The enthusiastic worker : another look at Marx and Taylor

What has become of the workers, those who simply carry out orders, as described by Frederick Taylor; and the exploited proletariat as defined by Karl Marx ? A study of about ten Saint-Gobain factories, carried out by Mathieu Bonnetand David Emond, shows that workers are now intelligent, in charge of complex machines and are often shareholders in their companies. The time has come for people who study the working class to take into account these developments in an industry which has transformed the relation with knowledge and with machines and the financial position of workers who have become operators. Nevertheless, there are still real proletariats, workers in unstable jobs or jobless people who are not connected with this industrial world. For them too, traditional, conceptual schemes are no longer representative and are inadequate to improve their fate.