WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, OCL CA #334 - Interview with bakery workers, part three (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

"It makes us laugh when people tell us about great French gastronomy"
---- We met M. and C., workers in an artisanal bakery. These meetings
gave rise to three interviews on the bakery today, from the point of
view of its workers. In the previous issue, M. addressed discrimination,
baking struggles and alternative baking. Here, this time with C., the
interview will be devoted to the training of bakers, unionism, hazing
and undocumented immigrants. ---- How long have you worked in a bakery?

The first time I set foot in a bakery to work was in 2007, at the age of
18, for a free one-week internship, because the director of the
CFA[Apprentice Training Center]where I I was considering enrolling for
the next school year and advised me to do an internship to be sure of
getting into this type of profession. I remember very well that the
worker who supervised me during the internship was barely 2 years older
than me, managed the morning production alone, and that the boss manned
the baguette baking station in the afternoon. . This young worker gave
me lots of advice on the attitude to have, what bosses don't like, how
to always be active at every moment of the working day, how to always
find something to do even if the we are not yet autonomous: "Never with
your hands in your pockets", "Always be on time and even early", "When
you don't know what to do, you ask for work and you can always scrape
the mess without let us tell you." Another thing I remember from this
internship with this young baker is that he had a rather nice car for
his age and that when I spoke to him about starting an apprenticeship
after 18, he told me that , according to him, I had wasted time. He must
have started his apprenticeship at 15 or 16 years old.
Then I started a one-year apprenticeship contract, in September 2007, in
a bakery in the 18th arrondissement of Paris that was part of a
franchise network. I worked in this company and very occasionally in
other companies in the network (which were also in the 18th) from 2007
to 2014, under different statuses.
In summary, in bakery: two one-year apprenticeship contracts, one-year
permanent contract then resignation, resumption of studies in BTS in
cereal processing while working on the black market on holidays and
weekends, one-year apprenticeship contract in professional license in
the cereal industry, one-year permanent contract then resignation
(almost physically broken down).
Then I took a break of three and a half years as a pawn in National
Education.

How long have you worked in a bakery?

The first time I set foot in a bakery to work was in 2007, at the age of
18, for a free one-week internship, because the director of the
CFA[Apprentice Training Center]where I I was considering enrolling for
the next school year and advised me to do an internship to be sure of
getting into this type of profession. I remember very well that the
worker who supervised me during the internship was barely 2 years older
than me, managed the morning production alone, and that the boss manned
the baguette baking station in the afternoon. . This young worker gave
me lots of advice on the attitude to have, what bosses don't like, how
to always be active at every moment of the working day, how to always
find something to do even if the we are not yet autonomous: "Never with
your hands in your pockets", "Always be on time and even early", "When
you don't know what to do, you ask for work and you can always scrape
the mess without let us tell you." Another thing I remember from this
internship with this young baker is that he had a rather nice car for
his age and that when I spoke to him about starting an apprenticeship
after 18, he told me that , according to him, I had wasted time. He must
have started his apprenticeship at 15 or 16 years old.
Then I started a one-year apprenticeship contract, in September 2007, in
a bakery in the 18th arrondissement of Paris that was part of a
franchise network. I worked in this company and very occasionally in
other companies in the network (which were also in the 18th) from 2007
to 2014, under different statuses.
In summary, in bakery: two one-year apprenticeship contracts, one-year
permanent contract then resignation, resumption of studies in BTS in
cereal processing while working on the black market on holidays and
weekends, one-year apprenticeship contract in professional license in
the cereal industry, one-year permanent contract then resignation
(almost physically broken down).
Then I took a break of three and a half years as a pawn in National
Education.
And I took up a job as a baker in September 2017 in Auchan, then I
resigned in June to hire in a self-managed SCOP in Montreuil, la
Conquête du Pain[see CA 333]until May 2022. Since May 2022
, I am not looking for work and I am discreetly waiting for Pôle emploi
to force me to do so. So in total I worked for about eleven years making
bread, pastries and pastries and selling these goods.

