The Ungovernable Society. Grégoire Chamayou
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was asked in 1973. He replied, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been in for one’. Another worker, when asked ‘how come you’re only working four days a week?’ replied, ‘because I can’t make enough money in three’.10 A third was asked what exactly he was looking for, and replied ‘for a chance to use my brain’, a job where ‘my high school education counts for something’.11 Factory life? ‘You’re like in a jail cell – except they have more time off in prison’, replied another.12
In factories, your body was ruined and your mind was exhausted, you felt dead: ‘I sing, whistle, throw water at a guy on the line, do anything I can to bust the boredom’.13 Unable to endure the infinite repetition of the same any longer, you aspired to create rather than to produce: ‘Sometimes, out of pure meanness, when I make something, I just put a little dent in it. I like to do something to make it really unique. Hit it with a hammer; deliberately to see if it’ll get by, just so I can say I did it’.14
Ordinary acts of indiscipline, just like the disciplines of which they are the counterpart, involve an art of detail. They require just as much meticulousness and obstinacy in producing their transgressions as the opposite side does in enacting its regulations. Operating on the scale of the smallest gesture, they recover moments of respite, in a fierce and intimate struggle whose booty can be calculated in the few dozen seconds you can grab for yourself from the rhythms of the assembly belt. ‘But eventually the main problem is time’.15 You slow down on purpose, you put on the brakes, alone or collectively, or conversely you sometimes accelerate so you can later enjoy a brief stretch of time out. ‘I’m not the only worker playing this game: almost everybody does it’. You steal a handful of moments for yourself, just to breathe, to exchange a few words, to do something else: ‘I’m good enough at my job now that I can do two or three cars in a row fast and then have maybe 15 or 20 seconds for myself in between. The main thing I do with these interludes is read. I read the paper every day and I read books. Some of the books are quite complex. The main thing I’ve had to learn in order to read under these conditions is to remember what I’ve read and to be able to quickly find where I’ve left off’.16 If discipline is a rhythmopolitics or a chronopower, indiscipline is too, but in a diametrically opposite direction, a fight against the clock of a particular kind. ‘I actually saw a woman in the plant running along the line to keep up with the work. I’m not going to run for anybody. There ain’t anyone in that plant that is going to tell me to run’.17 The first main refusals of acceleration were workers’ struggles. The Indocile are time thieves.18
At General Motors, one trade unionist reports, the staff ‘uses its powers as a dictatorship’.19 The authoritarianism of the little bosses, close supervision, pernickety instructions and absurd orders, insults and continued pressure – all of this was now unacceptable. ‘The foremen’, says one Black worker from Baltimore soberly, ‘could show more respect for the workers – talk to them like men, not dogs’.20
The state of social tension, said an alarmed Wall Street Journal in 1969, is the ‘worst within memory’. Everything suggested that an ‘epic battle between management and labor’ was imminent, announced Fortune.21 In fact, in the year 1970 alone, nearly two and a half million workers went on strike in the United States.22 This was the biggest wave of work stoppages since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. With the high number of strike actions came more radical forms of struggle. Over and above wage demands, the complaints concerned the forms of labour organization and were aimed at the authorities that were imposing them.
Bill Watson, a worker at a Detroit car factory in 1968, recounts a widespread wave of sabotage that he witnessed. The engineers had introduced a new six-cylinder engine model that workers judged to be poorly designed. They had expressed their criticisms to the management, in vain. Faced with this flat refusal, some teams started to ‘forget’ to mount certain parts. Soon, others followed, sabotaging the work in their turn. Mountains of unserviceable machines rose up in the workshops: ‘At that point there were so many defective motors piled around the plant that it was almost impossible to move from one area to another’.23 This phenomenon, says Watson, was not isolated. There were, pretty much all over America at the time, conflicts of the same kind: they expressed a desire on the part of workers to take over production, to gain control of their work, of the way they did it, of what was being manufactured in the factory.
In 1970, the CEO of General Motors sent a warning to his employees: ‘we cannot tolerate employees who reject responsibility and fail to respect essential disciplines and authority. […] GM increased its investment […] to improve both productivity and working conditions, but tools and technology mean nothing if the worker is absent from his job. We must receive a fair day’s work for which we pay a fair day’s wage’.24
How was discipline to be restored? GM management opted for the ‘hard line’:25 speed up the work rate, automate unskilled tasks, downgrade the remainder, make cuts in wages, and strengthen surveillance and control. The automobile factory in Lordstown, Ohio, with its assembly line described as ‘the fastest in the world’, was the firm’s technological flagship, the incarnation of the employers’ solutions to productivity problems. In 1971 it was placed under the control of the ‘General Motors Assembly Division’, a managerial shock force, described as ‘the roughest and toughest’ of the group.26 Under this harsh regime, many jobs were scrapped and the production rates, already very fast, were accelerated: from sixty cars per hour to almost double that amount. Now, ‘in 36 seconds the worker had to perform at least eight different operations’.27 ‘You just about need a pass to piss. That ain’t no joke. You raise your little hand if you want to go wee-wee. Then wait maybe half an hour ’till they find a relief man. And they write it down every time too cause you’re supposed to do it in your time, not theirs. Try it too often and you’ll get a week off’.28
In Lordstown, the workforce was particularly young, twenty-eight on average. It took young bodies to keep up with such a work rate – but the young minds that guided those bodies were also the least ready to submit to it. One day, a car arrived at the end of the assembly belt with all its parts unmounted, lying in a tidy pile in the frame. The managers accused the workers of sabotage. ‘Sabotage? Just a way of letting off steam. You can’t keep up with the car so you scratch it on the way past. I once saw a hillbilly drop an ignition key down the gas tank. Last week I watched a guy light a glove and lock it in the trunk. We all wanted to see how far down the line they’d discover it. […] If you miss a car, they call that sabotage’.29
The management, which reckoned that the losses due to ‘indiscipline’ amounted to 12,000 cars per year not being produced on the site, reacted with increased firmness, launching hundreds of disciplinary proceedings: one worker was sacked for arriving a minute late; another was suspended for having farted in the passenger compartment of a vehicle; a third for singing tralala on the shop floor.30
At the beginning of March 1972, faced with this tightening of screws, the workers resorted to a wildcat strike. The fighting spirit of the Lordstown workers made an impression. ‘These guys have become tigers’.31 They were ‘just not going to swallow the same kind of treatment’ as their fathers; they were not afraid of the management – this was what was at stake in the strike.32 The press talked of a ‘Lordstown syndrome’, an ‘industrial Woodstock’.33 After a month of conflict, the management backed off and reinstated the previous pace of production.
Thus, when confronted with acts of worker indiscipline, the management could find no better solution than to respond by intensifying the disciplinary regime that this indiscipline had rejected in the first place, then fanning it to such an extent that it was radicalized and turned into open revolt. Managers were caught in a contradiction. They knew for a fact that worker indiscipline expressed a visceral rejection of the organization of industrial work and, ‘especially among the younger employees, a growing reluctance to accept a strict authoritarian shop discipline’.34 They were also aware that ‘the conditions for work in the new factories are such that discontent and rebellion are not exceptional