficult for an isolated country, particularly when its port equipment is poor, to defeat the “diktats” of shipowners. It even happens that shipowners who have a monopoly on certain types of transport (for example transport of grain or refrigerated transport) are in a position to de facto prohibit certain trade between distant Third World countries, if this trade is an obstacle to interests with which they are linked.

It is because of these conditions that Algeria is trying to gain a certain autonomy in maritime transport, by building a large national fleet; in particular, it has been acquiring LNG carriers for the transport of its natural gas.

A situation of dependence and insecurity remains in place, which seems difficult to overcome immediately. The disadvantages of imported and remaining technology, highly dependent as it is on external supplies, are thereby multiplied. It is not difficult to imagine the consequences of the irregularity of supplies on large heavy industrial plants designed according to the criteria of functioning of developed capitalist countries, and thus involving major daily physical flows: supply difficulties in raw materials, spare parts, supplies of all kinds; very high cost of transport – all these are factors which contribute to raising the costs of production and constitute serious handicaps in competition on a world scale for the industries involved.

But the most immediately obvious direct effect of these difficulties has already been noted: the very irregular operation of recently imported plants.

2. Commercial Structures

The global trade structures that govern part of the supply further complicate the situation. The markets for raw materials and standardized semi-finished products (common steels, basic petrochemicals) are currently largely dominated by speculative mechanisms. In these markets, capitalism has many weapons: rapid decisions, secret trade, safe intermediaries, interconnected networks of interests, dumping, etc. By these means, it maximizes its exploitation of the rapid flow of capital and the concrete conditions for the realization of value.

Multinational corporations are obviously well placed to engage in successful operations under these conditions, especially since they themselves play a large part in creating these conditions. On the other hand, Third World countries are often in a state of inferiority from the point of view of the commercial system, purchasing techniques, and procurement procedures. We could cite many examples of failed transactions or transactions carried out on the most unfavorable terms, for lack of precise knowledge of the markets, or because of the excessive length of negotiations or procedures, or even because the dilution of powers delayed decision-making.…

At a deeper level, certain oligopolistic practices on the large capitalist world markets are deliberately closed and hermetic to the countries of the Third World.

Thus, the price of steel is worked out by complex calculations, the Brussels Stock Exchange indicating a trend from which we calculate the “extras” (premiums specified by product), the average of which is given regularly by the Metal Bulletin in London. But this is only an official base, established from known markets. However, a good part of the negotiations is secret, and the prices are established largely by direct relations, insofar as the seller and the buyer are two large economic subjects. When Thyssen sells steel to Volkswagen or Usinor to Renault, the prices and content of the contracts are hidden from publicity. A first difficulty for the steel industry in a Third World country: how to price its products (or buy semi-finished products used in the production process) when it is not directly involved in cartelization? Hence, the common temptation for the leaders of these new steelworks to bind themselves to this or that dominant force of the capitalist system, which never happens without an increase in dependency.

We can mention another factor of obscurement of exchanges and prices: triangular arrangements and the practice of “clearing.” A country delivers so many tons of sugar in exchange for a turnkey factory, and since the two are not equal, 50,000 tons of steel is added to the factory. This is common practice, and it is difficult to estimate the exact price of each component of such global contracts, some of which are, moreover, very complex and diverse. This constitutes an additional obstacle to controlling supply policy.

The world market often functions as a set of cogs and gears, which increasingly pushes the infant industries of the Third World towards working for external demands and the extroversion of the economy. In the case of heavy industry, oversized steelworks projects, inspired by profitability criteria currently in force in the developed capitalist countries, are part of this same trend. The commercial aggressiveness of countries or firms attached to developing their trade with the Third World accelerates the process. So it was with Japan, there a few years ago, bought cast iron from Algerian steelworks: shortly after, Japanese firms delivered to Algeria a giant steelworks “turnkey” project, said to be following the spirit of “rebalancing exchanges” (buying before selling is, moreover, the systematic policy of Japan in the Third World).

These then are the concrete conditions in which the new imported production units are connected to the global system. Some of the sticking points have been noted. Many others could be cited. The result remains that the extroversion of units – while it can have favorable consequences from the point of view of profitability in the developed capitalist countries – constitutes on the contrary, in the Third World, a serious danger. “Technology transfer,” as currently practiced, does not in any way guarantee the transfer of the operating conditions of the “technology” in question.

Does this mean that the newly independent countries must give up industrialization? Obviously not. Their true industrialization is essential to ending relations of dependency. But one of the conditions of true industrialization is indeed becoming not to copy large industrial units established by capitalist enterprises in the logic of their struggle on the world markets. It is up to each country of the Third World to find its own form of industrial development, at the level of production, productive methods, and types of most suitable products. It is also important to pay the greatest attention to the effective functioning of the production units put in place, so as not to install a technology that is unsuitable for integrating into the existing socioeconomic structure.

