The sociologist Denis Colombi author of Who really works (Payot editions) emphasizes that the work will gain visibility by once again becoming a “issue of struggle” in businesses as well as in public debate.
In your work, you highlight a process of “increasing invisibilization” of work. In your eyes, it is based in particular on biased representations…
The way in which politicians tackle the subject allows us to fully understand the weight of these representations. When, for example, they portray their relationship to work, when they want to talk about “the France that gets up early”, many of them go to the Rungis international market. It is an image that will overshadow other work situations, such as that of supermarket cashiers who finish late, or that of housewives who also get up early to look after their children and carry out domestic chores. … Many professions – in services, for example – go “under the radar”, because they do not correspond to the image we have of work.
The process of invisibility is also at work at the heart of companies. How can work organization contribute to this?
Many mechanisms make understanding the work done more complex. The atomization of tasks, for example. With this division of labor, it becomes more difficult to explain one's mission, to account for it, to say, basically, what one's purpose is. At the same time, work today refers, to a significant extent, to activities where it is less about doing something than making it possible for others to do it. Another factor of complexity: professions are evolving and becoming “bureaucratized”, as sociologist Béatrice Hibou shows, citing the case of nurses who must complete numerous documents before and after their medical procedures.
You believe more broadly that the invisibility of work is “deeply inscribed in the dynamics of capitalism”. For what ?
It’s an idea that may seem, at first, counterintuitive. Capitalism has in fact placed work center stage and encourages us to think of it as a specific activity. But, at the same time, he will participate in this invisibility. First of all by answering the question “Who really works?” »: it highlights those who own the capital and not the workers. Thus, it is the innovators, the creators, those who control and make the decisions that “make” the economy. However, it is not Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is in the warehouse preparing the packages and then ensuring their delivery.
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