Chômage et licenciements. La crise de la Lorraine sidérurgique : Longwy, 1978-1980

Unemployment and Redundancy. The Crisis of the Lorraine Steel Industry : Longwy, 1978-1979. The re-organisation of the steel industry in 1978 and 1979 was not simply an economic operation designed to re-establish profit margins, the social consequences have been numerous and deeply felt in Longwy (an important French steel producing town), whose whole foreseeable future has been thrown into uncertainty. The steel-workers' lack of qualifications or other work - their own skills being too specific - has been all the harder to accept because they had been relatively well protected from the effects of general competition in the job market ; emigration to other regions is also very much opposed because it goes against strong attachment to the region resulting from management strategies designed to encourage the implantation of the labour force and from the fight for the right to settle led by the metalworkers, who were often immigrants. But the crisis is also product of the multiple social transformations which preceded it and made the continuing of the existing systems of regulation more and more impracticable. At the root of these changes was the changeover from a society of overt dependence based on personalised authority and clear divisions between social groups to a more composite society working through more diffuse and indirect authority. This change is the more difficult to understand and accept for the fact that, faced with the growing diversification of different social groupings, institutions are less and less able to unify the representation of their interests and co-ordinate their practices.Montlibert Christian. Chômage et licenciements. La crise de la Lorraine sidérurgique : Longwy, 1978-1980. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 39ᵉ année, N. 5, 1984. pp. 1044-1068