Emma: I find that the reflection about labour issues is notably advanced in France so I’m interested in the question of work and its organisation as well as workplace harassment. I agree with you that work can have an emancipating influence. In the documentary, “Not everyone died but everyone was suffering”, that is Ils ne mouraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés, you said that the fact that people don’t react when their colleague is undergoing harassment but that they perceive themselves as victims, when it is eventually their turn, is a social and political problem. Why is it a social and political problem?
Christophe Dejours: The point of view that we develop in the field of mental health in the workplace and in this approach in particular, which we call the clinique - occupational psychodynamics, the psychopathology of work - is that there is a fundamental principle when you compare it to other disciplines. What is at the centre are the questions raised by work, including the process of harassment, the injustices that are committed in the workplace and the different methods, which are used to make people work, to get their obedience. For that, there is always a stake, something material at stake in all that. We don’t simply act only to manipulate or hurt others. No, that would be a view of things that would be a little too psychological. It’s true that there is a psychological dimension to it. The harassment is part of a psychological process but they have a stake in harassment that is material. Harassment triggers the material issue at stake in the workplace.
And, it is generally when there is a disagreement, when there is a conflict between a certain way of honouring work that is well done, which constitutes a conflict between this desire of doing the work in a certain way and, then, a hierarchy that doesn’t want anyone to work in the way that someone who knows the job will work. It generates the disagreements that there are. I can take a lot of examples from different occupations for you that there are today because there are situations, where the forms of harassment in the workplace have changed. We began to study this issue in the 1990s. Between the 1990s and now, coming up to the 2020s, there have been nearly 30 years and the forms of harassment in the workplace have changed. At the start, when we began to study these things using our approach, which we call the clinique, it was essentially harassment, which was orientated towards a determination to destabilise - weaken certain individuals - because what was at stake was carrying out what we called during that time des plans sociaux, that is, redundancy schemes.
It was at the beginning of this very hard, very difficult period of changing direction in France, in particular. But, in other countries, we have seen the same movement. This movement, it was initiated in England, Great Britain and in America, when Margaret Thatcher was in power. But, in France, for example, in the 1980s, it was Mitterrand, who had come to power so we said that it was a socialist who was taking power, right… Well, you know, a few years later, in 1983, he changed sides completely and actually adopted the same mode of thinking and the same mode of action as Margaret Thatcher.
Emma: Yes, we saw that in New Zealand with the nuclear testing.
Christophe Dejours: Of course.
Emma: It was difficult to believe that he was a socialist at the time.
Christophe Dejours: It was a real betrayal. The neoliberal doctrine means that you have to have the same amount of work carried out by a smaller number of employees. So, in order to get people to work more and thus produce more, when there are fewer of them, you need to change something in the organisation of their work. The change in question is an increase in the intensity of the domination. So, they’ve worked on this for years. The harassment was started as a way to not only get rid of some of the personnel, because the idea is still to cut back on the number of employees, but to increase the domination at the same time. So, what that means is that harassment in the workplace is going to be the means to instil fear.
On the one hand, you need to make certain people targets to be able to fire them, and on the other hand, you need to instil fear so that the others won’t react. You need to break up the solidarities that exist up until then. That is the objective, it is to break up the solidarities. The most damaging change in direction and the real betrayal of Mitterrand is not only that he became neoliberal but that he succeeded in adopting the techniques that came from a conceptual scheme, the conscience, where it is necessary to break up traditional solidarities. The means to increase domination, it is to break up these bonds that there are between people. The harassment that was carried out during that era, in the 1990s, when you could really start seeing it, it was a harassment that targeted, we will see later, certain individuals, in particular. Not everybody is harassed. They would choose the victim, that is the first point, who is chosen and why they are going to make them a target. The second point is how they are going to use the harassment to act upon others? Because the harassment isn’t only about one person being harassed. In reality, during that era there, the harassment, with one case of harassment, you were acting upon a whole population. That is what the principle is.
So, the principle is that one case of harassment, in which we are going to give the person, who is working, objectives that are impossible: quantitive objectives to carry out production, to attain a certain turnover, you need to succeed, contracts, spend time with the customer or client… You need to have results with the children at school, you need to go from a success rate of 60% to 70% or 80% in such and such an exam otherwise, you’re out. You give objectives that are unobtainable to one person, in particular, and from that point onwards, you are going to harass that person to show them that they’re incompetent, incapable and unable to reach the objectives set.
Emma: When considering the sense of what is being said to the person, is it to inverse the sense? Because you’re telling the person that they are incompetent when they are actually the person present, who is the most competent?
Christophe Dejours: Yes, but precisely, that is what the trap is. That’s what the harassment plays on, the harassment plays on that trap. It’s that you are going to take people who are competent and, above all, they are the people who are very committed to their work, who are the people, in general, who really get very involved, whose work really means a lot to them, who know how to work well, who sometimes do more hours than they have been asked to do, who produce a quality that is above average, who are really, very involved.
