This also allows Denys Gorbach to revisit a structuring debate in Marxist sociology of work from the last few decades, between Harry Braverman, author notably of the book Labor and Monopoly Capital whose French translation was recently republished, and Michael Burawoy, author notably of Producing Legitimacy.

Based on observations and interviews, he shows that, paradoxically, Braverman's analysis of the dequalification of work under the effect of automation and new management does not apply to this factory whose workers, like others in this post-Soviet space, have been able to remain relatively sheltered from the neo-Taylorism typical of the period, and consider themselves as craftsmen sharing with their bosses the same interests.

***

Screenwind[1] is a medium-sized factory located in a peripheral area of Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine. Surrounded by metallurgical giants built during the time of the USSR, this company, founded in the 2000s, produces double-glazed windows. In the popular Ukrainian imagination, these objects are associated with Western capitalist modernity, as opposed to the (post)Soviet reality, judged obsolete and inefficient. The installation of these new-type windows is at the heart of yevroremont (« renovation à l'européenne ») of post-Soviet housing, a sequence of standardized interventions to renovate housing (Ryabchuk, 2013). This trend becomes massive when economic growth is felt in the 2000s; initially imported, « European » windows are gradually tamed by Ukrainian society. New companies, such as Screenwind, are founded to produce them locally. How do they work?

Does the labor process at Screenwind contrast with traditional processes within the large neighboring factories? How does this company, created long after the fall of the Soviet Union and thus having no « socialist » heritage at the organizational level, organize the extraction of surplus value – notably, what place for Taylorism and for models of work organization that succeeded it in the West?

The city of Kryvyi Rih is an important mining and steel center, known for these gigantic companies built around the 1960s, which each employ thousands of employees. The metallurgical sector represented by these companies was decisive in the structure of national GDP in the 2000s, but its importance has been declining since the 2010s, threatening the subsistence and collective identity of the local population, which relies on productivity and worker pride. In this sense, the experience of Kryvyi Rih's workers is similar to what Western European workers experienced following the loss of competitiveness and the closure of mines and steelworks (Lomba, 2018; Retière, 1994) – even if the reasons for the decline differ in the West and East.

The organizational dynamism of large companies born from the post-war modernity drive is relatively well known, including regarding the post-socialist world (Burawoy and Krotov, 1993; Clément, 2000; Morrison, 2008). On the other hand, small and medium-sized young companies that exist in the shadow of the industrial giants of the Soviet era have been less studied. Screenwind is one of them. This factory has only about a hundred employees who manufacture double-glazed windows. But is it organized differently from neighboring industrial giants? We know that the labor process within large post-Soviet factories relies on paternalistic informal arrangements in progressive decomposition (Crowley, 2021; Gorbach, 2021a). Analyzing these forms considered transitional, researchers concluded that a new generation of « properly capitalist » companies had to appear to complete the submission of the post-Soviet economy to the law of value (Clarke, 2007). Have « new factories » like Screenwind managed to manage their labor process according to contemporary production models (Toyotaism, lean production...)?

In order to answer this question, I conducted participant observations at Screenwind by being hired as a worker for two months (March–April 2019). These observations, carried out undercover, were completed with in-depth interviews with my three teammates, as well as with two managers, after the end of my engagement in the factory. This fieldwork was carried out within the framework of a longer investigation into the political attitudes and behaviors of workers and female workers in Kryvyi Rih working in both types of enterprises.

In the first section of this article, I summarize the Braverman debate and its application to «real socialism» as well as its successors: to what extent can one speak of Soviet or post-Soviet Taylorism? The second section describes the fieldwork at Screenwind, and the following section dives into the analysis of the fragmented labor process observed there. In the fourth section, I focus on the autonomy of workers, their discretionary power, and the self-perception that results from it. At the end, I return to the theoretical questions of the subsumption of labor and profitability ensured by non-Taylorist organization.

For further reading |

Thinking about the degradation of work with Harry Braverman

1. Taylorism in the East: Braverman and the (post)Soviet factory

1.1. Braverman, workers, Taylor

The question at the heart of this article falls within the continuation of the debates of the 1970s sparked by the publication of Harry Braverman's book on the degradation of work in the context of Fordist capitalism (Braverman, 1998 [1974]). Braverman links the latter to the implementation of new strategies of labor control that pass through the dequalification of the immediate labor process, by separation between conception and execution and by concentration of knowledge and control in management. For him, «scientific organization of work» Taylorism contributes to alienation by appropriating the know-how and skills of workers. These latter lose the global vision of the production process and become Marx's «partial men» (2007 [1932]). Capitalists, in turn, gain control over the labor process which ensures them uninterrupted accumulation. Braverman inscribes these developments in the linear vision of capitalist mode of production, which only strengthens itself over the centuries to the detriment of the autonomy and know-how of the proletariat.

