Gender, Generation, and Space at Moulinex

Moulinex had its origins in a company called Moulin-Légumes, which was founded in the Paris region in 1932, but within five years had moved its production from the Communist-led suburb of Bagnolet to Alençon, a market town and administrative center in one of the more rural areas of Lower Normandy (Orne). There the company found a ready supply of first-generation industrial workers and pursued a policy of recruiting young women to Taylorized production jobs as machine operators and assemblers. This gendered division of labor, in which semi-skilled production jobs were done by women, while managerial and skilled jobs were the preserve of men, would remain in place with only minor adjustments until the company's demise in 2001. The Moulinex brand emerged in 1957 as the business, which had previously produced manual kitchen gadgets, moved into the production of electrical appliances. Over the next two decades as sales of household electrical goods soared, a network of twelve Moulinex factories developed, mostly in small rural towns (with the exception of one site in Cormelles-Le-Royal on the outskirts of the city of Caen). Owned by inventor and entrepreneur Jean Mantelet, the company remained in family ownership until 1987, but following a brief period of partial ownership by the staff, the controlling interest passed into the hands of banks and private equity firms from 1993. A series of restructuring plans followed as a succession of managing directors sought to return the struggling business to profitability and generate value for shareholders.

Opportunities for transfer between sites would be a feature of the plans put in place in this period as the management sought to shed jobs. In 1996, newly appointed managing director Pierre Blayau announced the closure of the factories in Argentan (260 employees) and Mamers (411 employees), where the majority of shopfloor workers (82 percent and 67 percent respectively) were women.Footnote ¹⁴ In a settlement negotiated with the unions, early retirement packages, compensation schemes for historic exposure to asbestos, and offers of transfers to other sites were deployed to minimize compulsory redundancies. Indeed, similar measures were being used across the group to reduce numbers. At the end of 1996, the company employed 7,476 people but in the year that followed, 600 had taken early retirement or other age-related packages (such as the asbestos scheme) and 515 had accepted a transfer.Footnote ¹⁵ Following a change of leadership, further restructuring plans were proposed and contested in 2000 and 2001, before the company was declared insolvent in September 2001. This led to the closure of a further four sites in the Lower Normandy region, where Moulinex was the largest private employer (Alençon, Cormelles-Le-Royal, Falaise, Bayeux). While around 3,000 jobs were lost in the 2001 closures, a partial buy out by rival appliance company Seb, which acquired the Moulinex brand and took over three production sites (Fresnay-sur-Sarthe, Vilaines-La-Juhel, Mayenne), meant that some workers from Alençon were offered the option of a transfer to what was now Seb-Moulinex in Fresnay. Thus, as Moulinex contracted, collapsed, and was partially reborn, transfers between sites took place across varying distances: the trip from Alençon to Fresnay was 22 km, from Mamers to Mayenne 83 km, and Argentan to Bayeux 99 km.

The age and gender profile of the Moulinex workforce would have significant implications for experiences of mobility. A large-scale survey of those who lost their jobs in 2001 showed that the average length of service was twenty-six years and the average age forty-nine.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, when the Argentan and Mamers sites had closed four years earlier, a significant proportion of the workforce was in mid-life, with long service, but too young for early retirement. Jacqueline Martin's profile was typical—she was forty-five years old when she made the move from Argentan to Bayeux.Footnote ¹⁷ Many of those in post in the 1990s had been hired in the late 1960s or 1970s: Having joined Moulinex as young women at a time when it was still expanding, they had remained there as the company's fortunes changed and as the alternative prospects for stable industrial jobs stagnated. The majority of Moulinex workers had grown up in the region and the stability of this workforce was further reinforced by the growth of working-class property ownership among this generation of workers.Footnote ¹⁸ The age profile of this group meant that although few had very young children, some still had sons and daughters living at home, while others assisted with care for their grandchildren or elderly parents. As these caring roles fell disproportionately on women, who were socialized more than men to prioritize such duties, women tended to be more reluctant than men to move for work.Footnote ¹⁹ The question of how to reconcile family and professional life would loom large in the concerns of women who faced the decision of whether to accept a transfer to another site or seek alternative employment closer to home.

