Taking It to the Streets: French Cultural Worker Resistance and the Creation of a Precariat Movement

Abstract

This article examines the intermittent cultural workers movement in France leading up to and including the 2003 strike that paralyzed the film and television production industries. Crucial to understanding the strike are the ways workers defined their labour in the cultural industries in the decade leading up to the strike. Such ideas were often at odds with government, employer, and even union understandings of labour in the sector. In using the concepts of immaterial labour and precarity to discuss the movement, the author argues that these workers movements might be understood as examples of syndicalism, enacted outside the traditional categories of the workplace and professional crafts.