The existence of multiple blockages in the functioning of large recently imported industrial units currently constitutes of the essential problems to be solved for the Algerian authorities. The place and modalities of “technology transfer” and more generally the politics of the “poles of development” (theorized under the name of “industrializing industries”) have been the subject of many of the debates which, since 1975, have accompanied the implementation of the second four-year plan. Should we continue focusing nearly 80% of investments on three limited regions, risking thereby accentuating the exaggerated growth of these regions and the disarticulation of the economy as a whole, or should we distribute them in a more egalitarian fashion across Algeria’s territory? Must we continue to buy the most modern “technology,” or should we resort to more rustic methods of production whenever possible?

The turnaround in the world economy precipitated this crisis of conscience amidst the leaders of the Algerian economy. The euphoria of 1974, triggered by the quadrupling of the price of crude oil, was followed by a sharp drop in oil sales and revenues. The bloated purchasing programs and investment plans had to be hastily revised downwards. But quantitative reductions do not solve anything – they can even exacerbate some imbalances or bottlenecks if they are applied too abruptly. The severity of the basic problem becomes all the more pressing.

Which path will Algeria take to try to overcome these blockages? Basically, two possibilities exist and the realization of one or the other depends in the last analysis on the evolution of the sociopolitical balance of power within the country.

The first option – probably the most likely in the near future – is the pursuit of the “poles of development policy” and systematic import of equipment corresponding to the technology of the developed capitalist countries, despite the difficulties encountered. But these difficulties are too serious to be able to continue as if nothing had happened. Either way, attempts will have to be made to overcome or reduce the incidents and bottlenecks described above.

That is why “rationalization” of the management of National Societies will probably be invoked, a “rationalization” which would introduce capitalist criteria of operation, thus reducing central state control. The managers and executives of these production units are pushing strongly in this direction. Most often from the Algerian urban bourgeoisie, generally trained in Western universities and strongly influenced by the technical ideology of the large capitalist countries, they constitute a coherent and determined force; they complain of what they call the “bureaucratic straitjacket ” and call for greater freedom of movement in the management of their units, hoping to become increasingly autonomous. They criticize the cumbersome administrative procedures of procurement, the complication of customs controls, transportation difficulties for spare parts, etc. They guarantee their capability of securing much better results and of operating the industrial facilities under their control more regularly, if allowed free access to global markets and the removal of all the barriers currently established by central government control – even if it means subjecting them to a posteriori control.

A first step was taken in this direction in 1974, with the National Societies awarded block grants for purchases abroad, with freedom of action within specified limits (still relatively narrow).

If this trend continues (and the conclusions drawn from the first four-year plan seem to indicate it), the Algerian National Companies, which already concentrate most of the technicians and executives, and a good part of the qualified labor, as well as a determinant part of available financial resources, will behave increasingly as autonomous economic entities, connected to the global market but gradually isolated regarding the Algerian hinterland.

Various factors accelerate this process of empowerment: the circulation of technical information and of “experts” in the world of large modern industrial units conveys a whole ideology which accentuates the specific features and the cohesion of the technical and economic “elite”, facilitating its integration with its counterparts from other countries. Similarly, the management of the labor force tends to reproduce the organization of labor operating in the developed capitalist countries: the gap is widening, there, between executors on the one hand, executives and managers on the other. Language itself acts as a barrier: the laborer and the dock worker think and express themselves in Arabic – sometimes ignoring the French language; the plant manager and the engineer speak French and are immersed in European culture.

Is the regular operation of units assured? While such a process of increased autonomy could initially reduce certain blockages, it is not at all certain that it will solve the overall problem in the long term. The increasing integration into the world market could prove to be a trap for the units that are fundamentally disadvantaged by the lack of infrastructure and an industrial fabric comparable to those of the developed capitalist countries. Conjunctural reversals and sudden fluctuations in major markets will weigh a much heavier weight on the marginal fringes of a globally interconnected industrial system: every crisis hits them first, and with full force.

However, another way is possible. If a disruption of the current balance of social forces pushes the political forces in power to slow down this excessively dangerous process – or transforms these forces in power themselves – it could be put into action. In the disadvantaged “wilayas,“³ where “special programs” are granted piecemeal to limit surges of discontent are far from solving the problems of unemployment and poverty, constant pressure by the population in favor of more balanced development is manifest. The mass of the peasantry would like more equality in the distribution of financial resources, productive equipment, and infrastructure works. It has a dim view of the growth of hypertrophied urban centers and the emergence of privileged islands of consumption. This pressure is expressed in certain spheres of the state apparatus and political power, where occasional populist reflexes and a certain ascetic ideology come up against the demands of rising technocratism. The waste that accompanies technology transfer operations provokes reactions. As far as we can tell, these reactions are nonetheless in the minority.

