Abstract
This chapter develops a number of aspects from Chapters 1 to 2. It is in logistics warehouses that we witness the return to Taylor and Ford with information technologies that accelerate work. The isolation experienced by workers generates new problems. At the same time, social games are so that people might survive and make their working conditions acceptable. In the design offices of (aircraft and automobile firms) and in a research and development department (an electricity company) management by project introduces the flux tendu used in workshops: all the engineers have to face the same symptoms of personality dislocation.
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- 1.
According to Didier Lagrange (2014), “Picking involves a succession of movements and grestures that stress the whole of the body. People use their eyes and neck muscles, for instance, to read codes. Pushing caddies means bending your legs, grabbing with hands, twisting backs. The same applies when stacking items. Above all, the same gestures are repeated day in day out”. And yet, the work is not considered strenuous since it alternates repetitive gestures with caddy driving. Defined thusly, the strenuousness index seriously underplays the difficulty of this work by ignoring factors like package weight and how many empty pallettes workers handle (weighing nearly 5 tonnes a day).
- 2.
The quality of a product (i.e. of a “durable good”) in a capitalist system always has two contradictory aspects: it must ostensibly possess sufficient quality to provoke a purchasing decision; but be of sufficiently poor quality to enable planned obsolescence so that the consumers will repeat-purchase as quickly as possible.
- 3.
Phases generally overlap, with employees all working with data that has yet to be determined or validated by the project manager. If they have to wait until all choices or data are determined, this would be akin to returning to a sequential logic. Overlapping injects a modicum of flexibility into the system but also flux and uncertainty since even if the data offers some certainty, it never stops coming. This can perturb employees who may be forced to revisit tasks or modify output that they thought they had successfully finished.
- 4.
To be more precise, an internal informational flows tool coordinates the time pressures weighing on employees. This is a groupware module organising the collective work of employees who meet rarely if ever. Groupware connects everyone via a shared knowledge base, linking all members of a virtual collective by e-mail while communicating the delivery dates that management has decided. Despite only giving people a little room to manœuvre, groupware forces on everyone group rules comprised of senior management objectives and desires, especially regarding deadlines (Craipeau 2001; Durand 2007; Goussard 2011). This machine-based supervision is akin to an economic kind of operational management, even if its effects on the de-humanisation of work leave it open to the criticism that it excludes all other social relationships.
- 5.
The new paradigm is illustrated in the following statement by an engineer-project manager: “The main challenge in design today is how to evolve from a plan logic to a specifications logic. (…) Workers believe they can function using plans but many other factors must be taken into account, like procedures, costs, etc. With specifications the focus is on needs and people must learn to ask for whatever it is they need, for instance, to design an engine. (…) Modern companies are all focused on returning to their core business and doing whatever they can to collaborate effectively with subcontractors” (Petit 2012b).
- 6.
See chapter on cooperation in Das Kapital (1948, Book 1, Volume 2, pp. 19–25).
- 7.
Other ways out of this predicament are more feasible, like employees adopting a withdrawal stance at work (something that management tends to criticise in the name of productivism) or behaving like hermits or refusing to cooperate—all attitudes that meet with social opprobrium. See Chapter 5 for accepted new forms of marginality at work, specifically with respect to the employment of highly educated young persons.
- 8.
Project managers (who might run anything from two to seven projects, and sometimes even more) and group leaders (managing between four and seven project managers) are all researcher-engineers. Those who became group managers all opted for a “hierarchical path” that generally offered greater financial opportunity. Project managers are not hierarchically superior to other researcher-engineers.
- 9.
Otherwise there is a major risk for researcher-engineers that the department to which they belong or the project they are working on will disappear due to a lack of funding. Thematic reconversions may take a while to materialise (one to two years) but they traumatise the researcher-engineers affected. Changes of this kind appeared to be a major cause of malaise at work in the R&D division in question here.
- 10.
Setting meetings (even using doodle) is a real problem, with people often juggling four or five doodles simultaneously. Once the first finishes, the others may have to be changed if they are not updated in real-time. All of these changes will have a cascade effect, interfering with people’s schedules and making them lose a lot of time sharing information about meetings and moving them around.
- 11.
Invisibilisation refers to the process whereby work tasks remain hidden due to lean management. Examples include treatement of emails, preparing activities such as arranging transportation and housing, readings reports, following Masters or PhD students in the firm, and so on.
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Durand, JP. (2019). The New Worker Dispossessed of Work. In: Creating the New Worker . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_4
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