#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) France, UCL AL #321 - Culture, Read: Piaget, "We manufacture, we sell, we pay ourselves. Lip, 1973" (ca, de, it, fr, pt)[machine translation]

 It's a little book and it reads quickly. A little less than a hundred pages to

recount the long and important struggle of the Lip. Over nine months long, from
mid-April 1973 to the end of January 1974, victory was the key. Important,
because it is emblematic of the "worker insubordination" of the 68s. Charles
Piaget, a worker activist of great integrity, tells us about this struggle, in
his own way, precise and sincere. His book is both testimony and transmission.
---- Let us recall in a few words what "Lip" was: the 1,200 workers were promised
unemployment and the factory dismantled. In June, following the sequestration of
the provisional administrators, the strikers stole the stock of watches before
relaunching production to finance the strike - and hold out. The outpouring of
solidarity is fantastic. "We manufacture, we sell, we pay each other." This is
what is written in the summer of 1973 on the banner hung on the gates of the
factory busy. She will then be forcibly evacuated by the police. The assembly
lines moved to the Jean Zay gymnasium not far from there: "the factory is where
the workers are" said Piaget.

The concrete experience of trade union apprenticeship
We manufacture, we sell, we pay each other, so that's the title he chose to give
to his book. But to get there, we had to build a "great collective" as he calls
it. This is all the salt of these pages: recounting the concrete and living
experience of trade union training.

Hired in 1946, Charles Piaget was a staff representative from 1954. He tells how
the decision was made to shake up the routine: "we have to go to the employees,
not just stay between us". It is "going fishing for information" in the
interstices of factory life, in the canteen, in the changing rooms or in
transport. Also identify those who can be their relays.

And then there are the strikes that punctuate the life of the company, numerous
from 1968 onwards, which founded this "great collective" and where the practice
of the general assembly is central. In 1973, Piaget was already a seasoned
activist, animator at Lip of a "CFDT of struggles" which wanted to be
self-managed. Above all, he knows that he is not alone and that everything
depends on deliberation, imagination, collective involvement. And this is what he
details here at work in one of the most striking strikes of the second half of
the twentieth century in France.

This is not, however, an exhaustive history of the Lip struggle. But it is a
reflection on the struggle where Charles Piaget does not hesitate to deliver us
his own contradictions, born of the common fight, for parts linked to the making
of the "leader". Because it gives us all this, this little book will be precious
to us.

Théo Roumier (UCL Orléans)

Charles Piaget, We manufacture, we sell, we pay ourselves. Lip 1973 , Syllepse,
2021, 80 pages, 4 euros,.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Piaget-On-fabrique-on-vend-on-se-paie-Lip-1973
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