From the 19the century, expectations for productivity at work have steadily increased. Return at all costs, very often achieved to the detriment of individuals and communities, only takes into account the need to produce faster, more and at the best price. The qualitative gives way to the quantitative.
Where are we going to stop on this momentum? On leaving certain factories, the lonely workers see the electricity that was used to light them during the hours of their labor deducted from their wages. If they are prevented from working, by accident or illness, these workers are also held financially responsible for their replacements. Paid holidays were still a long way off! These holidays, which arrived late, will also support the establishment of a new industry: mass tourism. So much so that today, at vacation time, it is still work, basically, that is in question.
Work, its hardness, continues to be a prominent issue of our time.
As proof, the value of work and productivity remain recurring watchwords in political speeches. Everyone remembers a highly paid Lucien Bouchard, loudly demanding that everyone work more, in the name of a strange conception of what lucidity is. Public figures change. But such speeches remain, as evidenced by the renewed injunctions in favor of work and productivity at all costs. To the point where we have come, without flinching, to watch the fauna, flora and humanity of a region being poisoned with arsenic for years, as if it were only there a mere inconsequential by-product of our “economic priorities”. No, they are not behind us, tragedies and scandals of this kind. Silicosis – this industrial disease which decimated in the post-war period, with the complacency of the authorities, the village of Saint-Rémi-d’Amherst in the Laurentians – still lurks. In other forms.
Of course, it is understood that history does not repeat itself, even if sometimes, let’s face it, it still stutters a little. However, the feeling that the present necessarily belongs to the order of novelty is pure naivety. History has its own way of repeating itself. Also the past is never quite past. It constitutes a reservoir of possibilities, the best as well as the worst.
Coming out of a pandemic that never ceases to come back to haunt us, many are those who welcome the transition made in favor of digital and teleworking. In truth, this period will have been the occasion to materialize old fantasies of work organization secreted in management manuals from the 1980s. In the name of permanent “restructuring” and “flexibility”, here we are at the he time when workers, more lonely than ever, are once again invited to provide or finance their work tools themselves. They pay for their office, their computer, paper and printer ink, often their telephone, while making themselves more available than ever. In the name of economic return, the worker is called upon to give himself more. We take more from him. These new constraints of today’s wage labor, however new they may be, are endured as if they went without saying, in the name of an old bond of subordination which continues to be exploited for better or for worse, regardless of the embellished cosmetics with which their workshops are made up.
No one seems to notice so much the cynical and real violence that our era secretes against employees, but everyone is surprised to see them turn against this violence, in particular by willingly leaving their jobs at the first opportunity. The workers are no longer faithful to their position, complain more and more of the bosses.
In an interview he gave to the daily The sun, the philosopher René Bolduc indicates that we should not be fooled by this prevailing discourse where young people, in particular, are constantly reproached for their lack of loyalty to their employers. That they happily move from company to company is fine, he says. “I find it a bit ironic to hear that. Companies — not all of them — stopped being loyal to their workers a long time ago. In the 1980s and 1990s, in search of flexibility, they got rid of permanent contracts, insurance and pension plan obligations. One only has to look at the time required to become permanent in government. For their part, the unions did not do much, because it was still the rule of seniority that prevailed. Young people were socialized in there. In other words, young people “tell themselves that they don’t owe much to their employer because he himself made them feel the same”. Work, even today, is often a thousand renewed ways of making you feel that you are nothing.
Besides, why work? Do we ask ourselves enough? “As a child, my goal in life was not to work”, confides René Bolduc in the first pages of work and time, an instructive book published this spring. Having a job capable of providing him with the minimum, or even a little more, was possible, he said, even necessary. But work? Work appears to him, as to many others, in opposition to what life demands of freedom.
Of course, you need money to live. No one lives on love and fresh water alone. However, in wanting to know the joy of having more of our time, are we all lazy, as some would have us believe?
I am telling you here, in any case, that I am going on vacation. In other words, this column is now available to absent subscribers. See you soon.