“The image of the enterprise as a place where employees can achieve personal fulfilment is therefore an essentially ideological invention. It conceals the real transformations that have taken place, namely that enterprises are replacing labour by machines, producing more and better with a decreasing percentage of the workforce previously employed, and offering privileges to a chosen elite of workers, which are accompanied by unemployment, precarious employment, de-skilling and lack of job security for the majority. The advance of technology has thus resulted in the segmentation and disintegration of the working class. An elite has been won over to collaboration with capital in the name of work ethic; the great mass of workers have become marginalized or lost their job security and serve as a reserve army for industry which wishes to be able to adjust its workforce rapidly according to fluctuations in demand.”
“The necessity -from a technical point of view - for control and, consequently, for domination, can be overcome without too much difficulty in small and medium-sized enterprises; it cannot be overcome ...”
André Gorz
“A system of co-operation between workers and management cannot survive, therefore, unless management effectively guarantees its employees job security, by which I mean employment for life. It is on th...”
André Gorz
“Enterprises are adopting a strategy of flexible response on two levels simultaneously: the firm's stable core of employees must be functionally flexible; the peripheral workforce, for its part, must b...”
André Gorz
“This revaluation of the image of the worker rests, on the part of the employers, on a rational calculation: it is not only a question of winning. the loyalty of an elite of workers they cannot do with...”
André Gorz
“The ideology of work and the ethics of effort therefore become cover for ultra-competitive egoism and careerism: the best succeed, the others have only themselves to blame; hard work should be encoura...”
André Gorz