The gendered division of labor, combined with the organization of production at Moulinex and the location of the factories in largely rural areas, produced a particular set of social and spatial relations. Rather than being concentrated in a factory town whose identity was closely tied to industry, much of the workforce at the Moulinex sites discussed here was residentially dispersed across small- and medium-sized rural towns and villages. As the Alençon factory had expanded from the late 1950s, it had run a growing fleet of coaches which brought workers from the surrounding area: by 1965, thirty-two coaches transported workers from within a radius of 35 km.Footnote ²⁰ The opening of network of satellite factories, grouped around the hubs of Alençon in the south and Caen (or more precisely the suburb of Cormelles) in the north, was intended to reduce travelling distance and bring the factories closer to a dispersed population. By the 1970s, each factory specialized in particular appliances and although there were some variations in the product ranges and their locations over time, there was considerable stability in the types of products manufactured at each site: Alençon was the home of the coffee machine, for example, Argentan the home of the hairdryer and later the deep fat fryer, and Mamers the home of grinders and mixers.Footnote ²¹ Thus, while the towns where Moulinex was located typically did not have a rich industrial tradition or identity, for Moulinex workers, each factory had a clear identity, aligned with particular products.

While the occupational identities of male skilled workers tend to draw on craft traditions, notions of skill, and technical competence and/or a certain pride in hard physical labor, female production workers often articulate their attachment to their work in terms of pride in the product.Footnote ²² At Moulinex, the link between place and product added a spatial dimension to these work-based identities. Thus, when Jacqueline Martin moved to Bayeux, she was fortunate that the product she worked on was also being relocated to that site, allowing her to retain some sense of continuity: “I'm following my fryers,” she told a journalist, her use of the possessive encapsulating the link between product and identity.Footnote ²³ The identification of sites with products was actively promoted by Moulinex, notably through the company magazine Le Point de Rencontre: for example, a 1977 issue included a “who makes what?” feature, while the cover image for a 1983 issue represented factories as giant appliances nestling in the green landscape associated with Lower Normandy (Figure 1).Footnote ²⁴

Figure 1. Cover image, Le Point de Rencontre, June 1983 (Courtesy of Direction des Archives du Calvados).

Pride in the brand's products even turned into a form of competition between factories, as former shop steward, Claude Renault explained:

While there is generally a strong sense of attachment to the Moulinex brand among ex-Moulinex workers, Renault's remarks highlight not just the way in which this was articulated in terms of local attachments to “our product” and “our factory,” but the extent to which successive restructuring plans exacerbated rivalries. This would have implications for experiences of transfer to other sites.

Choices and Constraints

While those Moulinex workers who were over fifty-two years old were typically eligible either for early retirement or for an asbestos-related pension, their colleagues faced a choice between trying to find alternative employment locally or accepting a transfer, in some cases a long way from home. Employment opportunities for those with few formal qualifications were limited, particularly in more rural areas, and from the beginning of the 1980s, many women workers whose factories closed moved into the personal care sector.Footnote ²⁶ This pattern continued during the wave of factory closures in France in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Elisabetta Pernigotti's research has suggested that most employers in Lower Normandy were reluctant to take on women who were over thirty-five, and that this was a significant factor in the decision of women in this age group to enter the booming domestic care sector.Footnote ²⁷ Such work not only tends to be low-paid but is frequently part-time and associated with informal practices such as hours paid “off the books” (without related social benefits). Indeed, among those workers who were in employment two years after losing their jobs at Moulinex in the closures of 2001, only 21 percent of semi-skilled production workers (a group that consisted almost entirely of women) had stable full-time work, the remainder being employed in various forms of precarious and/or part-time roles; in contrast 80 percent of the (predominantly male) skilled workers who had found alternative employment were on stable, full-time contracts.Footnote ²⁸

