Fast Cars and Vital Exhaustion

Chapter five examines a series of suicides at car manufacturer Renault, situating them in the transition from an industrial model to a knowledge economy, in which value is expropriated from the resources of the mind. Suicides did not take place in the emblematic spaces of the factory, where cars were once mass produced, but in a state-of-the art research centre, where cognitive workers conceptualised and designed cutting-edge cars of the future. In the knowledge economy, the mind is treated as an endlessly productive resource that reproduces itself continuously and is unencumbered by the physical limitations of the body. I argue that suicides were the end point of a form of vital exhaustion that transcends the corporeal defences of the physical body and depletes the mental and emotional resources of the self. Suicides do not reflect a deterioration in formal or material conditions of work, but rather a transformation in forms of constraint, as the individual worker internalises modes of discipline and becomes his or her own boss. Suicides affected workers who experienced a phase of chronic overwork in which the quest to achieve productivity targets pushed them to work continuously and obsessively.

Introduction

Suicide is an accusation brought against the organization of society when society becomes incapable of guaranteeing the happiness of its members. Minois, History of Suicide, 326 Work suicide or work-related suicide1 is a phenomenon that punctuates contemporary French public life with all the force of the banal and the sublime. Suicides now occur with such frequency that they have become a routine event, one that barely elicits widespread shock or consternation. Newspapers report on the human toll: engineers, nurses, teachers, assembly-line workers, checkout assistants, farmers, managers, postmen, ...

Orange on the Inside

Chapter four examines the suicide crisis at France Télécom, situating this in the shift to a new finance-driven management model, following the company’s privatisation, whereby the search for shareholder value became the overarching strategic goal of the company. I draw on scholarship on financialisation and in particular, the rise of shareholder value, examining its impact on the changing status and conditions of labour. Suicides were not an aberration in an otherwise smooth-functioning system, but the consequence of systemic processes that sought to remove labour from the workplace as an obstacle to extraneous financial goals. The chapter examines the structural transformations of the company which transformed the perceived value of the individual worker and considers the new expulsionary management tactics that characterised the Next restructuring plan. The chapter draws on testimonial material, including suicide letters and witness statements drawn from a legal case taken by a work inspector against the company in 2010 which culminated in the recent criminal trial against the company’s former bosses. An analysis of this testimonial material allows us to reconstruct the causal connections that link structural transformations in the company to the acute suffering that triggered an act of self-killing.

Suicide as Testimony

Chapter two examines suicide letters as a mode of testimony that bears witness to extreme suffering in the contemporary workplace. In an economic order that conceals the labour relationships that bring services and products to us, suicides push human suffering to the surface and force it out into the open. Drawing on testimony studies, I situate suicide letters at a juncture between the everyday and the extreme that unsettles the boundaries between the two and forces us to confront extremity in the everyday. Whilst these letters give expression to exceptional trauma, they are located within the quotidian, routine and functional spaces of work. Some recent critics have depicted the contemporary workplace as a site of extremity, drawing on the historical metaphor of the Holocaust to describe forms of managerial brutality and violence. Contrary to these representations, I suggest that the workplace is best understood in terms of its everydayness. This is a space governed by order, discipline and routine, where working life is subject to endless repetition and reiteration. Yet, this everydayness has a unique quality: work suicides make visible extreme suffering, not as an exceptional phenomenon, but one that is embedded within the universal spaces of social life.

Going Postal

Chapter three examines work suicides at La Poste, situating these in the context of a restructuring strategy that sought to transform the company from a public service entity, underpinned by a notion of the general interest, to a commercial entity, driven by product sales. Whereas earlier reforms had modified external working methods and practices, the new phase of restructuring sought to transform workers themselves, targeting their ways of being, seeing and thinking. I draw on Michel Foucault’s conception of disciplinary surveillance to examine the management methods that were imposed across the company following its liberalisation. Whilst the company was freed of regulatory controls and administrative constraints, the individual employee was subject to intensified surveillance of everyday working activity. The chapter examines a corpus of suicide letters in which postal workers explain the causes and motivations of their self-killing. Many employees experienced restructuring as a cultural assault that undermined the values, meanings and ideals by which they had defined themselves and their place in the world. The case of La Poste shows that when company strategy transcends external working activity and targets the intimate, subjective and vulnerable resources of the person, this can have deleterious consequences for lived experiences of work.

Capitalism, Work and Suicide

Chapter one draws on histories of suicide and historical studies of industrial labour in order to examine whether work suicide constitutes a new phenomenon reflecting the historically specific conditions of neoliberalism. Despite the poor material conditions of labour under industrial capitalism, there are few recorded cases of work-related suicide. In 19th century France, suicide was characterised as a marginal phenomenon that affected the most impoverished social groups: the jobless, the destitute or the infirm. The chapter examines the structural transformations that have precipitated a rise of suicides in the workplace and in particular, the shift to a finance-driven economic order. From a source of productivity and therefore profit under industrial capitalism, labour has become, in the contemporary context, an obstacle to rational and extraneous financial goals that needs to be removed. Suicides are the product of differential neoliberal management regimes. On the one hand, suicides affected workers who were pushed to their very limits by management in a bid to increase their individual productivity, economic worth and therefore maximise profits. On the other, suicides affected workers who were pushed out of the workplace as a form of surplus cost.

Conclusion

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