Braverman's perspective has been criticized as «neo-Luddite»: thus, Al Szymanski notes that it is quite conceivable that a meticulous distribution of tasks can be carried out within a factory in socialist society. To the objectives of profitability and technical efficiency he adds «joy efficiency» (joy efficiency) – the maximization of pleasure inherent in the production process, which can be achieved by distributing tasks and collectivizing atomized labor processes. Finally, he asserts that individual control over production, for which Braverman advocates, goes against the socialist program, oriented towards the establishment of collective control: «The whole of Braverman's analysis leads to the conclusion not of atomization of the labor process but of its socialization – the corollary of increasing division of labor» (Szymanski, 1978, p. 49).

Michael Burawoy develops these points further by stipulating the analytical importance of the "subjective" components of work, which would be evacuated from Braverman's narrative. Starting from the orthodox Marxist schema, the latter reifies the antagonistic interests of labor and capital, which are attributed to them by default, while it would rather be a matter of showing how they are produced and reproduced daily. To speak of this dynamism, Burawoy introduces the concept of "relations in production" (relations in production) – the social relations of humans to nature, the technical division of labor. These relations reproduce and mystify capitalist relations of production (relations of production) – the social relations of humans to one another, the social division of labor (Burawoy, 1978). Among the mechanisms at work in reproducing and mystifying a contemporary capitalist factory, Burawoy identifies games – notably the game of making out, competition in productivity, which he observes during his fieldwork in Chicago (Burawoy, 1979). Games not only naturalize the general framework of capitalist exploitation, but also help to coordinate the interests of labor and management. Workers thus give themselves space to exercise their agency, but this agency does not go in the direction attributed by the orthodox Marxist schema: thanks to productivity games, workers develop a stake in the rules and objectives of production (Saburova, 2019). Braverman's analysis misses this contradictory agency.

If for Braverman, Taylorism is a successful management technology, knowingly introduced by bosses and managers acting together against workers, for Burawoy this practice has failed, giving way to more sophisticated techniques (including games) specific to the monopolistic stage of capitalism: "the class struggle sparked by Taylorism favored the transition from scientific management to the scientific-technical revolution" (Burawoy, 1978, p. 287). Burawoy therefore complicates the functionalist picture painted by Braverman, by drawing attention to the contradictory relations between control over the labor process, class consciousness, and mode of production:

The craftsman has made, and in some places still makes, part of capitalism. Thus, identifying the reunification of conception and execution with socialism is confusing job control [job control] with workers' control [workers' control], relations in production with relations of production. This risks not going far enough and, in passing, taking a nostalgia for the past for a nostalgia for the future. (Burawoy, 1978, p. 295)

To refine the Bravermanian analysis, Burawoy proposes the concept of "factory regimes" (factory regimes). These are concrete political configurations in the enterprise – relations in production that obscure and legitimize relations of production. The different political configurations of production, rooted in the national economic and political context, sit on the continuum "despotic-hegemonic", with "hegemonic despotism" as the new form adapted to post-Fordist capitalism (Burawoy, 1983). His conceptual framework has been criticized for lack of attention to external coercion and economic incentive, which are also as important as the ludic dimension in preserving capitalist control over the labor process (Clawson and Fantasia, 1983; Stark, 2009). Nevertheless, since the 1980s, this framework has been taken up many times to conceptualize different specific factory regimes. One speaks for example of the "satisficing" [satisficing] labor process that dispenses with maximizing productive efforts on the part of workers in the name of perpetuating management power (Bialski, 2024; Vidal, 2019), as well as particular regimes in peripheral countries (Buu-Sao, 2021; Greco, 2019; Rubbers, 2021), including regimes that approach the despotic pole (Mihály, 2021; Raj, 2013; Smith and Pun, 2006), logistics labor regimes (Benvegnù and Gaborieau, 2017; Flécher, 2023; Høyer Leivestad, 2021; Mevik, 2023; Saraceno, 2019), or regimes specific to companies employing migrant labor (Birke and Bluhm, 2020).

