Lhe work has become unsustainable for a large part of the employees, this is no longer a matter of debate. The collective work What do we know about work (Seuil, 2023), written by around sixty specialists on the initiative of Bruno Palier (and with the support of “Le Monde”), has established a precise and documented inventory.
However, employer and government denial remains. Force employees to accept jobs as they are, rather than changing the work: this is the aim of the successive tightening of unemployment insurance rules or the pressure on doctors, who would prescribe “too much” work stoppages, without forgetting the reform of active solidarity income (RSA).
The four-day week, the experimentation of which Gabriel Attal advocated, seems a more positive lever for making work attractive. But if it fails to reduce its duration, it risks (like the twelve-hour day at the hospital or teleworking for executives) of moving the problem without resolving it, or even exacerbating it by a new intensification of work.
Research has established it: it is at the heart of activity, in its daily organization, that the causes of unhappiness and psychological pathologies at work are found. Changing schedules changes nothing, and could even worsen the loss of meaning and the breakup of collectives. Teleworking for some, staggered hours or four days for others, when will teams be able to meet and build the cooperation necessary for a job well done?
It is not only the health of employees that is at stake, it is also that of democracy. A long line of researchers, initiated by the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill and continued by Carol Pateman, Georges Friedmann, Yves Clot and Christophe Dejours, has shown why being subjected all day to repetitive work devoid of autonomy does not predispose not to civic engagement outside of work. A study confirms that, beyond diploma or profession, the lack of autonomy at work is an important determinant of abstention in the 2017 presidential election as in the 2019 European elections (“ The long arm of work. Working conditions and voting behavior », Thomas Coutrot, working document n° 1-2024, IRES, 2024.)
Mental health and democratic affects
Even more: the impossibility of expressing oneself about one’s work, about the difficulties one encounters there and the solutions one could propose clearly favors voting for the extreme right. Thus, in the municipalities having favored the vote for Jordan Bardella’s list in 2019, the probability that employees will have collective time organized by their manager to address questions of organization or operation of their work unit is 20%. below average. The National Rally (RN) vote is also associated with atypical hours (working at night or early in the morning), as well as physical arduousness, even in the same job. France, which toils and suffers at work without being able to say it and without hope of changing anything, tends to take revenge through, or to take refuge in, voting for authoritarian candidates. This is not the only reason for the rise in the RN vote, but it is one that cannot be ignored and that it is possible to address.
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