How did the learning process go for you?

I completed three apprenticeship contracts with the same company. The
first two followed one another, and aimed at preparing for the CAP and
BEP Boulanger for the first, and the additional mention Bakery and the
CAP Pastry Chef for the second. The third contract aimed at obtaining a
professional license and was rather an arrangement with my boss which
allowed him to have me hold independent positions at a lower cost and
allowed me to earn more than elsewhere, while being free in the
management of the project that I presented.
These details because, when we talk about apprenticeship, there are two
aspects: on the one hand the employment status / the apprenticeship
contract, and on the other hand the process of transmitting know-how.
Only my first two contracts are representative of what learning in
"bulpat" is.
The alternating schedule was two weeks at work and two weeks at school,
with adjustments for the holiday periods in order to be at work longer
in December/January, when production is maximum. The school was in Rouen
and the company in Paris (1). This is an elitist training course
recruiting at baccalaureate level, exempting apprentices from general
CAP subjects, with compensation for more courses and strictly
professional and technological practical work. One of the challenges of
creating this training was the training of future owners of artisanal
bakeries, but it ultimately also served to train executives of more
concentrated structures (whether franchise networks or industrial
companies in RetD or other ).
In the company, I was supervised by the head baker (also production
manager, and who later became tenant manager). There were a maximum of
four of us for the entire bread production: the chef (night and
morning), a worker (afternoon), an apprentice (me, when I was not at
school) and an intern (from Japan as part of "training" partnerships,
there were periods without trainees). Basically, there were two
employees really on the job all the time, the apprentice and the trainee
were there to supplement the shortage of labor in relation to the
quantities to be produced.
The chef worked from 2 to 14 hours and sometimes worked 6 days a week. I
worked every weekend, including between two weeks of school, and my days
off were returned to me during the week (when the store closed was
Tuesdays and Wednesdays). I was on a 39 hour contract, I started at 6am
and finished when the boss said so, usually around 2pm. The guiding
principle of my training was to learn to manage and do everything alone,
and to learn to supervise the trainees. No breaks, like the boss:
managing to fit the entire workload in as little time as possible. Learn
to manage the quantities to be produced yourself, while taking care of
the sale. We had to consider the pay as a fixed price, that is to say
that if we could leave early by having finished everything we did so,
but if we exceeded the hours nothing was paid to us.

Looking back, what are your views on this period?

It was a period that I appreciated, but it nonetheless remained an
apprenticeship in Stakhanovism and an instilled confusion between the
interests of the workers and those of the bosses.
My chef (less than 30 years old at that time) had completed his
apprenticeship in this same bakery and had spent his entire career
there, becoming chef when the shop was bought by the franchise network.
He told me a lot of things about his apprenticeship, the duration of the
work, the schedules, etc., and clearly he was not reproducing everything
he had undergone. I can say that he was more progressive than the
oldest, that he was attached to the mastery and quality of his work, and
that he was more in a meritocratic and competitive logic towards his
colleagues: to get better salaries, you had to prove yourself compared
to others. Concretely, in terms of cadences, this has the consequence
that the "normal" cadence is that of the fastest (the leader) instead of
being the average cadence.
At the end of my two years of apprenticeship, I was technically capable
of holding all the positions in the bakery, of completely manning the
pastry making station (the position I took) and of holding basic pastry
positions. Technically, because physically no: the days were too long
and I needed to do something other than work, eat, sleep. Basically, I
was trained to be autonomous as quickly as possible, and I was paid on
the apprenticeship scales, which in bakeries are the minimum legal scale.
I liked what I learned at school, and the control I was given in my
work, I felt useful. I was still critical because I was raised in a
rather Marxist left-wing family, but I resolved these embryonic
criticisms with a sort of workerist ideology or the idea of the
"established".

What is the profile of the students who enter a bakery apprenticeship?