It is conceivable that, following the acceleration of sociopolitical tensions, a breaking point could be crossed, new alliances could be forged within the social formation, and a certain number of choices could be called into question. The strategy of “poles of development” would be limited to the benefit of a more balanced development; investments would be distributed in a more diversified way between sectors of the economy, regions, and types of production units. Attention would be lent to the possibilities of creating small- and medium-sized units, more strongly connected to their immediate environment, both as a market and as a source of supplies. More generally, one would make as the objective internal coherence of the national economy, by relying mainly on the relations between industry and agriculture. A halt would be made on the excesses of the import of foreign technologies: greater selection in contracts, efforts to develop national technology – even those which are less “modern” – whenever possible, systematic use of local reserves of labor when they can avoid the importation of “capital intensive” techniques and materials manufactured abroad.

Can such a change of direction be achieved without profound upheavals? One cannot answer in the affirmative, especially since the interests grouped together in the first position (pursuit of the policy of “development poles” and the empowerment of large units are gaining in power and confidence. Their chance of promoting this path without a regime crisis depends on their ability to limit its immediate social cost. A difficult goal to achieve: eastern Algeria, which concentrates most of the recent industrial investments remains the area of greatest emigration from Algeria, and problems of employment, housing, and the life of the population remain acute.

Other factors are at play, including international market conditions and the results of Algerian foreign policy. The contradictions at work in the process of industrialization in Algeria are far from having produced all their consequences.

– Translated by Peter Korotaev

This text first appeared in Revue française d’administration publique 4 (1977): 123-34. Linhart wrote the piece while working as a consultant for the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies in France.

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This article is part of a dossier entitled “Robert Linhart and the Circuitous Paths of Inquiry.”

The post “Technology Transfer” and Its Contradictions: Some Aspects of Algerian Industrialization (1977) appeared first on Viewpoint Magazine.

Work has changed, especially in the industrial world, where Taylorism established its credentials. With the spread of information technologies, material contact is less and less frequent for many workers, even if it has not disappeared everywhere. Tasks increasingly correspond to oversight, the monitoring of automated systems, control, the management of information and risk. 

Organizational competitiveness tied to the new realities of the market and competition also exercises a determinate influence. The conditions of productivity have changed and condition another type of mobilization of employee engagement and the organization of firms: “The new forms of performance all depend on the density and relevance of the relations established between actors and the productive chains, between the functions of the firm (research office, marketing department, commercial services, production), between firms, the suppliers, and their clients, between firms and their social and technical environment.”¹

The Post-Taylorist Thesis and the Emergence of New Figures of Labor

From these widely held views, some authors deduce a radical transformation of the organization of labor and even the end of Taylorism, to the benefit of the potential autonomy of workers. A current of thought has thereby taken shape, which discloses the emergence of new functions, new actors, in other words new professional identities, new arenas and new training on the basis of the significance accorded to communication, cooperation, and expertise, as well as engagement and initiative.²

The analysis of these developments is placed at the center of labor sociology, as a new factor in the workplace, and new determinant of organizational choices and competencies. 

The quality of cooperation now takes primacy, information becomes the dominant feature. Workers’ skills rests with communication. It is not so much the autonomy of movements, the regularity of labor and its conformity to procedures, to the requisite prescriptions and codes which are required, but much rather a capacity to adapt to exceptional situations, an expertise which enables an appropriate treatment of the “events” which punctuate the labor-process: Reacting to events is now becoming a key component of collective or industrial labor. Qualifications are being displaced by expertise, the analysis of specific situations… One does not only communicate between tasks; the task itself consists in communicating.”³

We are far from the individual work postulated by Taylor: “The community of networked workers is in charge of its own capacity to recompose a collective knowledge,” namely, to work together, to create spaces of reciprocal understanding.⁴ We are far, too, from the Taylorist worker hyperspecialized in one compartmentalized task to which they are restricted. Jean-Louis Laville defines the new professional figure that has emerged in the following terms: “Office technicians, operators in automated facilities in the manufacturing industry, monitoring operators in the process industries all share the need to situate themselves in an informational series in order to locate and circulate information on which productivity and work quality will depend. Work is increasingly referring back to the culture of workers’ involvement in a universe in motion.” This culture revolves around “autonomy, initiative, the overall perception of the procedure.”⁵

For the team of Sainsaulieu, Francfort, Osty, and Uhalde, “the world of firms is becoming a real social milieu, where multiple ways of being are expressed in relation to the demands of initiatives and communication, responsibilities, outcomes, creativity that cover the changing life, technical complexity, and relational involvement of work.”⁶

These sentences from Christian Thuderoz find resonance: 

Production, organization, institution: at these three levels of analysis of the firm, change is notable. Different elements are indeed combined in the workshops to sketch a new social and productive state of affairs: other ways of cooperating and self-organizing to produce, appeals to the initiative and responsibility of employees, encouragement of speech, experience in the management of flows, quality control, etc. The hypothesis of new models of organization in North America and Europe seems appropriate. The operators of automated machines and systems now react to contingencies and handle them, analyze sequences, anticipate breakdowns. Whence the importance accorded to communication between individuals, to mutual understanding.⁷

Moreover, this overlaps with the definition offered by Benjamin Coriat of the super-worker, at the entrepreneurial and managerial helm.⁸ By definition, these new workers are no longer enmeshed in the logic of prescribing means. Only the objectives remain prescribed for operators at the intersection of several specialities, tasked with a larger range of missions and engaged in multifunctional work groups where the notions of collective work, autonomy, and initiative take on their full meaning. 

