Opening the Gates

The Lip Affair, 1968–1981

Donald Reid

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786635402
• eBook ISBN: 9781786635433
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the Summer of 1973, workers occupied the Lip watch and clock factory, sparking a national cause and controversy. The Lip occupation and self-management experience captured the imagination of the Left in France and internationally, as a living example of the spirit of May '68. In Opening the Gates, Donald Reid chronicles the history of this struggle. Beginning with the early stirrings of worker radicalism in 1968, Reid's meticulously researched narrative details the nationally publicised conflict of 1973, the second bankruptcy and occupation of 1976 and the conversion of Lip into a group of cooperatives operating into the 1980s.

1

Lip, Lip, Lip, Hurray!

The endeavor of les Lip began many years ago, when some men and women, each with the will to change their lives, to put their Christianity into practice beyond the traditional ways, met at Lip … To confront what the ‘system’ had always instilled in them: egoism, domination, sanctions … What a workshop for a Christian!

—Roland Vittot¹

To mark the hundredth anniversary of his watchmaking firm in 1967, Fred Lip had a fresco, six meters long and two-and-a-half meters high, painted inside the entrance to the factory in Besançon. It traced the history of measuring time from the ancient world, where master architects are shown examining parchments while laborers toil in the background, to the modern era, where managers appear in front of male and female workers from whom a plethora of watch parts emerge. In the middle of the fresco are portraits of eminent scientists, including Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Dressed in Renaissance garb, Fred Lip apparently stands with them.²

Fred Lip was the grandson of Emmanuel Lipmann, an Alsatian Jew who opened a watchmaking workshop in Besançon in 1867. At the time, farmers and their families in rural Franche-Comté devoted their evenings and winters to making the well over 100 parts needed to construct a mechanical watch. Artisans in Besançon, like those employed by Emmanuel Lipmann, assembled the watches. This division of labor between the production of parts in the countryside and their assembly in Besançon continued to characterize watchmaking a century later. The population of Besançon doubled in size during the three-decade-long postwar boom to 120,000; Franche-Comté was second only to the Nord in the percentage of industrial workers in the population. In 1972, the region was home to 82 percent of the employees and 84 percent of the sales revenue in watchmaking in France.³ In 1976, there were 213 watchmaking enterprises in Franche-Comté, about half of which made parts while the rest assembled watches; 160 had fewer than fifty employees. Only three, including Lip, manufactured parts, assembled watches, and had more than 500 employees.⁴

Another fresco could have been devoted to the many agricultural and industrial cooperatives in Franche-Comté, including the fruitières, peasant cooperatives that produced cheese, described by Besançon-native Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. Socialists Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were also born and grew up in Besançon.⁵ In 1941, Marcel Barbu founded the Boimondau “labor community” in Valence following his expulsion from Besançon (where, in 1936, he had set up a firm to make watchcases for Lip) at the beginning of the Occupation. Boimondau was predicated on the active participation of all in the community through a network of neighborhood and workplace groups. Pay for workers and their unemployed spouses were based on seven elements of a member’s “human values”: a means of assessing their contribution to the community beyond solely that of production.⁶ Not far from the Lip factory, in the first decade and a half of the Fifth Republic, the extraordinary Centre Culturel Populaire de Palente-les Orchamps (CCPPO) brought cultural revolution to workers, imbricating militancy and the arts, from films and filmmaking to theatre and book discussions, with the idea that “to introduce Bach to workers is a kind of factory occupation.”⁷

In 1906, when anarcho-syndicalists organized workers in the Lipmann firm, the founder’s son, Ernest Lipmann, overcame their forty-five-day strike, despite the strikers’ use of whistles to harass scabs—whistles that the firm had provided workers in 1900, to wreak havoc at a meeting of opponents of another Alsatian Jew, Alfred Dreyfus.⁸ This was a period when Ernest Lipmann differentiated his company from others in Besançon in several ways. He created a manufactory composed of a network of workshops on the rue des Chalets. Although the firm continued to purchase watchcases and some other components from the network of local producers, it came to make four-fifths of the watch parts itself. Ernest Lipmann was equally innovative in marketing. He registered the brand name Lip in 1908 and launched an advertising campaign in mass circulation magazines. This broke with the existing system in which vendors bought watches from producers and sold them under their own name. The firm put Lip on each watch face and gave selected watch seller-jewelers the right to offer them. It set prices and took responsibility for the warranty, in lieu of the practice of having the merchant decide on the price and guarantee the product.⁹