Despite the drawbacks of employment in the care sector, some roles offered certain advantages, the profession of childminder being the most coveted.Footnote ²⁹ As Roupnel-Fuentes has noted, a move into childminding allowed these women, who had come through the bruising experience of factory closure, to prove their worth as workers by “putting their experience as a mother to the test” in a professional setting.Footnote ³⁰ Although the skills required for this work were economically and socially undervalued, they were valorized by gender norms. Moreover, compared to the option of transferring to another production site, local childminding jobs saved women not only a lengthy commute, but also the effort of integrating into a new factory environment. This local work could offer a way to reconcile personal life, family life, and professional life—something that had long been a strain on women workers.

While some Moulinex workers turned down the offer of a transfer, those who accepted generally felt they had no choice. Jacqueline Martin had been at Moulinex for twenty-four years when she agreed to take a post 100 km from home. “I made a snap decision,” she told a journalist. “At my age [45], with the job situation as it is, I'd take anything, even night shifts if I had to.”Footnote ³¹ The risk of not finding any other work thus played a significant part in her decision. A few years later, after Moulinex went bust, Monique Guéranger, who had worked at the Alençon factory, found herself facing the same situation: “I accepted because I was pushing 50 and I said to myself, I'm never gonna find another job. Also, I was in the limelight for I don't know how long. I thought no one's going to want me, everyone knows who I am.”Footnote ³² Monique was a trade union rep involved in the struggle over the factory closure, and her visibility in this capacity was liable to prove a disadvantage in the local labor market.

While these women articulated their sense of insecurity about their job prospects in terms of age, the latter was just one of several intersecting factors that put them at a disadvantage in the labor market and contributed to anxiety about being too old. All other things being equal (including age), women were twice as likely as men to be unemployed two years after the company's collapse. Female workers blamed this on a lack of “women's jobs” and on a negative reputation that clung to the women of Moulinex, whose long years of service in one company now became a liability as they were reproached for their lack of skills and versatility.Footnote ³³ Mireille Jouvin, who had spent thirty-three years at Moulinex and turned fifty in 2001, only a few weeks after learning that her factory would close, hinted at the way in which gender, class, and age converged to limit the opportunities for women like herself who had reached mid-life with few formal qualifications: “even younger women than me couldn't find anything and they were told that they were older, that they were too old,” she lamented. She had attended the unemployment office, but concluded “well, given my age—me and so many others—cleaning people's houses was all they thought we were good for!”Footnote ³⁴ The fact that Moulinex factories drew on a rural population (especially one of a certain age) and the belief that the company was dated—associated in the public imagination with the postwar boom years rather than the cutting edge of French industry in the twenty-first century—may also have contributed to a negative perception of Moulinex workers: according to an employment advisor in Alençon, it took months to convince employers that they weren't “savages.”Footnote ³⁵ In this sense class, gender, and rurality intersected with age to place these women in an unfavorable position in the labor market. When women like Jacqueline and Monique said they had little option but to accept a transfer, they spoke with the weight of these factors bearing down on them.

Adaptation and Integration

Moving to a new workplace implied a process of adaptation to local working practices and integration into a new group of colleagues. These processes could also have implications for the ways in which gender, class, and place-based identities were negotiated. Indeed, integration was complicated in some cases by the strong identity of each Moulinex site and the history of competition between them. When Julie Duprès was transferred to Mayenne, she did not feel comfortable in her new factory because some “girls from Mayenne” told the workers from Villaines-la-Juhel, on their arrival, that “they could have fired you”—to which Julie replied that if Mayenne continued to function, it was because the work from Villaines-la-Juhel had been transferred there.Footnote ³⁶ While this anecdote suggests that identification with the old factory and the colleagues one had known there remained strong, at least initially, for Julie, it also conveys a very clear sense of no longer being at home at work. Indeed, Marie-Gisèle Chevalier, a former trade union representative at Moulinex who moved from Argentan to Bayeux, has described herself as a “déracinée”—an uprooted person—observing that she and her colleagues from Argentan were never really accepted in Bayeux.Footnote ³⁷

