Between `Mate' and `Scab'

Abstract

This article uses the case study, informed by long-term fieldwork in factories, neighborhoods and homes, of a young worker in the Peugot automobile plant of Sochaux who is himself the son of a foundry worker in that same factory to dissect the divisions and contradictions that beset the industrial working class in contemporary French society as a result of the onset of mass secondary schooling, the normalization of high unemployment and the shift to postfordist modes of production. A deep-seated social opposition and cultural gulf is shown to emerge between older semi-skilled workers and younger workers endowed with school credentials (albeit devalued ones) which splinters the class asunder and further contributes to its collective demoralization and deconstruction. On the one side stands the generation of the fathers who, weakened by the decomposition and precarousness of the conditions of existence of the popular classes, encounter insuperable difficulties in transmitting their social and political heritage, their shopfloor know-how and tactics, modes of resistance at work, masculine sociability and political forms of expression in the workshop. On the other side, their sons have acquired in the course of their secondary schooling (which recently became near-universal in France) social dispositions, bodily demeanors and cultural aspirations that lead them to distance themselves from a heritage which consigns them to remaining `mere workers' when their ambition is to escape from the class and its collective entrapment.