I don't have the average profile, the school and the company I was in
are minority structures with an elitist conception of the profession.
The apprenticeship sector is still mainly reserved for young boys from
disadvantaged backgrounds who are failing at school or deprived of
schooling.
I would like to say that I do not have the typical background or the
typical profile of workers in the sector due to the age I entered the
profession and the opportunities I have had to work in other fields, and
finally by the level of studies to which I had access. It is not the
working conditions that I endured that differ, it is the material
obligation to endure them.

Is there hazing?

I haven't experienced any, apart from a few jokes where they try to make
you believe something or make you do something stupid (go get a scale to
whip the egg whites, a croissant mold, or even pass via the fourth floor
to get to the bakery in the basement). The pastry chef who was the
oldest could have had more questionable practices, like pinching your
inner thigh very hard, but I wouldn't say it was hazing since every time
he made me I insulted him and sometimes threw a jet of water in his
mouth. I also remember the egg fight with another apprentice. It was
more childishness than oppression.
The real hazing was more about making me take over the position of the
retired pastry chef when I was coming out of my apprenticeship. It was
the non-replacement of a fellow pastry chef, which meant that we had to
do the work of three at a time for months and during the holidays. It
was that I believed that if I was exhausted after a year of working as a
worker it was my fault....
I wouldn't know if there is systematic hazing, but there is a
paternalistic relationship since the apprentices are very young and are
trained by comrades who take on the role of big brother, daron, uncle.
What is systematic and which allows anything to happen is the fact of
being in premises that few people visit, potentially one-on-one with a
boss, a boss, at specific times. different from the rest of society, and
that the learning relationship is a relationship of obedience.
In my personal case, my head baker never made me do something that he
didn't do himself, it was a principle for him. This was not the case in
pastry: my fellow apprentice pastry chef complained that he was always
given the same tasks, those that the others didn't do (like almond
croissants, diving, breaking eggs).
In my school, there was a classmate in second year who had struggled as
a girl and as an adult to find a boss (it costs them more than at 16).
In the end, she was forced to agree to pay part of her salary to the
boss. And the teachers knew it...

You joined a union, for what reasons?

I joined the union for the first time in 2012 with the CNT, more out of
ideology than to be armed against exploitation. I didn't stay there
long, because, on the one hand, the union I was in was interpro and
small group, which brought me nothing in terms of concrete defense or
building a balance of power at work, and that, on the other hand,
self-managing unionism required working time when I was already
overworked at work.
I re-unionized in 2021 with the CGT because I think there is work to be
done within the CGT, and in particular at the FNAF[National Agri-food
and Forestry Federation], which has the line of defending craftsmanship
facing industry, and therefore cooperates more with artisan bosses than
with industrial workers (see the positions on the UNESCO heritage rod).
And also because I was in complete disagreement with the majority of the
employees of the SCOP where I worked, and because I was suffocated in
the affinity of self-management, which was unable to criticize anything
other than the employed individuals. No work was done to understand and
know the sector, the profession, its structures, its antagonisms..., and
from there there was no desire to act on anything other than its small
structure of exploitation. To put it another way, I needed to discuss
class struggle because I was tired of arguing with comrades who claimed
to work differently without having ever worked in the classic structures
of the sector. Because the job of a baker's worker there was as
difficult as elsewhere, less well paid and with less well maintained
production tools. Basically, I joined a union to distance myself from
the idealistic visions of the majority of my comrades, who affirmed that
collectively operating a small capital at the end of the
wheat-flour-bread chain was in itself revolutionary. What I couldn't hear.
Regarding the Bakery Federation, I haven't been able to meet them yet,
even though I contacted them when I joined. It seems to me that it is a
bureaucratic shell empty of workers. My organizational basis is rather
the local union, especially since I am now unemployed. The UL receives
employees from the bakery during office hours, and it is often simple
stories of non-payment of salaries or violations of small bosses who
think they have everything they can do. Most of the time, this is
resolved on a case-by-case basis, with a little pressure. There is no
real logic for unionizing these comrades who come to seek individual help.

