Putting people to work: an ethnography of labor relations in a large company with financial shareholders.

Summary From a survey in transversal participant observation conducted within the management of a large distribution group, the majority union organization and the employees of hypermarkets, this work aims to study the means of obtaining the work of the employees in a group of large distribution with financial shareholders. In 2008, for the first time since its creation, this group leaves the hands of its founding families to pass between those of an investment fund which appoints a new CEO. The profitability targets set by the new shareholders were close to 15%, a colossal cost-cutting plan was put in place and the new management was forced to operate an unchanged number of hypermarkets with 9.3% fewer employees. How is employee investment obtained in this context of shareholder financialization and cost reduction? It is in fact the product of a continuous process of multiplication of links between management, trade unions and employees, which ends up creating a web dense enough to make it very difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from it. Individuals are more trapped than convinced. Placed at the center of economic, normative, personal, and emotional interactions, they are ultimately bound by a relational configuration that prevents them from totally divesting themselves. The ways in which investment is obtained consist in defining the parameters of the employees' professional situation in such a way that it seems neither possible nor desirable for them to disengage.