At the same time, they are people who have a certain idea of what work that is well done is, who refer to the rules, the professional standards, the civil service’s professional standards, to attend to the citizen in a fair way and what have you. There is a certain conception of how work is done in reference to these rules, the idea that there isn’t any quality in what the worker does or produces without there being the reference to these rules. In reality, the quality of work is always tied to ethical references.
These ethical references are crystallised in professional standards. There is a certain way of making concrete, you either respect the rules or you don’t reach the standard. You make quality concrete or otherwise you make it to the detriment of quality in spite of the rule, you don’t respect the rules. In this case, you make concrete of poor quality. In a few months, it is going to crack, and in some time, it will become porous, it is going to deteriorate, the concrete will fall apart, the tiles will come off, then, in short, everything will fall into disrepair.
So, the idea of a job well done is the target, which is chosen for the harassment. Simply put, firstly they are the people who are personally very involved in their work. Secondly, they are the people who are very competent. And thirdly, they are the people who have demands, we could say, who expect ethical requirements in keeping with work that is well done. It’s not only about their being competent, they are devoted to a job well done.
When the company decides they want to increase the rate of production and the production figures, reduce the lead time… In fact, degrade the quality, then you have this brave worker, who is trying to do his work well, who becomes implicitly… because of the way he works, he sets off the aggressiveness of the managers because of his devotion to the professional standards, the rules, making it so he isn’t dominated. It’s not that he doesn’t obey the manager, he obeys the manager but he obeys the rules at the same time. There is a sharing, the domination is not a complete domination of the subordinate by the manager since the worker compromises with the rules, the professional standards. What makes the difference between the person who does the job well and the person who doesn’t do the job well is that between an order that they receive and its execution, they will always interpose the reference to their professional standards.
If they give me an order to treat the ill, they tell me that I have to see 20 patients in a day, the rules make it so I can’t see the patients for less than half an hour, you don’t need to carry out research to find that out. Those are the professional standards. I can’t see 20 patients because 20 patients would mean that I would have at least 10 hours of work and I’m only paid for 4 hours. I can’t see 20 patients in 4 hours, it’s impossible. So, I interpose between the order that I receive and my work and I say: “But there are rules, you can’t just do anything, that is unbearable.”
The reference to professional standards, the reference to ethics, it’s that, which the new management, the neoliberal management, finds necessary to fight against. So, they are going to choose a target, who is someone who works well, who is known for, who has, in general, good assessments and they are going to harass the person by giving them objectives that are too high, which they are not going to be able to reach and as they can’t attain them, they try to work even more and because they think that, if they are, if they are criticised, if they are blamed, it is probably because they are not good enough… So, they overload themselves with more and more work to try and respond and the manager will continue… The manager is going to decide from that point on to make the harassment public.
That is the second stage, the harassment needs to become public so they are going to harass that person and humiliate them in front of all the others, in their presence. That is a technique. It’s a technique, which is extremely powerful because not only are they showing it, in front of, to everyone who is there, it is not only the victim who is going to be destabilised by the harassment, who will probably then become ill or resign or leave. There is a material stake in that order there, make the victim crack up, meaning either resign, become ill… But, roughly, from the moment that the process is started, it is necessary that it continues all the way to the end, never stopping, going right until the victim falls apart. Why? Because it is necessary to show the others that when you decide, when the manager decides to harass someone, nothing will stop them. That makes it necessary to consistently go all the way to the end. If they start a process of harassment, it will be hard-line, meaning that they won’t leave the person alone.
It’s quite common that when we discuss this with a manager, who is harassing people at that exact moment, in fact, if the other person who is being harassed kills themselves, it doesn’t bother them, it doesn’t bother them, meaning that when the other person must crack up and even commit suicide, that doesn’t bother them. What is important is that they succeed in showing everyone who is there that when they decide that someone should submit, they won’t let them go. So, the person in question, that’s what is first, they are going to be effectively destabilised, they are going to become ill, they are going to resign. Resign, it’s even better, they could then make them resign on the basis that they hadn’t reached the objectives set for them due to professional misconduct. If they persecute people at that exact time, when they are destabilised, they will make mistakes. So, they wait, then, until they make mistakes, the person is fired or made to resign for professional misconduct, there isn’t any indemnity to pay, off they go!
Emma: The desire to make someone sick. It’s a very violent thing to do to someone. You need to be able to conceive just how bad their intentions are to be able to see it. In your work, you have written that often the person who harasses was suicidal when they were an adolescent and started to harass others as a way to avoid suicidal episodes?