Differences in both the official and unofficial organization of work also complicated the transition for some, notably at Bayeux, where a new method of product assembly was introduced. In Argentan, Jacqueline Martin had worked on an assembly line and remarked that: “With the line, there were constraints, because you had to always be there next to the conveyer belt. But they couldn't accelerate it.” At Bayeux, lines had been replaced by so-called “islands” which had no conveyor belt to determine the pace of work. Jacqueline's description of the island assembly stations makes clear that this was much more than a technical change. It had significant implications for social and psychological relations at work:

According to its proponents, the “island” method offered a means of enriching the tasks undertaken by workers and giving them greater autonomy. However, workers’ accounts of life in this factory tend to highlight not autonomy but individualism, suggesting an “every woman for herself” mentality which meant that faster workers exercised pressure on those who were slower. The Bayeux factory is also associated with an intensification of work in these accounts. Josette Gosselin, who was transferred to Bayeux from Caen in the late 1990s, explained:

Josette's perception that she and her colleagues had more control over how they worked in Caen may be partly attributable to the fact that she spent most of her career on an individual work-station rather than an assembly line. Yet her remarks also point to what Danièle Linhart has called the “clandestine management” of the constraints imposed by the organization of work, i.e., the ways in which workers appropriate their task and establish informal working practices.Footnote ⁴⁰ For Linhart, such codes and practices play an important part in workers’ sense of ownership of their work and of feeling “at home” in the workplace.Footnote ⁴¹ Moving to another factory meant leaving this informal community of practice and encountering a new set of expectations: for Josette, the pace of work and prescriptiveness of the management culture at Bayeux made it difficult to develop the sense of ownership of the work that she had built up in Caen; for Jacqueline, the organization of work there served to undermine solidarity among workers, contributing to her sense of isolation. It is perhaps not surprising then that Jacqueline turned to her old networks to find a solution—she approached a foreman she knew from Argentan and asked him to reassign her to a different role.Footnote ⁴²

It is notable that when Jacqueline articulated her sense of being out of place in her new work environment, she alluded to the age gap between herself and her immediate colleagues (“I'm with young ones, they're 30 years old so they go really fast”). Being younger was associated in the testimony cited above not just with being faster but implicitly with being more individualistic. Looking back on their working lives after the closures, long-serving Moulinex workers whose careers had begun in the 1960s and 1970s often evoked the camaraderie of their former workplace. Women workers in particular recalled practices that domesticated the environment of the shopfloor, such as birthday celebrations on the assembly line.Footnote ⁴³ These acts of making a home in the factory were remembered fondly in part because they were contrasted with stories about difficult working conditions and intense pressure on productivity: it was the “good atmosphere” among the “girls” on the line that made the demanding aspects of the job more bearable. While not all memories were positive, particular value was attached to experiences of mutual aid in the workplace.Footnote ⁴⁴ The 1970s were also years in which women workers at Moulinex mobilized collectively in a series of strikes that protested against their working conditions, including productivity targets.Footnote ⁴⁵ In contrast, younger workers who had begun their working lives more recently were differently socialized, their expectations more informed by the employment practices of the latter period, which emphasized flexibility and autonomy—the new organization of assembly work at Bayeux being a case in point. Such generational shifts within the working class have also been noted by Béaud and Pialoux in their study of workers in the automobile industry.Footnote ⁴⁶ These cross-generational encounters were clearly not exclusive to situations where workers joined new workplaces, but restructuring plans and job relocation certainly created a context in which workers were more likely to find themselves in new work situations that affected their sense of self and relationship to work: feeling old was one manifestation of this. Moreover, in an environment where the ability to work at pace was a defining feature of “women's work,” where longer serving workers had developed gendered forms of workplace solidarity that were less familiar to younger workers, and where age was particularly penalizing for women in the labor market, “feeling old” should itself be understood as a gendered phenomenon.Footnote ⁴⁷