A Need for Caution

We can note two observations in regard to these arguments asserting a break with the principles of Taylorism in the emergence of new forms of the organization of labor. The first is that the majority of these authors have been influenced by investigations carried out mainly in the process industries, that is, a specific type of manufacturing (among them: cement production, petrochemicals, nuclear sector, steel). In these industries, organizational innovations have indeed been uncovered, notably in the sense of a real multifunctionality involving, for example, worker-technicians who participate in the improvement and optimization of production. 

There have always been doubts, however, as to the very presence of actual Taylorism in these industries, considering the division of workstations is problematic given the nature of continuous work. Furthermore, these are industries where labor costs are insignificant compared to capital costs and where questions of reliability and security are paramount, imposing concessions on worker professionalism. For the proponents of post-Taylorism, there is no doubt however that series production industries are beginning to acquire some important characteristics of continuous work, namely increasingly significant investments in information and automation as well as a greater fluidity of the production process with the decrease in inventory, and that they will necessarily adopt their post-Taylorist model. Zarifian states matters in abundantly clear terms: “It is not steelmaking that we want to present as a model, but through it the demonstration of the contemporary characteristics of the evolution of the cooperative dimension of labor.”⁹

As for the authors who draw on observations carried out in industries of series production or in services, they evince a strong tendency to generalize on the basis of limited cases, in this instance the emergence of new functions, particularly interfaces which require more specialized communication competencies, and thus a professional know-how marked by autonomy and initiative. And moreover, was not the process of deskilling for a majority of workers within Taylorist rationalization always accompanied by the overqualification of small professional groups? 

The second observation we might make is that these analyses define more of an “ideal type” than a reality, and curiously abstract from a whole fundamental part of social reality. In this optic, everything happens as if a given type of market constraint and a given type of technical tools necessarily determine a given type of work organization and a given form of employee engagement. As if Taylorism, inter alia, necessarily corresponded to a now superseded specific economic and technological conjuncture. As if, back then, there were no other possible choices. 

This overlooks the fact that the forms of the organization of labor are social constructs, that is, they constitute a kind of response to the relation of forces between different actors involved in the situation, relations of forces that they effectively illustrate. 

The Multiple Stakes of the Organization of Labor

Taylor never hid that the mode of organization he devised was a means of restraining the workers of the time. The scientific organization of labor thus corresponded to the institutionalization of a certain mode of compulsion, of coercion in the process of labor itself, to an organizational detour that forced workers to work not according to their own interests, but according to what Taylor presented as the good for the greatest number, the good of the nation. We know that this became above all a war machine against the workers. 

In the present context, what we are seeing does not really resemble the establishment of innovative organizations breaking with the Taylorist logic, but much more a mixture of genres where innovations are introduced but within a logic that remains fundamentally Taylorist. Management is engaged in a constant project to seek out another mode of control, domination, and coercion of employees before preparing the passage toward possible reforms of the organization of labor which could be rendered more compatible with the demands for responsiveness imposed by the market and new forms of competition.

The authors who sustain the post-Taylorist current of thought all discuss a new type of labor that profoundly involves workers’ subjectivities, their resourcefulness, their communicational capacity without ever raising the question of workers’ acceptance of cooperation, of open and voluntary collaboration with management and with hierarchies. Is it definitely the case that workers, who not long ago were engaged in an ideology of class struggle (during the “Trente Glorieuses”), that is, in an open conflict declaring the non-convergence of interests between workers and bosses, today accept engaging their subjectivity in the service of the enterprise? Certain elements might lobby in favor of this hypothesis: the decline in trade unionism as well as an exceptionally high and stubborn unemployment rate. But its success does not, for all that, seem guaranteed. At least, this is the conviction that modernized management has. As proof you can point to the tremendous effort undertaken by management to “work” the subjectivity of employees, to transform an identity that appears to them still too rooted in the values of the past.

We have, for over ten years now, elaborated the idea of a paradoxical consensus to describe the dominant attitude among workers during the prior period of strong growth.¹⁰ A paradoxical consensus, because workers’ very distance in relation to the dominant rationality of the firm, their dissenting attitude prompts them to develop professional behaviors which objectively serve the interests of the firm while contesting its legitimacy, its hierarchical order, the distributions of statuses and powers that it establishes to the detriment of workers, who receive the bare bones; they have developed a whole stock [capital] of knowledge, expertise, know-how, that they clandestinely apply, in other words by resisting commands, prescriptions, hierarchical orders. In the framework of a resistant, recalcitrant, and rebellious subjectivity, they have adopted a more effective and better-adapted attitude than what was required of them by scientific management. And this is because of the reference to the profession, to the job well done, to the shared values of workers which found their collective identity, because of a will to impose, in a world of coercion and subordination, their own vision of economic rationality.¹¹ These behaviors constitute what Jean-Daniel Reynaud calls autonomous regulation, as opposed to the regulation of control coming from management. The effective functioning of labor in firms brings results, in equilibrium according to this theory, in a complementarity between these two kinds of control, which brings about a “joint regulation.”¹²

Now, what is expected of these employees is consenting cooperation on the subjective plane: here there is an important shift [revirement] whose significance has not escaped managers. The challenge would be to pass to a new phase of control and domination of workers. 

