The city of Saint-Nazaire
Green fields, cows grazing in the meadows... in the background, the river Loire is swirling. Wheels clashing on the joint of the rails - we're on the train from Nantes to Saint-Nazaire. A few miles before arrival, (cows in) the meadows give way to huge tanks. Those are the tanks of the oil refinery in Donges. An pungent, unpleasant smell fills the train then slowly fades away, after the train has gone through the tangled up pipes of the refinery. Donges is the first of a string of industrial sites bordering the river, up to the city centre. An oil terminal, a methane terminal, the docks and warehouses, storage companies and processing plants, the gigantic hangars of l'Aérospatiale, where planes are being built, and at the end, the pride of Saint-Nazaire, just like the bridge crossing the river Loire : "les Chantiers de l'Atlantique" (Shipyards of the Atlantic Ocean). Here, they call them "les Chantiers" ("the Shipyards"), or "la Navale" ("the Navy"). One recognizes them at once, with their huge travelling crane, wearing the Alstom logo, and the funnels of "kings of the seas" towering high over the shipyard site.
Brakes are creaking... the train enters St-Nazaire' station. We're hardly off the train and at once, it feels like it's a different world. In the background, ships being build rise higher than the rooftops. The station itself is a mirror of the city : it's build in the shape of a sea liner.
In the city centre, wide streets run at right angles to each other, lined with buildings only a few storeys high. An architecture that goes back to the 1950's, not unlike Brest, Caen or Calais. Saint-Nazaire was razed to the ground during WW2 and rebuilt following a grid plan. In contrast to La Baule, distant from a few miles, the seafront is not the heart of the city, here. No restaurants nor bars, only a few seats scattered along the waterfront. Saint-Nazaire seems to turn its back to the sea.
What catches the attention, past these first impressions, is the number of temporary work agencies. With time, they have replaced the bars in the city centre and in Penhouët, as the area around the shipyards is called. Seeing that many temporary work agencies only strengthens our feeling that this town was built on one thing : work. Still, our first impression, one of strength, now gives way to a feeling of precariousness, of frailty.
How did it happen ? Why did job insecurity settle in Saint-Nazaire ?
Reorganizing work, or organizing job insecurity
Vilvorde, Levi's", Marks & Spencer, Lu, or recently Métaleurop, all these names bring to our minds images of downsizing, loss of social identity, severely damaged areas and personal dramas. The film won't aim at being an account of the closure of a factory or another, and its consequences. It will rather try to assess the extension, or even the generalisation of job insecurity, and starting from there, try to question the changes in the relationship between workers and their work that this new context brings.
In the last few years, we have seen deep changes in work management and organization, and thus the way work is seen. Little by little, employees have had to become more polyvalent, more available in terms of time and mobility, more efficient, their working time more flexible, etc. The counterpart being supposedly more time on their own and a so called leisure society. Little by little, we can see the emergence of a fake society, in which a lottery ticket may make a millionnaire, a TV appearance make you famous, in which we would only be interested in buiyng a car, a house, clothes and and a microwave oven, a world where to have would mean more than to be. A world where work, the importance it has and the conditions in which it's done wouldn't be relevant anymore.
But the film isn't either, in any way, about the nostalgia of a long gone "eldorado", where workers happily went to work. With a long term contract or a tempory job, a worker remains a worker. Still, the erosion of a certain force of opposition in the relationship between workers and bosses, social benefits and collective labor agreements being called to question came along with these changes in work management, that were presented as necessary, and inevitable. How do the people involved live with it and what do they think of it? What are the consequences of this new work management, on a personal and collective level? What does it change in the relationship between the worker and his job ? to the relationship between workers ? Can this change lead to a new social identity ?
This new management, depicted as necessary and inevitable, for those wishing to remain competitive in an everchanging world, may well lead, in (medium) term, to a complete disorganization of our "modern" societies. Year after year, the status of workers (employees) deteriorates. What will be left, tomorrow, of this status ? Will such a status still exist or will we see independent individuals selling their workforce on the labour market?
The division into smaller businesses working for a bigger one (subcontracting), and the multiplication of more or less insecure job types would let us think so. We can see this pattern in every area of society. The latest reforms, on pensions schemes, on the status of people employed in show business on a casual basis, and soon the reform of the social security system, all follow the same logic. Indeed, on the pretext of freedom and independence, our "modern" societies tend to produce individuals having to "take charge of themselves", each one becoming "his own boss", thus destroying everything "collective". Little by little, workers, and the younger workers even more, embrace these ideas. Furthermore, getting varied jobs and having more responsibility reinforce the feeling. Still the very same workers admit their working conditions are, physically and psychologically, harder and harder. On another hand, the notion of job as a trade, a skill, gives way to simply "make a living".
We believe (we think) that what contributed to make the workers accept the situation is a breaking of the communication channel that happened in the last twenty years. As if the younger employees weren't a part of the country's social history anymore. The only interest they seem to have in doing what they do is to make money, they don't seem very interested in social benefits or in labour collective.
Thus, the other consequence of the new work management is the decline of social cohesion. |
Lisez en français