For you, what are the obstacles to the development of worker and union
struggles in bakeries and pastry shops?

It seems to me that artisanal baking suffers from the size of its
structures, from turnover, from the social isolation of the profession,
from the illusions of emancipation by opening one's box.
What I think is that the CGT is entirely capable of providing a legal
service to isolated employees of bakeries and pastry shops, but that it
is not seeking to develop a collective organization there. However,
bakery workers have historically been part of the labor movement, and I
would say that the moment when this unionism disappeared coincides with
the period when the State and the employers invented the notion of
craftsmanship, to defend the small capital of the industrial competition
and concentration. From there, we developed the discourse on the quality
of production, causing the social relation of production to disappear in
favor of the relation of size of capital.

Are there many undocumented immigrants who work in bakeries?

I can't really answer the number question as there are no statistics, no
official counts, and my personal experiences cannot be a sufficient
basis for concluding. There are around 35,000 "boulpat" companies in
France, and 120,000 workers.
The size and number of bakery structures lend themselves well to
concealment and avoidance of controls. On Facebook recruitment groups,
where offers and requests are published, there are workers from foreign
countries, generally those from the former French colonial empire (2),
who seek to be recruited in France. I see more and more announcements
from bosses who want to specify in their requests for labor "with papers
in order".
Personally, I have always worked with comrades of very diverse
nationalities (Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Japan,
Guinea, Mexico...) and I have never been aware of alias type
situations.[an undocumented person who uses someone else's valid papers
to work]. The companies where I worked did not practice undeclared work,
or only marginally for overtime. This doesn't prove anything, however.
The training aspect must be taken into account. For example, Auchan
requested the originals of diplomas during recruitment, and bakery
worker jobs are qualified jobs where "autonomous" workers are recruited,
that is to say capable of ensuring the production immediately. There is
therefore the filter of learning, and it is rather situations of young
unaccompanied minors that we observe. There is a collective "Patrons
solidaires" (3) which was born from situations where young unaccompanied
minors, apprentice bakers, were threatened with OQTF[Obligation to leave
French territory]once they reached the age of majority, while their boss
had need their trained workforce. There is this type of struggle on the
papers, a paternalistic struggle of a small anti-racist employer and
above all in need of manpower.
In bakery or pastry production, there is no "maneuver" position, a
specialized worker position that does not require lengthy training.
These are not positions where bosses recruit at will without paying too
much attention to the profile of their comrades. On the other hand,
there is this type of position for sale, preparing sandwiches. Unskilled
production tasks are carried out by apprentices.

What are the prospects for the fight for immigration in baking?

I think that the fight for the right to freedom of movement lies in
access to training in baking and the right to migrate easily for pastry
making. I distinguish between bakery and pastry, because training in
French artisanal baking is a sort of preserve on national territory,
while pastry has international schools and training which do not
"technically" justify blocking comrades who want to change country. For
the bakery, what is blocking is the refusal to allow everyone to enter
training schools. Young comrades who manage to come to France before
their majority (and who can therefore enter an apprenticeship) do so by
overcoming all the disgusting and inhumane barriers of Frontex (4). You
then have to find a boss who signs the contract and work authorization
paperwork. There, the obstacle could be racism or the so-called
"administrative phobia" (rather employer laziness). But hey, when you
haven't drowned in the Mediterranean, getting 40 rakes from the bosses
before finding one "nice" enough to pay you EUR350 per month to sweat in
a bakery and ruin your sleep patterns , it's not important. In the end,
there are almost all the conditions met for the contradictions of this
sector to evolve and oppose the lack of labor to nationalist racism
provided that we build class solidarity in the face of corporatism and
"the French tradition»!

Comments collected by zyg

P.-S.
An interview with two bakery workers was done by the show L'Actualité
des Struggles, it completes this series of articles very well. It is
available online here

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3984
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