Christophe Dejours: Yes, sometimes it is like that but it is not always like that. On the one hand, there is the victim themselves, who is going to be harassed up until they make mistakes or become ill. But, the harassment is intended for the other people who are there, for those who are the spectators, everyone. When you study harassment, you see that people are scared when they see this phenomenon play out. They don’t react, they don’t protest, they don’t show their solidarity as a witness by acknowledging what has taken place because they’re scared that if they do, it will be their turn to be the victim.
Most of the studies in the workplace show that people are scared and don’t react. It’s terrible because the victim, when they turn towards their colleagues and towards the others, expecting to a certain extent, a sign of sympathy, a sign of solidarity, a sign of understanding, a sign of complicity, the others don’t look back at them, they don’t bear witness. What is important is that the people, who keep quiet, who don’t react, who are frightened, actually become complicit.
In reality, they actually do become complicit because, normally, they should have intervened to put themselves in front of the chap who was screaming at the woman, who is being harassed. Why don’t they intervene? Why don’t they stop him? If they don’t stop him, they become complicit, they let him do it, that is what is already political. It is not only a moral problem, it becomes a political problem very quickly, by not opposing it on a moral level, on a psychological level but also on a political level, you can’t treat people like that. If you accept it, you become complicit. If you are complicit, the day that the other becomes ill, in the end, for one reason or another, he’ll need to go to trial at an employment tribunal (le Conseil de prud'hommes)… The others who have betrayed him don’t testify because they are ashamed. They didn’t say that they saw that at the time, that they saw that but didn’t do anything. In fact, they’re not going to say anything about what they saw.
Emma: You are up against an unspoken agreement as to what remains unseen.
Christophe Dejours: Yes, it is an unspoken agreement as to what remains unseen. In reality, there are all these people, who not only betray the other person but, eventually, what it is, is betraying oneself. They become bastards. It’s very important, moral harassment is carried out for that reason, to make people become complicit. With one act of moral harassment, you frighten a whole population of labourers, of employees because… It can either be in construction or at France Telecom. If it’s not in construction, it’s in the offices, the harassment, you hear the shouting, everybody knows, you hear the humiliation of someone. It’s someone and nobody moves, that was what it was like in the 1990s.
Since then, things have evolved a great deal, we have witnessed from the year 2000 onwards, what we call the management turning point (le tournant gestionnaire). Before the management turning point, the organisation of work was primarily decided by engineers, the people who were in charge were civil engineers from the École nationale supérieure des travaux publiques. That’s finished, they have lost their power. Today, it is the managers, who are now in their position, the managers who introduce new methods.
Among these methods, there is an individual performance evaluation. The work is no longer a reference that is of any use to the actual work that is being done, they don’t want to know anything about it. There are objectives in quantitative terms, the figures to then examine performance. Each person is assessed individually, each person is compared to others, set up to compete with others. Before the management turning point, the work that was well done was part of the organisation of work, it was in the engineers’ evaluations, where they still referred to the work that was well done.
So, the problem is not the quality of the work that you do, it is the quantity, a certain quantity of things that are supposedly produced. In certain cases, it depends on the occupation, if we take the example of judges, it is the number of case files that they deal with, which is the objective. You have to hear 50 trials in 4 hours and you have 50 families, 50 people, who are there with their lawyers. They want to come up before the court to be heard, one by one, you have 6 minutes per person to judge, they give you that as an order. Needless to say, the quantity is in contradiction with the quality. The more that you increase the quantity, the more you degrade the quality, it’s the truth, you don’t have time to look in order to pass sentence. What is awful about it is that these are people’s lives.
Emma: Yes, it is awful. Didier Fassin has written in detail about immediate appearance trials in which the prosecution tends to request imprisonment with immediate incarceration. The procedure reflects the social vulnerability of the defendant.
Christophe Dejours: It’s true that the increase in quantity is carried out to the detriment of quality, which is what we call governance by number (le governance par le nombre). Previously, governance had been carried out by referring to rules, now you have a neoliberal turning point to governance by number. Governance by number, it doesn’t want to know anything about quality, quality is deteriorating in teaching, in construction, in nuclear safety. It is deteriorating in justice, in the police.
The police have to run at a healthy profit but, in reality, the quality of service from the police is deteriorating. They stop people in the street, anyone in the street, a police report, stop the car, clack, because you don’t have your rear red light, the other fine because you don’t have your driver’s license with you, clack, 35 euros… Then, it’s your insurance, you don’t put the little piece of paper where it should be, clack, 40 euros. Again, there’s no point. There’s no point to the situation but still the figures are on the increase.
For those who are working, for the judge who wants to do his job well, it’s horrible. Because he didn’t come to work to work like that. The police officer who really believes in the Police, stopping people in the street, the fines, don’t make any sense. That’s not what it is, right? Drug trafficking, that’s another story, it’s not that, when you have to chase traffickers or make plans for surveillance at night, that doesn’t make figures. And, you have to understand how it works, otherwise you won’t manage.