Contradictions 

It is important to emphasize that managers are striving to develop a new type of social control, which is directly exercised on minds, on subjectivity, without actually initiating transformations in the corresponding organization of labor. We find ourselves in a specific moment of history where new forms of discipline precede, at least partially, the evolution of the organization of labor itself, which leads to a whole series of contradictions indicative of contemporary forms of modernization. 

Work has of course changed, in connection with new technological tools: new practices are developing such as just-in-time production, flexibility, automatic control, first-level maintenance, the “management” of flows by operators, for instance. Tasks, as mentioned above, increasingly fall under facility oversight, operations, monitoring. But if we closely observe the new forms of labor, we notice that in the majority of cases these operations are subjected to processes of rationalization, standardization, which empties them of all professional skill and turns them into extremely routinized and simplified tasks, in the same way that the activity of oversight itself has been very codified. 

The principles which carefully delineate between tasks of conception and organization, on the one hand, and tasks of execution on the other have hardly changed. 

That technological development and new forms of competition open onto new possibilities in the organization of labor, that the place occupied by information flows in the labor process encourages the consideration of new modalities of definition and function does not mean, however, that these possibilities are necessarily implemented. We should not lose sight of the social dimension of Taylorism which corresponds, as noted, to an institutionalization of control and coercion in the labor process itself. Directorates for the most part do not appear, for the moment, to have renounced central Taylorist principles of the organization of labor, because they are not convinced they have access to a sufficiently reliable workforce. On the other hand, these directorates have already launched into what might be called a battle of identity to modernize employees’ minds, that is, to make them internalize the values, culture, the standard methods of reasoning in the firm, in the mode of the one best way approach to management, on the basis of the dominant rationality in the firm and excluding any debate, possible discussion, or possible alternative concerning management style.¹³ It is a matter of forcing workers to eschew professional solidarities, class solidarities, to embrace only the company’s values. 

Even if it is done under influence (controlling and disciplining their subjectivity), directorates are consequently seeking to position employees as full-fledged interlocutors in the firm. And it is here that a very problematic discrepancy intervenes, between the effects of this approach of “enveloping” employees, of transforming their subjectivity as well as their symbolic place in the firm, on the one hand, and on the other the reality of their role in the organization of labor where they most often remain confined within Taylorist horizons, limited by still quite standardized prescriptions and definitions of procedures. 

The contradictions are of two orders. Symbolic and psychological above all, since employees find themselves caught in conflicting roles (executants and pawns in the context of a very codified and prescribed organization of labor, interlocutors and actors in another time and space of the firm, that of participative groups, individual discussions with management). But very concrete contradictions, too: the prolongation of the logic of personal growth (an alibi discourse which accompanies the battle of identity and the work of subjectivity), within the organization of labor, is reflected in the keyword of accountability [responsabilisation]: each person is deemed accountable at their job post for the quality of the work they provide and the deadlines in which the work is carried out, and no longer have “management on their back” since the chains of command have been considerably streamlined by the same logic. These changes would be welcome in the framework of a post-Taylorism as some sociologists say they see it. But in the majority of cases, operators have to assume the responsibility imposed on them in what is still an extremely codified universe, where decision-making possibilities are very standardized and without help from management. Operators thus feel trapped: they are not capable of influencing the way in which their work is defined and organized, and the higher-ups, nowhere to be found, no longer provide assistance. If problems arise (breakdowns, various dysfunctions), they find themselves blocked, incapable of undertaking their job and responsibilities.¹⁴

We can advance the hypothesis that a very real misery [souffrance] is bound up with these kinds of contradictions which maintain employees in a state of permanent unease, in an exacerbated feeling of increased dependence, especially through the incredible possibilities for control offered by information technology. 

– Translated by Patrick King and Paul Rekret

This text was first published in Jacques Kergoat, Josiane Boutet, Henri Jacot, and Danièle Linhart (eds.), Le monde du travail (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 301-309.

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This article is part of a dossier entitled “Robert Linhart and the Circuitous Paths of Inquiry.”

The post The Evolution of the Organization of Labor (1998) appeared first on Viewpoint Magazine.

