Clair Juilliet

History thesis

Defended on November 12, 2018

Building professional relationships under the aegis of the state : socioeconomic conflicts and consensus in a French aeronautic factory (1943-1978) under the supervision of Jean-Marc Olivier

Abstract

Whilst the aviation industry has been the subject of extensive historical investigations, economic and social topics seem to have remained in the shadows as far as the post-World War II period is concerned. This PhD thesis, through the example of a state-owned aeronautical company, and using a socio-economic micro-history method, focuses on the role played by workers in the building of an aeronautics company over thirty years.

By analysing the trajectories followed by collective bargaining, as well as paying attention to industrial development and productive activity, this thesis highlights how professional relationships were built, day after day, inside a firm under the authority of the State. The politicization of industrial relationships, that derived from the company’s status and role in National Defence, often led its actors to oppose each other on social, industrial or political issues throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In the last third of this decade, some of these actors finally decided to return to the bargaining table and base their relations on contractual practices, which contributed, after difficult discussions, to a lasting mollification of these industrial relations.Hence, using a multi-scalar approach to interrogate the relationships that emerged in the factory space, between local, national and international and between plant, firm, branch and inter-professional, makes it possible to evidence the capacity of the protagonists to either succeed or fail in coming to compromises and trade-offs.

The aim is thus to understand the role of conflict and consensus in industrial development, in order to demonstrate that the health of industrial relations may depend, at least partly, on a company’s socio-economic development. This example also shows that, contrary to commonly accepted thought, there is a culture of bargaining in French companies, when trade-offs are made possible by the cooperation of the various protagonists, even when professional relationships are based on power dynamics, or influenced by political issues and by the complexities of State intervention.

Publication

• Juilliet, Clair (2018), Bâtir les relations professionnelles sous l'égide de l'État : conflits et consensus socio-économiques dans un établissement de constructions aéronautiques français (1943-1978) [Thèse]