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WORKERS
ARE DEHUMANIZED AND DISCARDED IN HUMAN RESOURCES
 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.
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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
LEWIS
RINGEL DONATES A SYLLABUS ON "POLITICS THROUGH CULTURE"
Lewis
Ringel of California State University, who teaches at both
the Fullerton and Long Beach campuses, has donated the fifteenth
course syllabus to the Political
Film Society’s Syllabus Series. Copies of the 15 syllabi
are available at $1 each.
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