1.2. The infrapolitics of the Soviet factory

What about the USSR and other regimes of "state socialism," as well as their heirs? Contrary to the prejudices propagated by certain works from the 1970s, which were highly abstract and historically circumscribed (Linhart, 2010 [1976]), Soviet labor was never taylorized. In his book, Robert Linhart emphasizes the fascination of the leader of the Bolshevik party with the Taylorist method, considered politically neutral and technically indispensable for modernization and the promotion of science in the industrial context (Lenin, 1972 [1918]). But the ideological success of Taylorism was not accompanied by its adoption as a managerial practice. Linhart thus makes the same mistake as Braverman by confusing ideology and practice. Indeed, the technocratic ideal of "scientifically organized" labor seduced an entire spectrum of political organizations and social movements in the 1920s, ranging from Bolsheviks to fascists, passing through the IWW's anarcho-syndicalists (Maier, 1970). All dreamed of a society where rationality and science could substitute for the struggle of particular interests that is politics. But the latter was not ready to be evacuated – neither from society in the broad sense, nor from the workplace in particular.

The Bolshevik party's enthusiasm for Taylorism found its expression in the figure of Alexei Gastev, the syndicalist socialist activist who founded in 1921 the Central Institute of Labor with the aim of automating and radically rationalizing the labor process (Koulaeva, 2021). The same year, he published the theses entitled "How One Should Work" as well as the analytical paper "Our Tasks," which outlined the policy for implementing "scientific organization of labor" (SOL) in the country. Unlike Taylor, Gastev did not limit himself to technical measures imposed from the outside, but paid great attention to sensitizing workers to the correct "labor culture," notably time economy. For the rest, his approach fully fits within the global Taylorist movement. The Central Institute of Labor conducted surveys on industrial processes, equipment and tools of labor, as well as on the psychic and physiological resources of the human body. It organized the training of cadres and designed projects for rationalized labor processes.

However, in the 1930s, during the full-scale industrialization campaign, the institute became the subject of increasingly severe criticism in Soviet press, which treated it as a bourgeois scientific organization. The institute's activities were gradually reduced. Gastev was accused of anti-Soviet activities and shot in 1939. Why did Stalinist industrialization, which determined the direction taken by the evolution of Soviet and post-Soviet industry, abandon the Taylorist rationalizing approach to the labor process? And how did it succeed without this "bourgeois science"?

Social relations inside the Soviet factory were structured by shared interests and the alliance of the factory director and workers against the state-party. Workers had an interest in increasing their wages and reducing the workload, while the director's interest consisted in respecting (and, if possible, exceeding) the production plan. To ensure the cooperation of the workforce, management proposed an informal pact: workers had the right to violate certain rules on a daily basis provided they were ready to make extraordinary efforts when the situation demanded it (notably working more at the end of the month or year). This tacit pact went against government policy, which imposed draconian discipline in principle, going up to criminalizing delays (Filtzer, 1986, p. 67‑68), and promoted the Stakhanovite movement, sabotaged by directors (Siegelbaum, 1990).

For the labor process, this pact meant preserving the worker's autonomy, free to organize the labor process as they saw fit provided that they delivered the expected results. This logic contradicted the spirit of the NOT, just as did the competing logic of stakhanovism. The official Stalinist culture despised the norms and calculations advanced by engineers and other specialists presumed to be bourgeois-minded or saboteurs. By rejecting the authority of "objective" science, the party bet on the "inner resources of productivity" hidden within the working body. It would be possible to draw upon these resources thanks to the enthusiasm aroused by propaganda. This individualistic and idealist approach did not correspond to the image of a planned economy developing according to a rational design (Clarke, 1993a; Fitzpatrick, 2008). The chaos thus generated was the hidden face of the "deficit economy" and "flexible budget constraints" (Kornai, 1980; Sapir, 1990; Zhou, 1992).

There are several structural factors behind this Soviet industry's aversion to Taylorist principles. The policy of systematic labor retention (Berliner, 1957) was incompatible with the Taylorist goal of reducing headcount. The structure of incentives in the non-market economy favored increasing production volume rather than profit maximization. Uneven production rhythms, where periods of forced inactivity alternated with "assault" productive campaigns, were the exact opposite of the measured routine of a Taylorized workshop (Atta, 1986).