The French Trotskyist journal Critique Communiste published a special issue in 1978 to mark the anniversary of the events of May and June 1968. It featured a lengthy interview with Robert Linhart, former leader of the Union de la Jeunesse Communiste (marxiste-léniniste) (UJCML), the organization perhaps most closely associated with the archetype of the Maoist student-intellectual, the soixante-huitard. But, in a striking shift of emphasis, rather than contribute to the litany of quixotic autopsies that characterize the period, Linhart instead pivots the discussion towards what he views as most urgent for Marxist theory, especially the need to engage in concrete inquiry into the labor process. 

Some context is useful to understand what is at stake in this interview, entitled “The Evolution of the Labor Process and Class Struggles.” Robert Linhart entered the École Normale Supérieure at Rue d’Ulm in Paris (ENS), the peak of the French university system, in 1963. He soon became among the most intimate of Louis Althusser’s “student-disciples.”¹ As the decade progressed, he would also become a regular attendee of Charles Bettelheim’s seminars at the École pratique des hautes études on political economy and socialist construction in the Third World.² He sharpened his Marxist analytical chops as one of the primary editorial forces behind the journal Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, which served as a theoretico-political training ground for the group clustered around Althusser. Turning to Maoism during a summer working for the Algerian Ministry of Agriculture in 1964, in the following year, Linhart’s intervention proved decisive in reasserting orthodoxy over the Union des Étudiants Communistes (UEC).³ During the previous three years, this youth movement had become more open to the broader Marxist left under the direction of an “Italian” revisionist tendency within the French Communist Party (PCF). The “Ulmards” pro-Chinese anti-revisionism eventually led to their own expulsion from the UEC in 1966. This group of around one hundred militants, mainly ENS students, came to form the UJCML with Linhart at the helm, later that year. The UJCML first rose to prominence through the Vietnam Base Committees: these coordinated anti-imperialist organizations, formed in November 1966 and rooted in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, popularized the struggle of the North Vietnamese forces and National Liberation Front in the South against the United States, held discussions, published leaflets and bulletins, and engaged in solidarity actions.⁴ A delegation visit to China in August 1967 profoundly shaped the subsequent trajectory of the UJCML and Linhart personally. The development of a theoretical analysis came to be anchored in “établissement,” a term derived from the French translation of a speech from Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign for the integration of intellectuals and the masses.⁵ Less than a year before the eruption of 1968, the group effectively turned its back on student politics to make “inquiries” by taking up work in the factories.⁶ Linhart himself would only become établi at the Citroën-Choisy factory in the autumn of that year.⁷

In May 1968, however, “our Great Helmsman Robert,” as one former comrade sardonically called him, remained at the head of the UJCML and when unrest began in the Latin Quarter, he dismissed it as a “social-democratic plot, orchestrated by Trotskyists to usurp the working class’s legitimate leadership of the struggle for the benefit of the petit bourgeoisie,” going so far as to expel his wife from a meeting for advocating in support of the student uprising.⁸ As such a position became increasingly untenable, Linhart underwent a severe mental health crisis, which saw him hospitalized for an extended period, just as rioting in student neighborhoods gave way to factory occupations. When, in the fallout from the 1968 revolt, the UJCML is proscribed by the state along with other left organizations, Linhart joins Gauche prolétarienne, acting as the editor of J’Accuse, one of its two journals. The practice of établissement would continue through this period, conceived in part as an inquiry in search of the theoretical principles that would triumph given their identity with workers’ aspirations and practices and not merely derived from doctrine, and to cultivate the more radical elements of the French working class.⁹

While Linhart judges this span of political work harshly in the interview, J’Accuse was a significant left-wing publication. It advanced a militant yet popular journalism that sought to comb the political relays that had continued after May ’68 between intellectuals and working-class strata. Its opening editorial averred that its content would be “oriented toward reality, in other words expressing what the press is silent about or distorts. It is a matter of telling the truth about the violent battles the people put up against those with power in this world, the truth too about the low-level everyday war waged against…work ‘accidents,’ living conditions, HLM-dormitories, the foyers-rackets[.]” The weekly was to be “popular through its methods,” and correspondents were encouraged to “physically connect with the reality of peasant and working-class revolt, to articulate the currents of contestation that are transforming the different layers of French society.”¹⁰ The project of sustaining viable organs of counter-information that could transmit the intelligence of ongoing social struggles remains one of the GP’s most enduring legacies and certainly can be felt in Linhart’s later work. 

In “Evolution of the Labour Process and Class Struggles” Linhart describes the permanent state of crisis of the GP as a “much more dialectical type of organization,” whose own existence and form was perpetually in question; one that sought to break with activity designed mainly to accumulate political capital for the militant, as he puts it, rather than seek out the conditions for revolution. But Linhart is also critical of the militancy of this period for its truncated focus on the spectacular; a blinkered, even “pathological” view of reality prevailed, he argues.¹¹ This is a worldview which, according to Linhart, has its watershed around 1972, when the GP is dissolved and its members, along with the wider milieu, are faced with a return to “ordinary” life. For his part, Linhart would return to the academy, spending most of his career teaching sociology at Université Paris-VIII-Saint-Denis.

