Frederick Schulze

Labor Contention and the Inversion of 'This World'
Anthropologizing the France Télécom Suicide Wave of 2009

Introduction1

It is September 9th, 2009; a 48-year old engineer stands in front of his supervisors in a conference room at France Télécom. He has worked for the company for over twenty years, two decades spent adjusting to changing technologies and meeting company expectations. When he began his career in his mid-twenties, he could rest soundly knowing that his work qualified him as a civil servant and therefore his job was relatively secure. The French government had owned France Télécom for most of its existence and even now it maintains a two-thirds stake in the company; he knows that he cannot be fired without just cause and he, a long standing member of the France Télécom service team, knows that they do not have one. The management team before him did not summon him in order to fire him, however, merely to transfer him to a new department: the sales floor. The engineer draws a knife from his pocket, extends the blade, and stabs himself in the stomach; he does not die.
Only days before, a worker in the customer service department opened a window on the fourth floor of her office building; she stepped out of it, falling to her death on the pavement below after being told of changes to her department's organization. She was 32. In August, two France Télécom employees took their own lives, one of them a 52-year-old father and the other a 28-year-old boyfriend who left a note citing his feelings of anger and helplessness at work. In July, a middle-aged engineer took a piece of paper and wrote, “I am killing myself because of my job at France Telecom. That's the only reason.” This black list continues backwards into 2008, but this is not a history paper.
The list also continues into the future; after the attempted self-evisceration recounted above, another woman, told she would have to transfer for the third time that same year, would kill herself by a drug overdose in her home. Following her death, another employee, another father of two children, would leap from a towering viaduct in Alby Sur Cheran to become the 24th consecutive suicide of a France Télécom employee in an 18 month period. More suicides would follow in October and December, but let us not begin here either.
I ask that the reader return to our engineer in the conference room and focus on the knife with which he made headlines all over the world. I wish to start here because a knife is a familiar object, its fundamental material use value is quite clear; a knife is designed to cut, to divide, to separate. In the social context in which we encounter it above, however, what exactly the knife is separating is not so obvious. I propose the answer to this question can be found in an anthropological analysis of sacrifice and the hegemonic power apparatus of the capitalist mode of production.

France Télécom in the Age of Collective Suicide

In order to prove the salience of this question to the above event, much less answer it, I must first press the point that these are not acts in isolation. These suicides and suicide attempts are part of a long and very public 'wave' of suicides in the France Télécom company specifically, and French white-collar labor generally. Following the rash of similar incidents at the Peugeot and Renault research and development offices (Costello 2007), not to mention previous waves at France Télécom itself in 2000, 2002 and 2003 (News Wires 2009, Lichfield 2009), France Télécom has garnered significant public infamy for its twenty-month run totaling 26 suicides of its employees as of November, 2009 (UNI 2009, Le Monde 2009).
The labor syndicates, especially FO (Force Ouvrière), CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail) and CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), under the auspices of the CHSCT (Comité d’Hygiène, de Sécurité et des Conditions de Travail), openly accuse France Télécom's oppressive management tactics as the ultimate mechanism that has pushed so many employees quite literally over the edge (B.H. 2009). The French government followed suit, demanding and receiving the resignation of deputy PDG Louis-Pierre Wenes, widely regarded as the architect of the management tactics in question, in early October (Bushell-Embling 2009).
The syndicates did not, however, engage in organized action on a rank-and-file level until well after 400 workers themselves, unionized and non-unionized, took to the street in a wildcat walk-out in September at Annecy-le-Vieux and Bourdeaux in support of one of their deceased colleagues; notably, almost two-thirds of the protesters hailed from branches unaffiliated with the deceased. Their demonstration focused on three basic issues: frequent employee re-locations, impossible production goals, and poor working conditions, tying each to the suicides of their colleagues. PDG Didier Lombard attempted to address the demonstrators but he was drowned-out by booing workers (Costello 2009).
Another protest, again without direction from the syndicates, preceded the above event earlier that month. Signs carried by the demonstrators at these events, as well as smaller mourning events in Paris, Marseille, and surrounding areas, referenced excerpts from a widely publicized suicide note by a France Télécom employee who killed himself that summer (News Wires 2009). One phrase, “le management par la terreur”, was particularly attended to and was repeated in numerous press reports covering the suicides and the protests from labor (cf. Independent.co.uk 2009).
The ultimate response from France Télécom, accomplished without any admission of guilt, was the constitution of a 24-hour psychological helpline for its employees as well as hiring 380 new employees charged with stress-relief programming (BBC 2009, La CGT 2009). France Télécom also distributed a 171 question survey to its employees entitled “Questionnaire Technologia on stress and work conditions” which they gave their employees a few weeks to complete (France Télécom 2009); it boasted a 80% return though with predictably grim results (Télécompaper 2009).