Other differences in factory cultures also became visible as a result of workers being transferred to new sites, including divergences in the ways gender identities were expressed in workplace practices. In particular, we find this articulated as a gap between “town girls” and “country girls.” Monique Guéranger recounts that when she moved to the factory in the village of Fresnay, it was like going back in time. Asked why, she replied:

The town in question here is Alençon—not a metropolitan center, but rather a modestly-sized provincial town of less than thirty thousand people, which drew part of its workforce from the surrounding rural area. Nonetheless, Monique Guéranger, found that things in Alençon had “evolved,” as she put it, whereas “the Fresnay girls hadn't evolved”:

Here, place-based identities—expressed as an opposition between town and country—were associated with a gap in gender norms, whether at the level of dress habits or attitudes to hierarchy. Transferring to another factory meant encountering these different embodiments of what it was to be a working-class woman. In this case, it appears that the encounter allowed transplanted workers to feel affirmed in their own class and gender identity as they navigated the transition to a new workplace.

On the Road

As Fresnay was only 22 km (or a half hour drive) from Alençon, it was within reasonable commuting distance for many who had worked at Alençon, and this may have facilitated the relatively smooth transition experienced by Monique Guéranger, though it still meant getting up at 4am to be at work for the early shift.Footnote ⁴⁹ In contrast, for those who accepted transfers to sites that were further afield, the distances involved created additional complications. Interviewed about her experiences for a news bulletin in 2001, Brigitte, who had previously worked at Moulinex Argentan, explained that she now had to travel 50 km to work and was working nights as the bonus pay helped to cover her transport costs. As a divorced mother, apparently managing without significant parenting input from her former partner, she had to arrange bed and board for her children during the working week.Footnote ⁵⁰ Dominique Oriot, who had worked at Moulinex Mamers for twenty-nine years, was forced to move home when she accepted a transfer to Mayenne, 100 km away. Having initially tried to sell her house in Mamers, she eventually rented it to her adult son (with an agreement that he would eventually buy it). However, her sixteen-year-old daughter refused to move with her as planned and Dominique found herself parted not only from her former factory and colleagues, but also from her children. These experiences crystallize the complexities of reconciling personal life, family life, and professional life when mobility appears to be the only option.

Dominique's story features in the documentary Ex-Moulinex: mon travail, c'est capital, which explores the trajectories of several workers in the aftermath of the closure of their factory.Footnote ⁵¹ The film renders particularly evocatively the sense of dislocation that came with mobility in Dominique's case. The first scenes of the documentary show her outside her former home in Mamers, on a street where she had lived for almost her whole life until the factory closed. Significantly, we never see her inside the house. The camera follows her as she walks up the street and arrives at the now closed Moulinex factory, retracing the route she used to take to go to work. Just as she had looked at her house from the outside, we now see her standing in front of the factory looking in, estranged from these spaces she previously inhabited. The film then cuts to a shot of Dominique inside the factory, showing where the production lines used to be. Gesturing toward empty spaces she explains that one line is now in Limerick (Ireland), a second in Thurles (Ireland), and a third in Mexico. At one point a smile flashes across her face as she approaches a pillar that stands next to the old work-station where she used to keep what she calls “my little supplies,” which included items such as her ashtray. For a moment we have a sense of how workers like her appropriated the space of the factory as their own, and we see the pleasure she takes in this fleeting sense of homecoming. But there are no supplies hidden in the pillar anymore. At the end of the sequence, we see Dominique leave the factory by climbing through the window, an intruder in a space where she once belonged.