Basically, not only the judge at an entry level is subjected to quantitative constraints that oblige him to degrade the quality of his work, the judge above him, his promotion and his career depend on figures. So, he will put pressure on all of the judges below him to obtain figures because that is the function of figures, that the figures are going to get him a promotion… So, he doesn’t practise justice any more, he only needs figures, only figures…
The situation is now that if the hierarchical superior doesn’t obtain the figures, it’s him, who is going to be sanctioned. So, all of this system, which ensures his salary - increases in salary, a career in justice - depends on the way that the people below him obtain figures or don’t obtain figures. Therefore, among those who are his subordinates, there will be an employee, who likes doing the work and works more slowly. For the boss, at a given time, that will become unbearable because this person doesn’t want to obtain figures. The subordinate continues to do their work well, the aggressiveness of the boss, it increases and in this situation where, you see, a boss, because he is stuck by his own hierarchy, he starts to get aggressive and to consider that the subordinate, who doesn’t work fast enough has become an obstacle to his own situation. It’s like that, that’s what triggers the harassment.
So, now you see a lot of people who have become harassers, while they are going up the ladder in the hierarchy. At that moment then, the pressure that there is, you would expect well enough to have, when you are a judge, not only to be given your transfer to Aix-en-Provence or to Toulouse… So, he thinks: “Me, I feel like being in Toulouse to have that. My family is in Toulouse…” And, he puts pressure on his subordinates…
As there is a stake in it for him, he actually starts to harass people. You see people who are like you and me… He can’t stand the situation, what he hopes for is to go up a grade, meaning leave, for example, what could easily be a court in Bobigny, Evry or Créteil, the courts in the periphery of Paris, where it is hell for him. He will want to go up the ladder so he can leave, meaning obtain a transfer. In this situation, he becomes a harasser, well, we have gone on to another stage.
In the 1980s, 1990s, it was specifically for: One, in order to fire people, destabilise people… Two, to make them scared. Today, it’s not even that anymore, today, you harass, it’s becoming systematic, everywhere people are harassing others so even the people who were respectable up until then, they end up becoming a harasser. This kind of logic in a system is entirely sordid. I’m not saying that to make those people there look innocent. The system makes it so that people who were morally correct up until then are going to become aggressive and humiliating towards their subordinates. Listen, they’re responsible. The lad is already a judge, he is already vice-procurer, when he harasses another judge, he is responsible. Harassment is not the only alternative, whatever profession you practise, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t harass people otherwise everyone is innocent: It’s the system, you can’t do anything about it.
Emma: There might be the reasoning that if everybody else is doing it, then, why shouldn’t I? I’m not sure. I’ve observed the effects of restructuring while working in other countries, where they have adopted neoliberal management and they’ve all ended up with the same problems, particularly when they privatise the public services or entrust their administration to the private sector.
Christophe Dejours: The neoliberal doctrine is every man for himself. The morality of the neoliberal doctrine is a morality against the public interest. You don’t start by looking at the other first, you look out for yourself, your own personal interest. What counts is this every man for himself thinking, the strongest wins and the others, too bad for them, that’s what you call social darwinism.
Emma: And that becomes possible because people can no longer see the extent of the violence in social and cultural terms or the political manoeuvres at play. The proportion remains difficult to determine. They lose sight of the public interest and are not able to envisage how to get organised to participate effectively in the social movement.
Christophe Dejours: Harassment in the workplace poses this problem. It’s for that reason that it is a political problem because the banalised use of moral harassment in the workplace is nevertheless training people to betray morality. If you betray morality, individually, that’s one thing, but if there are several of you who betray morality collectively in that sense there, who accept acts without any moral sense…
If I do it, if my neighbour does it, if everyone does it in the name of work, productivity, turnover or profit, the justification that is given, that the fact of betraying moral values is always in the name of work, it is in the places you work, where you learn to betray morality. If you do that in the workplace, when you go out onto the street, where you are also a moral being, that becomes a psychological problem… From production, merchandise, that becomes moral, in general, and harassment then becomes a political problem. Not only because it happens in the workplace but because that transforms society.
Emma: I arrived in France for the first time 30 years ago so I can tell how much it has changed. It is undoubtedly political in the sense that everyday situations can now be characterised by their collective violence.
Christophe Dejours: Harassment is an extremely powerful practice of fracturing solidarities. At the same time as you break up solidarities, you destroy the common sense of justice that people share. That was what Hannah Arendt called loneliness and not isolation. The social tissue that holds human beings together is made up of bonds that correspond to a certain conception of justice. When those bonds no longer exist, it’s called loneliness and that is the basis for the development of totalitarianism. At this point in time, all these solidarities are destroyed by the work environment. Not in the work environment but by the work environment. It’s for that reason, that it is a very grave problem. Extremely grave, experienced in these cases of moral harassment.