L’Établi (2): the book

Having watched the film, I thought I’d get Robert Linhart’s book off the shelf and finally read it. I think I bought it in Oxford in the early 80s. To remind you, it depicts Linhart’s experience as a Maoist cadre who has chosen to get a job in a Citroen factory in Paris in order to foment “resistance”. There’s an English translation, apparently, called The Assembly-Line, long out of print.

One reason for my hesitance in reading, perhaps, is that I have quite a low opinion of Maoists, particularly Western ones, and I’m sure that Linhart had at the time all kinds of dubious opinions about the Moscow Trials or the Cultural Revolution, but there’s really none of that in the book where he comes across as a fairly generic far-leftist. Instead there’s a fascinating description by someone with real literaray talent of the human reality of mass production as it was in the 1960s and probably still is somewhere other than Europe. It aslo gives an account of the ethno-sociology of the workforce which was “multicultural” long before the rest of society meaningfully was. Possibly the best book ever written by a Maoist then.

When Linhart enters the factory it is very different to how he imagined it would be, which was an assembly line shifting in short bursts as workers performed their tasks. Instead, the line moves continuously with workers running to catch up trying do their jobs quickly so they can get ahead of the game and sneak a quick cigarette or taking too long and getting tangled up with the next section. A manager puts him in the hands of a spot welder, who makes his movements with speed, precision and grace. But when that same Arab worker hands over to Linhart the novice makes a complete mess, molten solder all over the place, and he’s a danger to others and himself with his blowtorch. In a break they get chatting and he discovers that his “trainer” is graded as an unskilled worker (despite showing consummate skill) whereas he, Linhart, has been taken on at a skilled grade. But it soon becomes clear that the assignment of workers to grades has nothing to do with the skills those grades nominally represent: blacks are at the lowest unskilled level, Arabs at the higher unskilled ones, Spanish and Portuguese at the lowest tier of “skilled” and white French people like himself a notch above that, even if they can’t actually do anything. Who says there’s no such thing as “white privilege”?

He doesn’t last long on that job (the bosses judge him to be unteachable) and so gets swiftly transferred to the shop where seats are made, threading rubber bands into holes thousands of times a day. That repetitition is a big theme here: the reduction of the worker to a very small set of choreographed movements. I believe Adam Smith discusses it somewhere. The workers’ bodies are a resource to be consumed and little care is taken to protect them from sharp edges, deafening noise or toxic chemicals. There is a company doctor whom you can go and see if injured, but he’s notorious for doling out an aspirin for everything and sending people back to the line. The product, the 2CV is to be treated with the greatest care and respect, the human bodies that make it not at all. But the harshness of the factory sometimes also brings out the good in people: when Linhart can’t do a job other workers come and help him out until he can and this selflessness and practical solidarity is another aspect of the story.

While the factory is composed of a Babel of languages and nationalities, the wider society in which it works is that of immediately post-colonial France, not so long after the Algerian war has finished. Many of the supervisors and middle-management have a military or colonial background so their attitude to black or Arab workers is not just simple racism but very much a straight transfer of the colonialist authority they had previously exercised over the “natives”. For many immigrant workers who live in company hostels managed by some ex-colonial supervisor this subordination extends beyond the factory gate to most of their lives.

One of the ways in which the bosses mark their dominance over the workers is by addressing them with the familiar “tu” rather than the more respectful “vous”: the grown-ups are speaking to the children. You might conclude from this that when a supervisor starts to use “vous” that this is an improvement, but that would be a mistake. They switch to vous when they are reminding the worker of their formal contractual obligations to the company, so this too is a tool of dominance and way of reminding them who the boss is.

The central part of the book concerns a partial strike that Linhart helps to organise. The strikes in May-June 1968 had cost the company money, and management are determined to claw back some of those losses by making workers stay on for an extra 45 minutes at the end of the day for no extra pay. The trouble is that at Citroen many of the workers are more-or-less forcibly constripted into a company union, the Confédération française du travail (CFT) and the CGT, the communist trade union, is very weak. Linhart also discovers that in practice it is extremely difficult to get to know enough of his fellow workers to have an influence in an enterprise as vast as a car plant. Still, he and a few others, notably a Sicilian named Primo and some Yugoslavs, establish an organising committee, circulate leaflets in multiple languages, and manage to finds enough people at key points on the line to stop production. They start downing tools at 5pm and refuse to work the additional time. Retaliation is swift: translators, employed by the company, are brought in to speak to and intimidate the immigrant workers, and to threaten them with deportation, those living in company hostels are evicted and others are summoned individually to be intimidated by managers. On the first couple of days the numbers hold and production ceases, but after a week or so too many have drifted back to work and the few holdouts are motivated by personal pride and a determination not to give in rather than by any hope of success.

By this point, management have clocked Linhart as a leftist agitator. But they don’t fire him; they redeploy him. First he gets sent to a nearby depot which supplies spare parts for a defunct marque that Citroen has taken over. Total isolation. Then they bring him back to be the guy who links two sections of the assembly line by pushing half-finished 2CVs on a trolley across a courtyard: a backbreaking task, all the time subject to harrassment by a foreman who is the representative of the scab union. For just one day he gets to know the worker who loads the trolleys at the input end: Ali, the son of a marabout (an Islamic holy man) who is very proud of his Arab language and culture. They have the following weird exchange:

Ali: “never do that, it is ‘juif’ [Jewish].”
Linhart: “how so, ‘jewish’?”
Ali: “it just means that it is bad, it is something you shouldn’t do.”
Linhart: “No, no, ‘jewish’ refers to a people, a religion.”
Ali: “No no, ‘Jewish’ is doing things the opposite way round to other people. You say ‘Jewish’ to say that something is not how it should be.”
Linhart: “But there is a Jewish language!”
Ali: “A Jewish language? No! No!”
Linhart: “Yes there is, it is called Hebrew.”
Ali: “No, to write ‘Jewish” is to write in Arabic but the wrong way round. It’s the same writing, but in the opposite way.”
Linhart: “Listen Ali, I know what I’m talking about, I’m Jewish myself”
Ali: “But you can’t be Jewish, you’re good, and ‘Jewish’ means that something is not good.”

At this point Linhart decides to abandon the effort.

Linhart gets fired in the end. Of course he does. But before he does there’s another fascinating episode. He’s been restored to the main assembly-line and in the same shop there’s a highly-skilled worker, Demarcy, a “professional”, whose job it is to take any doors that have been damaged on the line and fix them. Since damage can come in many forms, Damarcy has customized his workbench so that he can very quickly go through whatever sequence of operations is needed (hammering, soldering, etc). The customized workbench looks like a mess, of course it does, but it is highly functional. One day, management take exception to the mess and supply a new workbench, shiny and clean, while pushing the old one to one side. It doesn’t work for the guy. He struggles. He fixes the doors at half the speed. The shop is then visited by the bosses: a whole team including the head of the factory, all dressed in expensive suits and holding clipboards. They stand around the worker, observing his difficulties, shaking their heads at his incompetence and making comments wondering how he passed his technical exam. Of course, he sweats, blushes, gets even worse. The shop-floor bosses know exactly what the problem is, but they won’t say, since there is a hierarchy to be respected. Some time later local supervisor has a discreet word with someone higher up and the custom workbench is restored, but the worker’s confidence is shattered, he goes off sick.

(slightly edited)