Contenu du sommaire : L'alimentation au travail depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle

The three ages of paternalism. Canteens and workers' meals in Le Creusot (1860-1960)The evolution of the organization of feeding constitutes a privileged observatory for thinking the paternalism and its reconfigurations between the mid-nineteenth century and the “Trente Glorieuses”. At Le Creusot, the paternalism of the Schneider family had generally been hostile to the canteen system. Canteens were accepted grudgingly during periods of exceptional crises, such as the two world wars. During peacetime, the firm emphasized the importance of taking meals at home, in support of a family model based on the nurturing role of the housewife. The canteen was mainly for foreign workers and single men. Only when corporate catering was generalized under the auspices of the State, in the context of a contractual economy, did this form of paternalism begin to disappear. The decree of October 5, 1960 made it mandatory for companies with more than 25 employees to provide them with a local restaurant, leading to the generalization of staff canteens.

Catering for workers in France during the Great War
Prior to 1914, workers' canteens were rare. The First World War was a phase of accelerated development of this form of catering. These changes were due to the necessity of improving food supply: the population of workers to be fed had grown, and had also changed, with more women and foreigners, with different eating habits. The question of meal-taking at the workplace thus reveals critical contemporary issues of effort of production, social peace, and reform of labor conditions (for which minister Albert Thomas, in particular, had great hopes). The number of canteens increased considerably. The cooperative initiative to manage restaurants, canteens and sometimes supply stores was important, but in this respect, employers overwhelmingly dominated this kind of initiative. Workers seemed satisfied with such an offer. Nevertheless, they only haphazardly used such workplace restaurants, even though they were supposed to be an answer to problems of food supply and cost of living.

Situating the factory canteen in discourses of health and industrial work in Britain (1914-1939)The widespread adoption of canteens within British factories was a product of government intervention during the First World War, reflecting the State's distinctive war-time objectives. However, this article has sought to dispel the notion that employers discarded such canteens following the cessation of hostilities, while acknowledging the distinctive function of industrial welfare architecture such as canteens in the interwar period. The ideal of industrial health which crystallised over the course of World War I, and which the factory canteen reflected, helps explain why canteens were the lynchpin of interwar industrial welfare scheme implemented by employers. Canteens embodied a holistic, generalised concept of industrial health which emphasised workers' responsibilities for securing their own health through diet, hygiene and exercise. They marginalised employers' responsibilities for their employees' health, and concealed the specific health hazards of the industrial workplace, thus serving effectively as a means of stalling legislative intervention on health and safety issues. Welfare supervisors viewed the canteen as a key ingredient of a person-centred industrial welfare scheme which could counterbalance the sense of alienation believed to result from the subdivision of production processes and the expansion of workforces. Far from transcending the process of industrial rationalisation and consequent depersonalisation of the worker, one might therefore ask whether canteens embodied the ethos of industrial rationalisation, serving to control unruly behaviour while maintaining the human component of industrial production.

Feeding the builders of socialism. Canteens and the food issue in the USSR of the first five-year plans (1928-1935)In the industrializing and urbanizing USSR, the canteen was a political and ideological ambition of the Bolsheviks: its aim was first to promote the efficiency of production. The idea was to provide rationally planned and prepared meals. Canteens were thus the place of a healthy diet, but also of a political education and kulturnost (“civilizing process”). Yet with the food crisis and rationing, the canteen became, for Soviet workers, the only location for a regular meal. On the ground, improvisation dominated. Canteens were lacking everything: buildings, refrigerated storage area, cutlery, staff and especially food. Dirty premises, a very poor quality of food, and monotony created discontent among the workers. Canteens were the symbol of the Soviet failure to keep promises of a brighter tomorrow. They were also the melting pot of the Soviet experience, a common, essential anthropological and political experiment, a learning school of real socialism, a fundamental place in the formation of the “Soviet man.”

Canteen through the prism of industrial paternalism. Food and consent at the factory of Dalmine (Lombardy) between fascism and the republic. The canteen of the factory of Dalmine opened in 1934 and has to be considered as a fundamental element of a social welfare policy, celebrated by the official propaganda. The transformation of the former industrial paternalism under the influence of fascism was linked to the need to control the working population by suppressing any manifestation of opposition but also by creating the necessary consensus to accept the rationalization of work, lower wages and the removal of trade union rights. During the war, working in a large company became a guarantee of survival while the sense of belonging to the company grew stronger. In the immediate postwar, the factory became a propitious space for the emergence of a new workers' power. At Dalmine, poster factory for the spirit of collaboration and mutual aid claimed by the corporatist ideology, the canteen had become both an economic and political focal point. It provided for food security in a context of scarcity and, at the same time, reinforced the dependency / recognition relationship among workers. Thus, the canteen can be seen as the mirror of the social relations in the factory workspace, a useful way to capture industrial relations and their evolution over time.

Billy can or canteen? Forms and issues of the workplace meal-taking in the French labor literature since 1945Food practices in the workplace have a special place in the autobiographical writings of workers. The analysis of behavior and strategies around food gives information on both locations and times of the meals and the breaks, but also on the types of food as well as on sociability at work. The workshop appears as an important place of consumption, particularly in the texts published in the immediate postwar period. Several testimonies reveal ingrained habits, such as adherence to the mealtime on the workplace, addressing the need to recreate a familiar space. Other workers preferred to go out of the workplace to eat in restaurants and cafés, putting some distance between them and the workplace for a while. Food practices, whether ordinary or festive, were part of the daily rhythms of work and the writings reveal the complex links between differentiated times, that of the production and that of the meal. Behind the wide variety of behaviors, a strong socialization of the act of eating is suggested: to eat at work often remains a shared time and the meal is one of the touchstones of worker sociability translated into this labor literature.

Canteen in the era of the “reform”. Lunchtime in a large public company in France in the 1990s
In the mid-1990s, in a context of important reorganization, an ethnographic survey was interested in feeding patterns on the workplace at EDF-GDF (producing electricity and natural gas), especially in lunchtime. Be they at the refectory, at the canteen or at the office, the analysis of food practices away from home captures what people make, in practical use, of their 35-minute lunch break. The refectory was historically a stronghold of working class identity. Despite the tensions born of the standardization process of the lunch break, eating at the staff canteen remained the practice of the majority, men and women alike. Meals could also be taken in the office or in the refectory, the first being more feminine than the second. Beyond the different ways to use this time, which varied significantly between sexes, the same logic prevailed, that to escape or at least circumvent the constraints built into the system of dependency and domination in which everyone find themselves.