By 1931, with 245 employees and an annual production of 40,000 watches, the Lipmann firm was the largest watch manufacturer in France. It stood out in a Besançon with 4,000 artisans making watches in workshops and 1,000 others whom the extension of electricity allowed to work in their homes.¹⁰ That year the firm reorganized as a joint stock company, Lip SA d’Horlogerie, initially selling stock to vendors of its watches and using the funds to expand along the rue des Chalets. Ernest Lipmann’s son, Fred, joined the firm as the director of production. He had been an indifferent student, more interested in rebuilding and racing motorcycles than school; for several years, he held a world speed record. When he failed his baccalaureate exam, he was sent to the École nationale d’horlogerie in Besançon and received a degree specially designed for him. However, in coming to work in the family business he sought to avoid, in his words, “behaving like a crass residue of capitalism.” Fred Lipmann later framed his arrival in the firm as “the beginning of my great revolution: the struggle of the forces of youth and the future against those of tradition, or else of inertia.”¹¹

The Swiss began industrializing the fabrication of watches in the late nineteenth century, and had well surpassed the French in sales by the interwar years. The Lipmanns stood out among French watchmakers by responding with the standardization and rationalization of production. The firm mechanized, broke down the work process to establish worker specialization in a single operation, speeded up production, and increased the use of piece work such that 89 percent of workers were paid by output in 1930. Workers struck for a month that year against the new production norms and the replacement of skilled workers (ouvriers professionnels (OP)) by unskilled workers (ouvriers spécialisés (OS)) performing one task repetitively for less pay; 60 percent of both male and female workers participated in the movement. Fred Lipmann negotiated with the workers in place of his father, and held the line against reversing these changes. In 1934, the firm claimed that worker productivity had increased three-fold in recent years.¹²

As an element of his project to enact the modern employer, Fred Lipmann embraced a theatrical paternalism. In the early 1930s, he ordered workers making watches to replace their traditional black smocks with white ones, and had them exchange their shoes for white slippers when they entered the factory to avoid tracking in dirt. To signal their membership in the community devoted to production, managers, including the director, wore white smocks as well.¹³ Because visibility and cleanliness were of paramount importance, Fred Lipmann installed fluorescent lights and jointless flooring. The firm opened the factory to the public, allowing it to visit the workshops and there to be impressed with their order and modern technology. In 1934 Lip claimed to be the first French firm to provide paid vacations.¹⁴ After the victory of the Popular Front in 1936, Fred Lipmann got up on the roof of a car and harangued his workers to resist the bosses. During the workers’ brief occupation of what he considered his factory, he went to the locked gate and asked to join them, but they turned him away.¹⁵ Tales like this may be apocryphal, but the fact that they were widely repeated is a testament to Fred Lipmann’s projection of the image of a boss, a patron, unlike any other.

Lip had used its expertise in precision mechanics and timers to make armaments for France in World War I. When the Germans occupied Besançon in 1940, they requisitioned the factory to produce parts for their own armed forces. After Fred Lipmann’s efforts to get his parents to Switzerland failed, they were deported and died in Auschwitz in 1943.¹⁶ At the Liberation, Fred Lipmann showed up gun in hand to take back the Aryanized factory.¹⁷ He changed his name to Lip and took sole direction of the company. Under his leadership, Lip diversified. The firm took compensatory damages from Germany in the form of machine-tools and developed a department devoted to precision mechanics that was key to the operation of other elements of Lip in both technical and accounting terms; it supported fixed charges without which other departments would run a deficit. Lip moved successfully into new markets like parts for semi-conductors and silicon coatings for IBM. Armaments sales to NATO and to France during the Algerian War provided close to 30 percent of the firm’s revenue in the mid-1950s. Although only a small element of production, profits from this sector provided Fred Lip the funds to reestablish his firm as the preeminent name in French watches. In 1970, 75 percent of Lip’s turnover was in watches with the remainder in armaments, precision mechanics, and machine-tools (made in a small factory in nearby Ornans). The symbiotic relationship between the different divisions was one basis of the company’s prosperity.¹⁸

Fred Lipmann had gone to the United States to observe factory management in 1928, before beginning work in the firm, and he took pride in the soubriquet, “the French Ford of the watch”; he even adopted the American slogan, “Keep on smiling.”¹⁹ After the war Lip introduced aptitude tests to assign workers to posts, and established in-house job training for employees.²⁰ Charles Piaget dubbed Lip “paternalist and modern” when he began there in 1948, a place where the work week included one and a half hours of sport, but production was pushed.²¹ That same year, Fred Lip claimed to have introduced assembly line production to watchmaking before Switzerland or the United States.²² In 1962, the firm produced 600,000 watches, making it the seventh largest producer in the world.

Unlike other French watchmakers, Lip supported a renowned research...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• List of Illustrations
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1. Lip, Lip, Lip, Hurray!
• 2. The Serpent
• 3. We Produce, We Sell, We Pay Ourselves
• 4. The Factory Is Where the Workers Are
• 5. Because We Tell You It Is Possible
• 6. From Besançon to the Chingkang Mountains
• 7. Sometimes a Great Notion
• 8. Take the Money and Run
• 9. Women’s Lip
• 10. Like the Bodies of the Hanged at the Place de Grève
• 11. Reentering the Atmosphere
• 12. The Onions of Egypt
• 13. From Besançon to Gdansk
• 14. In the Musée Grévin
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index