The individual autonomy of the worker, who kept control of their workplace and processes, pushed for giving important weight to informal norms at the expense of official regulations in interactions between workers, foremen, and management. Trade unions played a very limited role even after their rehabilitation in the post-Stalinist era: relaunched by Khrushchev as tools of external state control, concerned with breaking complicity between workers and directors, they were ultimately integrated into this ecosystem as the right hand of management, responsible for maintaining social peace within the enterprise (Clarke, 1993b; Filtzer, 1992; Gorbach, 2021b). Political contestation, impossible in the institutional sphere, organized itself in the informal sphere, around the "weapons of the weak" (Scott, 2000 [1985]): alcoholism, slowness, absenteeism, theft, frequent changes of workplace. This omnipresent element of late Soviet industrial culture was anticipated as early as the 1920s by Evgeny Preobrazhensky:

From this point of view, not only does the pressure of non-party workers on trade unions and the pressure of trade unions on economic bodies and the state make up an ultimately necessary part of this mechanism of the new economy, but the same role is partially played by the spontaneous pressure of workers, down to so-called volynki [loafing]. Here our system, on one side consciously, on the other side spontaneously feels its way within itself for regulators that must substitute for the stimuli of competitive capitalist struggle and thereby fulfill the same functions but by other means. (Preobrazhensky, 2008 [1925], p. 237)

In fact, low-profile policy, coupled with autonomy of the labor process and, from the 1960s onwards, with industrial paternalism, became functional for Soviet industry, substituting for the market and open political contestation as regulatory mechanisms. What happened in workplaces after the fall of the USSR in 1991?

1.3. The post-Soviet factory

Unlike its Western neighbors, Ukraine could not immediately take the path to a market economy, pushing enterprises either to get rid of excess labor and become profitable or to go bankrupt. In the post-Soviet context, with its strong anchoring of industrial enterprises in the social fabric, such liberalization would have propelled the country "into the nineteenth century" (Ticktin, 1992, p. 175). If enterprises, even if economically inefficient, ceased their activities, entire sectors of the population would have been left without essential daily services for their survival (Siegelbaum and Crowley, 1995, p. 84). Supported by the state, factories maintained the policy of labor retention and other resources, as well as avoidance of disruptive innovations. This policy was largely reinforced by the new conjuncture of hyperinflation and broken supply chains.

In this new survival pact, workers have been politically and economically weakened. In exchange, they kept their jobs. Despite wage arrears, devalued wages, payment in kind, or simply non-payment, the factory job allowed access to non-monetary elements of the social wage: leisure bases and vacation colonies, small plots of land to develop a domestic economy, material aid granted in cases of serious personal situations, sometimes free public transport, and so on. Moreover, by keeping their jobs, workers preserved access to equipment and materials to use for lucrative purposes: side work, home renovation, theft and resale (Cherkaev, 2018; Smolyak, 2014). During this period of the "merchant capitalism" of the 1990s (Burawoy and Krotov, 1993), the fragmented nature of the labor process only intensified.

The privatization of industry by oligarchic groups, the end of hyperinflation and deficits, and the return of market exchange and profitability in the 2000s did not bring significant changes to power relations on the shop floor. The new owners preserved existing managerial practices because they alone guaranteed the continuous operation of factories without technological disruptions and without challenging the authority of the new bosses (Morrison, 2008, p. 7). This conservative choice allowed owners to extract profits, favored by the new commercial climate, without reinvesting them in purchasing equipment and technology. Even during the period of most intensive economic growth, the Ukrainian industry continued to consume capital accumulated at the Soviet time without renewing means of production (Khaustov and Venger, 2019; Matuszak, 2012).

The progressive deterioration of the technical base reinforced sub-mechanized and non-Taylorist relations in production. The retention of labor remains the preferred way to compensate for lack of equipment: "resorting to work rather than investing in the factory is perfectly rational given the very low wages that make up a tiny fraction of production costs, as well as the high cost (due to credit scarcity and significant risks) of investment funds" (Schwartz, 2003, p. 51). That is to say that Taylorist (or post-Taylorist, Toyotist, etc.) labor processes were never introduced, as this would also have required significant investments.

