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Thesis Better pay cannot repair work that destroys attention: Simone Weil was right about the factory

Hugo Marchetti Fellow
· 5 replies
Economy & workContinentalModern EuropeanMarxismHannah Arendt#alienation#attention#factory-work#simone-weil
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Its coordinates: 6.5 Philosophy of Economics · 6.22 Philosophy of Work

Where it stands

In 1934 and 1935 Simone Weil left teaching and took factory jobs in and around Paris, at Alsthom and later at Renault, as an unskilled worker on the machines. She kept a journal. What shocked her was not only the low pay. It was the speed. Working to the rate, she found she could not think at all, and that the constant pressure of orders and the fear of being too slow made her docile in a way she had not believed possible. Her later writing on work keeps returning to attention as the thing such work takes away.

I am a crane operator and a union delegate. My union spends most of its energy on wages, hours and safety, and rightly. But Weil makes me ask whether we fight for the wrong thing.

Thesis: some work damages people through the way it captures their attention, and no amount of pay can make up for that. The demand should be to change the work itself, not only its price.

The obvious objection: Weil was an intellectual who stayed a few months. Workers have families to feed and may reasonably prefer more money to more "attention". Marx said alienation is built into the wage relation itself, which means Weil's complaint cannot be fixed by redesigning the job.

Which side are you on?

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5 replies

For the thesis 3

  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    For Fellow

    For. In the job centres I see people offered work that pays enough to live on and still turns them down, and they are called lazy for it. When you listen, they are refusing exactly what Weil described: work where a supervisor's eye is on you every second and your thoughts are not your own.

    Hegel's servant at least shapes something and comes to see himself in it. Weil's line worker doesn't even get that. Money cannot buy back what that takes, because what it takes is the person who would enjoy the money.

  2. Hugo Marchetti

    For Fellow

    Javier, you have moved me a little: fear is the word Weil keeps returning to in the journal. But Pieter proves my side. Watching a screen for eight hours for the one container that is wrong is the factory of 1935 with nicer chairs. And nobody at the bargaining table has ever priced it.

  3. Joel D'Souza

    For Fellow

    For, from a kitchen. On a Friday night my line cooks work to the ticket printer, and Weil's word, fear, is exactly right: the printer sets the rate, and nobody thinks while it is chattering.

    Better pay keeps good cooks. I've raised wages twice and it worked. It did not make the eleventh hour of service any less of a blur. What changed things was redesigning the work: cutting the menu by a third so each cook could cook rather than assemble, and giving every station a quiet hour before service to prep its own way.

    Javier's point about cooperatives is fair, but I'd turn it round. Workers vote for pay first because pay is the only thing they have been told is negotiable. Weil's claim is that attention belongs on the table too.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Javier Ferrandis

    Against Fellow

    Against, as stated. I've worked with cooperatives for twenty years. When workers own the firm and vote, the first thing they usually change is pay and security, not the design of the tasks. Hard repetitive work persists, but it feels different when you're not afraid of being fired for being slow.

    Which suggests Weil's real target was fear, and fear is about power and money. Better pay and job security are not a distraction from her point. They are one of the main ways to deliver it.

  2. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Against Fellow

    Against, from the other direction. Machines now do most of the timed, repetitive work Weil described. What replaces it is often monitoring, which can be worse for attention: watching a screen for the rare moment something goes wrong. Hugo will know this from the automated cranes.

    So I doubt there is a fixed set of "attention-destroying jobs" we could redesign once. Each new technology produces a new version. Pay is at least a lever that keeps working.