In his column “The urgency of success”, Michel David wrote this week during an analysis of the teachers’ strike: “It is clear that increased flexibility in the organization of work is necessary. » I put forward the following hypothesis: the chronicler said this automatically. Without really thinking about it. Because, frankly, this statement is a bit stupid when you think about it (and the columnist is not, stupid).
Human resources management has been “flexible” for 40 years. Forty years of flexibility, of making the world more malleable and more manageable; forty years, too, of piling up reforms and restructuring of public services, as if the very idea of the stability of institutions was an evil to be fought in our society.
And the more we “flex”, the more the work becomes rigid, painful, heavy, time-consuming, meaningless. The more we relax, the more the life of ordinary people freezes, becomes stiff, accelerates, submits to the injunction to adapt, whatever the cost.
The principles of public administration have been thrown out the window in order to apply the techniques of new management wall to wall. Since then, public services have been governed like factories. Downright. It’s not a picture. However, there is no democracy, no social goals, no cultural functions in a large company. Only interests, investments and technical means, including personnel.
Unions often have a bureaucratic and rigid view of work. No one will dispute that. But there is nothing more inflexible in Quebec than school administrations, than ministries, with their almost pathological logic of control and governance by numbers.
The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) abolished school democracy – moribund, certainly, but is that a reason? — to maintain the opaque bureaucracy of school administration. Bill 23 calls for the centralization of power in the hands of the minister. Here: Bernard “karaoke” Drainville. How will this regime of authority be more “flexible” for the majority? One wonders.
This bill abolishes the Higher Council of Education, an institution of the Quiet Revolution, whose main fault would be its infamous autonomy. He will replace it with a gadget whose main merit would be to have the word “excellence” in its name. This word, “excellence”, has belonged to the empty vocabulary of liberal management since the 1990s. It evokes old Greek philosophy and aristocratic virtues, but today everyone knows what is hidden behind it.
Calls for “flexibility”, one time in ten, are aimed at union inertia. Proverbial and sometimes proven. The other nine times, it serves to destroy the autonomy of institutions and to reduce the citizen, the teacher or the nurse to the rank of passive instrument. Thus, the more teachers and nurses are “flexible”, the less they can act according to the purposes of their professions – caring, teaching – and the more they must assume by themselves the bureaucratic obligations and management hassles whose main goal is to control their actions.
The autonomy that they have gained, by dint of being “flexible” in this way for 40 years, is the same as that of the supermarket customer who now switches to automatic checkouts, docilely and free of charge carrying out the operation by which the large company takes his money.
Flexibility is a commandment of authoritarian liberalism. A regime that has no idea of flexibility.