Tension
between the imperatives of business and the dispensability
of workers in the current era of economic globalization is
featured in Human Resources, a French film (Ressources
humaines) directed by Laurent Cantet. Frank (played by Jalil
Lespert), a business school student in Paris, returns home
for the summer to the industrial town of Gaillon in Normandy.
His father (played by Jean-Claude Vallod), who works in the
local sheetmetal factory of the Group TGT conglomerate, is
proud that he has placed small parts into a welding machine
for thirty years, turning out 700 units per hour, but he is
clearly a beaten man. With the money he saved, he sent his
son to the university; proud that Frank is to begin as an
executive trainee at the same factory, he urges his son the
night before he begins work at the plant to show proper respect
to the management, a bit of advice that has the autobiographical
subtext of long subservience to authority. Assigned to the
Human Resources Division, Frank soon learns that the chief
executive officer fired about 25 workers the previous year
and now is eager to reduce the work week to 35 hours. The
Communist tradeunion, led by Danielle Arnoux (played by Danielle
Mélador, an actual union leader), is adamantly opposed to
the reduction of hours of work, which amounts to a cut in
pay and benefits. At the end of his first day on the job,
the boss (played by Lucien Longueville) tries to pick Frank’s
brain for a way to sell the 35-hour week to the workers. Based
on a case study in a class at the university, Frank proposes
to ascertain worker opinion through a questionnaire, naïvely
believing that the conflict will be resolved thereby. The
boss approves of the idea with alacrity because he can marginalize
the union leadership thereby. When word leaks out about the
questionnaire, the union objects and refuses to cooperate.
Frank also suggests that the plant should adopt "annualization,"
that is, a variable work week, two days when demand slackens
and six days when orders for parts increases, which would
add up to the equivalent of 35 hours per week. Again, the
workers are cool to his idea, but the boss is so impressed
by Frank that he offers him a permanent job with the company.
As he gains favor with the boss, his former school chums tell
him that he has become a Paris snob, uninterested in the plight
of workers. Frank, nevertheless, feels more comfortable socializing
with the workers than with the managers, having grown up in
a working class family. One day Frank serendipitously discovers
a memo detailing how the purchase of robotics will enable
the plant to fire 11 more workers, including his father, only
a few years before they qualify for a company pension; results
of the questionnaire are part of the justification for the
layoffs. Frank then refuses to accept the job offer, leaks
the memo to the union, and joins the picket line as the plant
is shut down by a strike. Much of the film focuses on the
fact that Frank’s father is so ashamed of his working class
background that he refuses to support the union, but the son
goads the father into joining the work stoppage to save his
own job. At the end of the film, while the strike is in progress
and the outcome is in doubt, Frank buys a train ticket to
Paris to resume his studies and perhaps find employment. Before
leaving, he sits next to Alain (played by Didier Emile-Woldemard),
who is closest to his father on the shop floor. When Alain
points out that Frank is about to resume his place in Paris,
Frank asks rhetorically, "What’s your place?" As we leave
the cinema, we thus ponder that those who take pride as industrial
workers are increasingly becoming obsolete, and the gulf between
the classes is widening. Human Resources, which
hired unemployed workers for all but two characters, is intended
to raise the consciousness of workers that they will lose
their incomes and even their jobs if they fail to unite together
in protest before it is too late. A movie that shows how economic
globalization is eroding democracy, the Political Film Society
has nominated Human Resources as best film of
the year 2000 in raising consciousness of the need for greater
democracy. MH
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