Tribune. The director of the Terra Nova think tank, Thierry Pech, tries to explain the disaffection of the popular classes towards the left parties, in a column published in The world dated Wednesday, November 9, 2021 (“It is not enough to declare your loyalty to the popular classes to meet them”). This is not the first time that Terra Nova has taken up this topic and, as he notes, a report from 2011 “On the electoral strategy of the left advised him to seek the votes of young people, women, graduates, minorities and working-class neighborhoods rather than those of workers and employees”. This report was intended to justify the abandonment by the government left of workers and employees.
Thierry Pech, who claims to have distanced himself from this report, wants to substitute for it a sociological analysis of the transformations of the working classes. And to note, rightly, the decline in blue-collar employment in total employment, the rise of employees and the feminization that followed.
A mythical vision of the past
But this relative drop in worker employment, linked to deindustrialization, is in no way explained and is not related to the strategy of transnationals and more generally to the financialization of the economy which has seen the “Creation of shareholder value” become the alpha and omega of business strategies. The globalization of value chains, with its consequences for employment, is thus overlooked. By “forgetting” this essential aspect, Thierry Pech presents, in fact, the current evolutions as coming from a natural process against which we could do nothing.
Even more problematic, the claim that the“Individualization of employment relations (in services), which has established unprecedented competition between workers, has gradually destroyed the base of” production relations “which formed the basis of the old reading of the social”, individualization due to the fact that “The quality of the service is, in fact, often inseparable from the personal qualities of the person who produces it”.
We can first of all wonder how the personal qualities of individuals, for example their capacity for initiative, were absent in the industrial labor process, labor sociologists having shown that even a Taylorized assembly line could not function. correctly if the workers were only following the direction of the management. Beyond that, competition between workers is a structural datum of capitalism, competition whose forms are renewed with the transformations of the latter.
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