The Logic of Suicide

The analyses that I present in this short paper regarding the France Télécom suicide wave are broad and discursive covering ritual sacrifice, labor alienation, emergent repertoires and hegemonic struggle; in order to tie them together, a starting thread must be teased out of the tangle. Given that the most striking aspect of this case is, without a doubt, the sheer horror of the suicide wave itself, putting it into an anthropological context seems to be the most immediate concern.
Eschewing the classical Durkheimian discussion on suicide as a general social phenomenon, I argue that these suicides, given their reception and use in the France Télécom repertoire of labor contention, exemplified by the aforementioned wildcat demonstrations, ought to be viewed anthropologically as 'sacrifices.' Linda Pitcher (1999), in her strikingly reflexive enthnographic work on Palestinian martyrs of the intifada, writes:

Sacrifice is the acceptance of loss or destruction as a means to an end; the ful- fillment of an ideal. The call to sacrifice within a living subject whose psychic "wholeness" has already been subsumed by external contingency presents a redemptive invitation. For the would-be martyr, it is an opportunity to gain subjective control of life through death, with the added promise of securing a legacy that will carry his memory (however objectified) into the future (25).

Whether or not these suicides were intended as efforts towards the “fulfillment of an ideal” by the deceased themselves matters only peripherally to this study; they are definitely used to those ends by the France Télécom labor activists. This was proven in their use of excerpts from suicide notes in the Autumn wildcat walk-outs as well as being the stated impetus of the demonstration itself and successive planned demonstrations. While taking seriously the suicide notes some of these employees left behind, I will not be attempting to guess at the inner motivations of the individual workers who take their own lives. Rather, I am interested in how the suicides, as sacrifices, are used to propel and legitimate the emergent field of labor contention at France Télécom and what that discourse reveals about the structures of power within, or against which it must operate.
The question I posed of the knife in the meeting room regarding the object of division and separation in our case study is salient to this analysis because of the distinctly sacrificial quality of the suicide wave as it has been categorized in active labor agitation, reformist unions, and in the media-fueled public issue from which much of this data originates. I concur with Edmund Leach that one of the primary roles of sacrifice is to bridge the “impotent man” (1972:6) of “This World of temporal experience” to the “Other World of experience reversed” as a means of empowerment (1976:82). Leach pays special attention to the ritual process of sacrifice, specifically those rites which “separate the 'initiate' into two parts -one pure, the other impure” (84) This ritual logic is provided by the cosmological structure of the death-event, natural or otherwise. He writes:

At death a living man becomes, by a process of 'natural' separation, a dead corpse plus a ghost-soul. This separation is treated as a 'purification' of the ghost-soul, which is initially deemed to be in limbo, separated from, but still close to, its original domestic environment. But whereas the soul has been purified, that from which it has been separated […] has become polluted (84).

The knife of the would-be victim in the France Télécom offices, though it failed to kill its wielder, in fact succeeded in its capacity as a divider, as have the windows, bridges and belts which have taken the lives of this worker's colleagues. In our case, however, the 'soul' was not separated from the impure body, but rather from the impure “external contingency” of the total subsumption of labor by the domination of time in the capitalist mode of production; the “pure soul” of the suffering worker is sacrificially separated from the “pollution” of the France Télécom corporation. In this way, the sacrifice is also an indictment.
The suicide wave at Frace Télécom has become a category of martyrdom and sacrifice for those who dread the alienation of capitalist labor. The “impotent man of the temporal world”, a role filled in this case by the white-collar proletariate, has used the suicide wave to create an “Other World” from which to speak with, in Bourdieu's terminology, an “authorized language” (1979:170). This process is analogous to the formulation of a hegemonic field from which emergent repertoires of labor resistance, by definition marginalized by the hegemonized categories of capitalism and the institutional repertoires of syndicate-based activism, can validate themselves and press their interests.