It is partly in light of conceptions of revolutionary struggle developed through the Cultural Revolution and against the backdrop of the decomposition of the French left that in 1976 Linhart publishes perhaps his most important text, Lenin, the Peasants, Taylor, offering a nuanced and account of the Bolsheviks’ shifting analyses and policies vis-à-vis the Russian peasantry and developments in industrial production.¹² Among its most fecund arguments is one revolving around Lenin’s adoption of Taylorist scientific management as a means of developing Russia’s productive forces. In conceiving the party as the political agent of the working class, the latter’s objectification by a bureaucratized, Taylorized labor process is justified on the grounds that newly won efficiencies in production would free the popular masses to participate in the direction of the state. The Russian turn to Taylorism, Linhart argues, thus lay the conditions for a rupture between an authoritarian labor process and the democratization of political institutions.¹³

We can discern in such a claim the echoes of earlier concerns over the separation of intellectuals from workers, and of the division of mental and manual labor more generally, as developed within the UJCML and GP. These are made explicit in Linhart’s discussion of the fear of the peasantry among the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia whose romanticized adoration of the countryside quickly turns to disgust following their bad reception there. This is a characteristic move for the petit-bourgeois intellectual, Linhart notes, a sentiment witnessed among those who entered the factories in the 1960s “with the religious fervor of men for whom absolute truth has been revealed, and after a difficult experience or defeat, abandon their établissement by declaring that the workers are bourgeois, rotten, or fascists.”¹⁴

What, then, was Linhart’s own response to Mao’s injunction for the intellectual to “dismount to look among the flowers” or “settle down” among the workers, where a revolutionary situation is absent? In this respect, “Evolution of the Labour Process” unpacks at some length the method of “inquiry.” This is to return to the term deployed by the UJCML but, by the late 1970s, while still conceived as an operation “at trench level”, still établi, in a manner of speaking, but effected through a scholarly work that seeks to understand contemporary transformations to the conditions of labor. The strategies, experiences, and setbacks of établissement allowed could lead into more adequate apprehension of workplace organization and sociabilities.¹⁵

Linhart offers a two-fold line of reasoning for the urgency of such a method and unpacking this here serves to begin to offer a sense of how it functions. First, capital operates with an increasingly sophisticated capacity to obscure reality, to restrict or manipulate knowledge of production. Second, production and circulation themselves grow in complexity as outsourcing and subcontracting extend these processes ever more widely and the divisions and differentiations of labor become ever more intricate and stratified. What might appear as a given, discrete factory or enterprise to an outside observer, Linhart suggests, might involve a whole array of small subcontractors operating across an assortment of sites with vastly disparate working conditions and very different operations. Failure to grasp this is to retain a viewpoint anchored in what remain in many respects “craft” sections of the working class within certain sectors – steel working, auto production, cement making… This is a form of ideology, as Linhart sees it, insofar as it excludes from its frame of reference the “spider’s web” of fragmented labor, some “core,” others “subaltern,” that make it up. It is on this basis that knowledge collected from workers is essential in order to gain crucial, systematic knowledge of “the whole” of specific processes of production today. Consistent with his rejection of a romanticization of the working class, Linhart insists that workers’ knowledge is fragmented and partial, if also profound.¹⁶ The task of the inquiry is, thus, to collect via dialogue and participation, this disjointed state of collective memory and oral testimony in support of a systematic understanding of the whole.

Linhart’s investigative throughlines combine specific insights from the roughly contemporaneous efforts to develop a practice of workers’ inquiry and “co-research” in Italy, namely the attention to workers’ subjectivities and the “fractures” introduced into class composition through circuits of migration and the variegated enforcement of job hierarchies. Recent scholarship has traced the diffusion of Italian workerism in France, particularly via the publication of translated Quaderni Rossi articles in the 1968 Maspero collection, Luttes ouvrières et capitalisme d’aujourd’hui, as well as the influence the inquiry-form – as fact-finding, interviews, collective tracts, or questionnaires – would have on far-left groups embedded in the social upsurges of the period.¹⁷ Linhart’s elaboration of his approach to inquiry in the 1978 interview allows us to see its resonances with that of a figure like Romano Alquati, who stressed the need for close relations between an “outsider” with deep-seated links to “insiders” at a particular worksite. When Alquati went into Olivetti in the early 1960s, he had contacts with workplace militants active in the local branch of the Italian Socialist Party to lend their expertise and assistance. Alquati grounded his inchieste in discussions with workers themselves, drawing out hypotheses and leads that interacted with shop struggles and bringing in broader layers of workers across plants and job classifications.¹⁸ The cultivation of close ties with informal work groups around specific knots of firm-specific issues and labor processes raised the collective analysis to a political level. Likewise, Linhart’s careful introduction of the “core/periphery” world-systems problematic to the differentiation of workforces across a production complex also gestures toward the research Ferruccio Gambino and others were conducting in the mid-1970s on how the “mobility of labor-power” and the “mobility of capital” constituted “complementary aspects of the fractionation of labor,” hardening forms of segmentation and closing down openings for working-class organization.¹⁹ Finally, Linhart’s insistence that the introduction of new technology into work relations is always a matter of rebalancing the nexus of capitalist power, integration, and workers’ insubordination finds reverberations with Raniero Panzieri’s criticism of distortions around Marxist views on technological development, the division of labor, and workers’ control.²⁰