The artisanal logic in the labor process only intensified with equipment wear: the individual expertise of workers who know how to run machines becomes a precious resource, while improving the balance of power and increasing their discretionary power. Furthermore, this considerable margin of discretion left to (post)Soviet workers would be responsible for the unequal quality of final products: in popular narratives about local production, there are as many praises as criticisms. The secret lies in the artisanal nature of work: without the standardization of the Taylorist conveyor belt, the worker is free to apply more or less effort to produce the given article (Alasheev, 1995). Autonomy at work has become one of the main elements in the formation of post-Soviet worker subjectivity (Temnitskiy, 2011).

Thus, the post-Soviet period saw the evolution of power configurations in enterprises, which however remained very different from the Western model. Worker autonomy in the labor process, informality and individual strategies as the preferred method for problem solving, under-investment and work intensification still define the landscape of large industrial enterprises, carriers of the organizational, material, and ideological heritage of previous eras. Do we find the same social and political configurations in new factories created recently and devoid of this heritage?

2. The field: working at Screenwind

A typical case of the post-Soviet "garage economy" (Seleev and Pavlov, 2016), the history of Screenwind begins in the informal sector: in 2001, two friends launched the production of double-glazed windows in their garage. A space of male worker sociality (Morris, 2018, p. 90), the garage is also a protected space from scrutiny, which allows a whole spectrum of undeclared economic activities, outside the control of tax and health services, as well as outside the framework of labor laws.

When their business outgrew small-scale production, the two founders rented a building in a secluded residential area that was formerly an avian farm. The vast grounds of this farm house other new enterprises that operate away from public scrutiny. Screenwind shares this space with a logistics company, an automobile repair shop, an anti-aircraft shelter[2] and a heating plant. The neighborhood is bounded to the north by a regional highway alongside which lie an abandoned shoe factory, a cancer center, a small forest and a cemetery. To the south, one can cross the railway line to access the city's main train station; however, the proximity of this transport hub has no impact on life in the very quiet neighborhood.

Since the 2008 crisis, Screenwind is partially controlled by a company from the regional capital, Dnipro. Every week Screenwind receives an order book destined for a Spanish partner of the Dnipro firm. The rest of the orders come from the Ukrainian market. As for inputs, some details and materials are manufactured in Ukraine, while others are imported from Germany. The glazing for Screenwind windows is produced in Japan and the United States.

The demand for double-glazed windows emerged on the Ukrainian market in the 2000s. When the effects of the economic boom reached Ukrainian households, they invested their increased incomes in improving their private housing – the yevroremont, today considered a symbol of bad taste by the middle classes, but still popular among workers. Since the 2010s, demand has been sustained by permanent energy crisis: trying to reduce its dependence on Russian gas used to heat buildings, the state increased tariffs and launched subsidies for thermal insulation projects, including for the purchase of double-glazed windows. This "new factory", created in the interstices of the post-Soviet informal economy, is therefore fully inscribed in global capital flows: its economic model is made profitable first by the growth of raw material prices in the 2000s, then by Ukraine's structural energy deficit.

My decision to infiltrate this factory was dictated by the impossibility of being hired at a mine or a large steel company. Realizing that the hiring procedure would take too long relative to the fieldwork schedule, I shifted my focus to the world of new factories. A family member told me about her employment experience at Screenwind: she had worked as a "white-collar" employee, handling customer claims files. She put me in touch with her former colleague, still employed at Screenwind's HR department. The latter explained the first steps for applying for a manual labor position. Since I decided to conduct fieldwork incognito, it was up to me alone to proceed: she could not recommend me without causing undesirable questions regarding the nature of my approach.

The interview with the head of security confirmed that undercover investigation strategy was correct: on his own, he occupied an office twice as large as those of the three HR employees. The interior of the office was carefully designed to intimidate the visitor: it was filled with indicators of proximity to the occupant of the offices of police services and sports circles (wrestling, judo, sambo) traditionally close to the criminal world. He was especially interested in my criminal record and professional experience. Admitting that I was a political science doctoral student from Paris would surely have put him on guard. I also evaded questions about family members working or having worked at Screenwind.

The other stages of the hiring process were easier than I had imagined. Apart from the questionnaire about my professional past (which I embellished by including references to unskilled but non-manual jobs), the documents I had to provide included an ID card, a work booklet[3], a lung scan, and banking data. The alleged loss of the work booklet did not pose any problem for HR: it turned out that at Screenwind, most employees are not officially registered, and the work booklets are kept by HR just "just in case," according to my interlocutors.