This World of temporal experience

In the structural model of sacrifice presented above, the existence of “The Other World” is a necessary precondition for the transfer of power or authority into the identity of the “impotent man” through sacrifice. Though Leach developed his model to explain overtly religious ritual forms, it is easily adapted to our secular case as well. In order to explain the negative contours of the Other World as it is made to function for the activist worker at France Télécom, I should first explain why such a cosmological construction is needed at all.
Eric Wolf (1990) delineates four basic forms of power. Personal capability, the first form of power, is the “Nietzschean” potential with which any given individual meets the world. The second form accounts for the ability of that individual to exert his will onto another and expect it to be realized; we might call this form 'interpersonal power'. He calls the third form “tactical power” and describes it as the power to “direct energy flows” in a given structured setting. This power is associated with instrumentalizing the condition in which one finds oneself and organizing it in a way that benefits the ego (586). The final form of power he identifies as “structural power”; this is the power to shape the limits of the possible, to demarcate the field in which all social action takes place and to define the categories from which that action draws meaning (587).
Though it would be just as fruitful to apply Wolf's forms of power to the case of the France Télécom suicides in the order they appear above, I feel it would be more interesting to reverse this order and instead start from the broadest form of power as it is experienced by the France Télécom worker and then spiral down to the ego which is, after all, where suicide is finally encountered.
Structural power in contemporary capitalism suffers from no lack of analysis in the social sciences; the most relevant structural detail of this mode of production to the activist France Télécom employee is the domination of time by the exigencies of capitalist production. This domination has two faces: the infinite revolutionizing of socially necessary labor time via the commodity form of value and the unpaid surplus labor time that allows for the production of surplus capital (Marx 1867, Postone 2003). The France Télécom laborer, much like his historical predecessors for centuries past, is structurally limited in his personal capacities from the moment he enters the labor pool to the moment he leaves it. The condition of his social identity as a laborer is that of flotsam in the distant ebbs and flows of structural tides far beyond his control or vision. Leach's “impotent man in This World of temporal experience” is the very definition of the capitalist worker, regardless of the color of his collar. Alienation via the domination of time is the working class' heaviest burden, it is the clearest result of and contributor to the socially relative power inequality which is its most determinant characteristic (Miliband 1991:25).
Wolf's tactical power, unlike structural power, is partially accessible to the France Télécom worker, though this access is limited primarily to a repertoire of institutional pathways, notable examples being syndicate membership or status mobility in capitalist bureaucracy. As the French syndicates have long been cemented as arms of the French liberal and leftist political parties, they are an integral part of the capitalist State and act as mediators between an ever-marginalized worker base and an ever-revolutionizing capitalist bureaucracy (Touraine 1985). Clearly, the limited tactical power afforded the worker through these media is reformist in nature; it cannot legitimize emergent repertoires of contention. The reformist tactical repertoire reinforces the legitimacy of the hegemonic order in the same strokes with which it criticizes it (Roseberry 1994:362).
Impersonal power, in the Wolfian scheme, does not require much exposition here. Following Weber, its realization is legitimized by the authority of the above two power forms. Anyone who has worked in a hierarchized system of production is well aware of stringent limits placed on the enactment of interpersonal power for the worker; interpersonal power flows one way: downriver.
Finally, under the weight of this upside-down pyramid of power digging into the increasingly atomized worker, the France Télécom employee is allowed few pathways for self-realization of the first form of power: personal capacity. The possibilities for expressing his personal power are limited to the point of extinction; whatever outlets for empowerment he finds at home are completely absent in the workplace. “The primary quality of labor,” writes G. M. Tamas, “is a general and irremediable divorce of persons' [sic] inner forces, desires and capacities, from the aims at the service of which they must develop and exercise these forces” (26). As the influence of the labor bureaucracy encroaches on these workers' personal time and begins to decide even the location in which they spend this time by irregular staff transfers, is it any wonder that power will be sought from without and in such dramatic displays? The guiding phrase of the World Social Forum in Brazil is “Another world is possible”; for the France Télécom worker seeking to regain control of his “inner forces, desires and capacities”, The Other World is necessary.

The Other World of experience reversed

Following Antonio Gramsci, William Roseberry (1994) argues that a hegemonic field is a relational web of conflict between interested actors unevenly situated in a power hierarchy; it is not a 'cultural consensus' of ideology and mores but rather a space of struggle over the categories, or “meaningful frameworks”, of practice and communication which appear normative or inevitable to the oppressed (361). The self-separation of the oppressed worker from his body indicates the degree to which the capitalist mode of production has hegemonized the limits of worker practice on even a personal, visceral level. The domination of time is simultaneously a domination of mind and body; the body becomes capital. As suicide 'purifies' the worker's 'soul' and condemns his puppet flesh, it 'bears witness' to a system of production which, even though authorized and legitimized by all forms of power in all presiding institutions, is nonetheless judged as wrong. If the categories and frameworks that legitimate practice are so hegemonized by the French capitalist system, what authorizes this judgment? From where does that authority stem?
The conversion of the suicides into sacrifices, though similar as a form of indictment, is counter-hegemonic in the way that syndicalist reform can never be; it rejects the entire world of power by making it visible at its basest level. While the syndicates draw their authority to reform from “This World”, the emergent repertoires of labor contention draw theirs from the possibility that “This World” is not inevitable and should not, therefore, be accepted at all. Thus, their actions are drawn from the inversion of “This World”, precisely the “Other World” of Leach's model above. The suicide-sacrifice turns power on its head; as structural power twists its roots into the bed of the worker's personal power, the suicide reverses the flow of influence. The inverted “Other World” appears to speak through the suicides, rejects power at its highest structural level because of its corruption of the lowest.
Of course, none of this interpretation can be extracted from the suicides in isolation, but is rather validated by their development as symbols in the emergent repertoires of contention exemplified by the wildcat walk-outs of the France Télécom workers in September. The “Other World” for the activist France Télécom worker is not a 'real' or spiritual place as it might be taken in Leach's original model; it is merely an inversion of the reality of capitalist production which purifies the concept 'worker' by turning even existentially motivated atomized suicides into social sacrifices.

Concluding Remarks: atomization or worker's movement?

I propose that within this dramatic separation of 'purified worker' and 'impure mode of production' through the apotheosis of the France Télécom suicides lies a token of evidence for the foundations of a supra-national worker's movement drawn on broad class lines. While much has been written in the social sciences on the atomization and inter