“Evolution of the Labor Process and Class Struggles” provides a series of examples of how the move from fragments to system might function, although it bears remarking that it does not take up the literary form of an episodic first-person narrative that Linhart otherwise adopts in The Assembly Line, his account of his time établi at Citroën, or Sugar and Hunger, his analysis of the sugar-growing region of Pernambuco in Brazil.²¹ In the latter, for instance, he offers a rich narrative of his travels through the region as a means of examining the ways an industrialized, sugar-based monoculture wipes out small plots, draws local producers into global markets and class relations. His tapestry of dialogues is expansive, extending to children (themselves often waged workers), a union president, local politicians, engineers, plantation owners; it’s a mode of analysis that operates at different levels of abstraction and, in “settling down” in this way, seeks to avert a reification of Marxist concepts by starting instead from lived experience. This is a means of analysis, in other words, which offers the resources to overcome the apparent contradiction between objective knowledge and a class perspective.²²

Not long after “Evolution of the Labour Process and Class Struggles” was published, Linhart largely retreated from public view following a suicide attempt, and with the exception of The Assembly Line, little of his oeuvre has been translated to English.²³ It is important to note, however, that Linhart did not completely abandon this commitment to militant inquiry in the later phases of his itinerary, but sustained it through other channels. As he perceptively remarked in a conversation with Charles Bettelheim and the journal Communisme in 1977, there exists a “fantastic disproportion between certain theoretical debates over Marxism and the capacity to understand the concrete class struggle today.”²⁴ Linhart has continued to survey this struggle in its different levels: from international transformations in the process of accumulation, the increasing mobility of capitalist firms and the multiplication of subcontracting, the state’s role in social regulation and labor legislation, different strategic approaches and accommodations from the trade unions, to the strategies of exploitation, spatial division, and resistance that make up the everyday antagonism of the working day.²⁵ He contributed to the lively debates in France at the onset of the 1980s and the arrival of the Mitterrand government into power over the future of the trade-union movement, the destruction of shop floor cultures, and the ideological obfuscations around the Auroux Laws and the devising of new lean production-based “employee participation” schemes.²⁶ He co-wrote reports with other researchers and labor activists involved with the major trade union centers – including his sister, Danièle Linhart, a prolific sociologist of the shifting patterns in the subjectivity of work and managerial techniques centered around the rerouting of autonomy. Through networks and think tanks like the Association d’enquête et de recherche sur l’organisation du travail (AEROT) and the Centre pour la recherche économique et ses applications (CEPREMAP), he made connections with other currents of Marxist analysis of the labor process, recasting the themes and approaches of sociologie du travail in contexts of crisis and restructuring.²⁷ Across all of this activity, he has tackled these scientific analyses of the tendencies of capitalist development, the management and control of labor-power, and workplace organization from the “viewpoint of the working class…among the agents of the production process.”²⁸

In the texts assembled in this collection, Linhart upsets familiar periodizations regarding Fordism and post-Fordism, Taylorism and post-Taylorism, globalization, and other broad characterizations about the changing character of work. He hits upon critical features of contemporary political economy and the labor movement: the redistribution and maintenance of forms of exploitation through outsourcing, arcane legal arrangements of flexible employment, and offshoring in many industries; the interplay of autonomy and subordination in work relations; management surveillance, stress, and knowledge capture in partially automated worksites; and the prospects of worker militancy and union organization among fissured or segmented workforces in larger production and logistics concentrations, across smaller, low-wage shops, and on regional or geographic bases.²⁹ Included are investigations carried out at petrochemical complexes around the Étang de Berre;³⁰ a report on the development of capital-intensive industry and the dilemmas of technology transfer in Algeria, from a visit to the country in the mid-1970s, broaching the the logistical and political questions raised by relations of dependency and underdevelopment in the global value chain;³¹ historical overviews of Taylorism and consideration of the methodology of the enquête; an inquiry conducted among hospital workers during the transition to the 35-hour workweek in France, tracking the contradictory upshot of computerization and standardization on the labor process in the medical field; and analyses of the structural effects immigration, imperialism, and racialization have had on divisions among the proletariat in France. Linhart has continually highlighted the significance of militants immersing themselves in these situations of investigation and struggle. 

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This article is part of a dossier entitled “Robert Linhart and the Circuitous Paths of Inquiry.”

The post Introduction to Robert Linhart: Concrete Analyses in the Spider’s Web of Production appeared first on Viewpoint Magazine.