On the other hand, the fact that I was one of the few Ukrainians without an account at Privatbank, the country's largest bank, constituted a real obstacle. This was a non-negotiable condition, as Screenwind pays undeclared salaries through private transfers between Privatbank accounts. In this way, the company avoids the obligation to pay income tax (18%), war tax (1.5%), and social contributions (22% or more depending on hardship and occupational risks). The only thing the company has to spend beyond the salary is a 1% bank commission. I managed to convince HR to accept my aunt's bank account so that she could receive my salary.

The minimum wage legislation is not respected: during high season (summer and autumn), salaries at Screenwind are competitive compared to large companies in the city, thanks to the absence of taxation, but during low season, they fall below the minimum threshold. Nevertheless, 30% of the workforce are officially registered so that the company can present proof to tax authorities. The taxes and contributions for these employees are partially covered by Screenwind, which constitutes the most well-known element of this company's corporate social responsibility.

Beyond the wage issue, safety and health at work issues are also taken very lightly: it was enough for me to sign a certificate stating that I had read the rules. However, the only rules I was asked to read very carefully concerned sanctions for absenteeism and the principles of salary calculation. The latter is calculated per piece, in its most classic form: there are no vacations or paid sick leave. If the worker wishes to take vacation or feels unwell, they must negotiate with the foreman and obtain a permission for unpaid leave with the right to return later.

Workers are invited to provide their own work clothes. Some wear the uniform provided by their previous employers – another window factory or a water treatment company. But most use ordinary clothes, too worn out to be worn elsewhere. Screenwind simply gives each employee a pair of gloves per month. All these conditions are perceived as normal, without evoking particularly negative reactions from the workers[4]. I will now describe the organization of the work process at Screenwind.

3. Work process: fragmentation otherwise

A typical work week consists of three or four shifts of 12 hours each. Each production sector is run by two brigades that alternate between night and day shifts. For each worker, a week of night shifts is followed by a week of daytime work. The number of shifts in the given week depends on the volume of orders received by the factory. The order book is prepared during the weekend; once finalized, the shift leader communicates the schedule for the following week to the workers. Therefore, they have no margin to plan the week, but for the company this system guarantees extraordinary flexibility without the costs imposed by law (notably double pay for overtime hours).

The entire production cycle at Screenwind takes place in a single workshop. At the back, workers receive long plastic profiles and cut them out. In the next step, three teams work in parallel: one assembles the profiles into frames, another into sashes, while the third manufactures non-standard frames and sashes (for "special orders"). My team intervenes at the next step, attaching metal fittings to the perimeter of the sashes. This is the job most likely to produce defects – or so my colleagues claim, who say they play the hardest role in the entire cycle. Then, the sashes are mounted onto the frames, and finally, the last team installs the glass panes. Finally, the quality control (QC) team checks each window and summons those responsible for defects to eliminate them. The finished units are labeled by QC and loaded into trucks.

Despite the clear continuity of the entire production chain, it is not connected by conveyor belts or other automated devices. Each team stacks finished products in the space adjacent to the one that must take them over (Ill.1). A team (brigade) can be overwhelmed by stock left by their underperforming counterparts from the previous shift or accumulated by the very high-performing workers of the previous step. Conversely, it may have nothing to do and spend an entire shift without work due to problems upstream in the technological process.

There is no fixed lunch break, but those who wish can take a snack at any time. For this purpose, there is a makeshift canteen: in the narrow corridor connecting two buildings, several tables, two microwave ovens, a kettle, and a refrigerator have been installed (Ill.2). Breaks do not last long, because every non-productive moment reduces wages.

My brigade consists of five people. Iarik, who is 19 years old, cuts the metal fittings for the other four, who mount them onto the sashes. Saniok is the foreman and, no doubt, the most experienced worker, who has been working at Screenwind for six years. Artem's seniority is twice as short, but he is almost as fast and skilled, while being older. Andreï, on the other hand, is 19 years old and has no experience; he came to Screenwind six months ago. Finally, Yulik, in his twenties, is a former miner; having left the mine, he went to Poland to work in a large window factory. His stay at Screenwind was short, just enough time to renew his Polish visa. I was the sixth member of the team, ready to eventually take Yulik's place.