The above scene conveys the extent to which, for Dominique, leaving Mamers meant breaking with a way of life built on local roots, geographical proximity, and stable employment. The decision to accept a transfer to Mayenne also had a profound impact on the conditions in which she carried out her caring work as a mother, particularly given her daughter's decision not to join her. Although her daughter was old enough to make her own decision about moving, she still needed parental care. This meant that in order to fulfil her maternal role and maintain her family life, Dominique made a 200 km round trip every weekend. As well as being an emotional strain, these domestic arrangements implied an additional financial burden (the cost of travel and supporting two households) that was well beyond Dominique's means, leading her to seek short-term assistance from an emergency fund run by the town council.Footnote ⁵²

Indeed, the challenges of managing the double burden of professional and domestic labor, and of reconciling mobility with family life, were particularly stark for Dominique as she was a lone parent. In this respect, her situation (like that of Brigitte) was by no means unique. Indeed, an article in the national press in 1996 reported that politicians were particularly concerned about the number of lone parents with children still in education among the women due to be made redundant at Moulinex in Argentan and Mamers.Footnote ⁵³ Such a state of affairs was of course symptomatic of the way in which gender norms have shaped the distribution of care work and child custody arrangements: the vast majority of single parent families in France are headed by women.Footnote ⁵⁴

Throughout the documentary, Dominique is frequently filmed in her car, suggesting that her life is now characterized by being perpetually on the road: the settled life she once had appears to have been replaced by one defined by mobility. In one scene, filmed as she drove between Mayenne and Mamers to see her children, the filmmaker asks whether she might have considered buying a house in Mayenne if her daughter had been willing to join her. Dominique's reply is definitive: “there's no point” she says, indicating that she sees no prospect of being able to put down roots again. Already, she notes, there was talk of workers from Mayenne being transferred to another Moulinex site at Carpiquet (near Caen): “Now that I've lost my house, my family, my family life. Well, if I have to move, I'll move again. Here or elsewhere, the main thing is I need to work.” Given that Dominique had previously spent her whole life in one town and belonged to a generation of working-class people for whom home ownership had been an important social aspiration, this statement suggests that job relocation and the disruption of domestic life that came with it had brought about a significant shift both in her expectations for the future and her relationship to place. If Dominique appeared to accept rootlessness here in some sense, she did so with none of the bravado expressed by High's “interstate gypsies.”Footnote ⁵⁵ She spoke with a kind of resignation and perseverance as she contemplated another move that would take her even further from her family.

Like those American autoworkers interviewed by High, Dominique too went through a series of restructuring plans. After Ex-Moulinex, mon travail c'est capital was filmed, she was indeed transferred to Carpiquet. By May 2004, this factory, which had survived the collapse of Moulinex in 2001, thanks to a management buyout, was supplying motors to what was now the Seb-Moulinex group. Entirely dependent on this outsourced work, it was again under threat of closure. Dominique appeared in the news coverage, described as a closure “veteran.” Unlike the “I75 Gypsies,” however, she turned to the metaphor of family rather than that of the road to express her relationship to work: Moulinex is “kind of my family,” she told the reporter. “I've lived with them as much as I have with my children.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Here, Dominique articulated an attachment to the brand that transcended the old rivalries between Moulinex sites. Indeed, since Moulinex had gone bust in 2001 and the Carpiquet factory was not even formally part of the Seb group, which acquired the Moulinex brand name, the “family” that she evoked was not co-terminous with the legal entity known as Moulinex. Moreover, much of what characterized earlier ideas of the “Moulinex family,” including longstanding relationships with colleagues and accompanying practices of sociability, had gone. The language of “family” seems rather hollow in this context. All that allowed Dominique to cling to a sense of belonging in her work was the fact that she and her Carpiquet colleagues were still involved in the manufacture of Moulinex-branded products.