At the beginning of each shift, every worker identifies themselves in the 1C system. They scan the sash, and the screen indicates the type of fittings to use. The same software displays the number of sashes processed by the user. Each sash "costs" 3-4 hryvnias (ten euro cents) and takes two or three minutes for Saniok and Artem. During the work shift, they manage to process up to 250 each. Since individual screens are visible to others, Saniok monitors them throughout the shift to evaluate the progress of collective work. Knowing the number of sashes that our brigade and the one taking over our work during the day (or night) must process before the end of the week, he encourages us or warns us when he anticipates the risk of not finishing everything on time. As soon as the planned workload for the week is completed, the team is free to leave; however, in case of delay, the shift leader, with Saniok, decides who will have to come work on Saturday to finish the tasks.

The screen is also used to communicate with the QC team. When it detects a defective sash, all our screens display a red announcement: someone must come to repair it. Each of the four members of the team marks their sashes with a sign, which allows tracing the author of the defect. In principle, each person is responsible for repairing their own errors, but several factors can intervene. Sometimes, the situation is serious enough to require the intervention of people more experienced than the novice responsible for the error. Indeed, Saniok or Artem sometimes spend considerable time in the QC area, which annoys them: time spent there is lost time. The more they repair other people's sashes, the fewer they make themselves, and thus the less money they earn. The imperative of maximizing individual pay thus comes into conflict with the imperative of advancing the team to avoid spending Saturday at the factory.

From this perspective, novices like me pose as many problems as they represent an asset. At the very beginning of my engagement at Screenwind, when my salary was still that of a trainee, i.e., fixed at a certain minimum threshold, others used me to increase their own incomes. Saniok had a makeshift workbench built from an old cart and a sandwich panel (Ill. 3) so that I could perform simple operations for the benefit of the whole team. On the first day, everyone brought me their frames with the supplies placed in the correct order so that I could screw in the nails. But from the next day on, Saniok limited others' access to my services, and I became de facto his personal assistant: according to Ioulik's estimates, thanks to me, Saniok worked 2.5 times faster than usual. At the end of this work shift, Saniok processed 281 frames, while Artem, who followed a more intensive pace, processed only 232. After another day of training, I began working as an autonomous productive unit.

Besides this anecdotal exploitation and the systematic work of Iarik who serves the whole team, the labor process is in no way connected between the four workers doing the same job at their respective stations. Instead of cooperation between interdependent team members executing complementary tasks, there are four autonomous processes coordinated by interpersonal relations external to their tasks. Each worker determines their own pace, invents their own order of operations and finds their optimal body postures, while putting their resourcefulness to work to solve problems that, normally, should be solved by management (missing tools, defective supplies). In the end, my subordination to Saniok during the first few days is part of his individual strategies in the logic of a completely autonomous labor process, rather than in that of collectively organized task sharing.

4. « Earning » or « Selling »?

The labor process at Screenwind relies on autonomy and a wide range of skills. The supplies used are not uniform: there are three different brands, with overlapping and contradictory bills of materials (the same object is designated differently according to industrial ranges), giving rise to numerous possible combinations, each of which requires specific tools. The software screen is supposed to guide assembly with instructions for each frame, but they are so imprecise that workers do not pay attention to them, relying solely on their memory. The automatism of classic assembly line work is excluded; the space is open to « creative » skills.

The lack of tools and spare parts is constant: every time, one has to spend a good part of the shift finding them, which requires resourcefulness and diplomacy. Even on the best days, I only had two screwdrivers instead of the three required. The availability of supplies is not guaranteed either: one has to procure them from the warehouse, and they can be defective. Every work shift begins with an excursion to the warehouse, where we load the necessary supplies for the 12 hours of work onto two carts and transport them to our workplace. Nothing is gained in this process: the warehouse manager can be obstinate and refuse to give workers what they ask. « If you ask me politely, I will give what is needed », – she reassures me after a conflict scene. It is therefore impossible to be a good worker without mastery of diplomatic skills and « emotional labor » (Hochschild, 1985; Wharton, 2009).

In case of lack of equipment or faulty equipment, one cannot count on idle hours waiting for management intervention. The worker gets nothing as long as they do not solve the problem that often exceeds their skills. This goes against the classic model of relations in Soviet production, where the worker received a salary even for downtime.

The structural injunction to rationalize and intensify the work process at the individual level encourages minimizing non-productive time. The duration of cigarette breaks and lunch is not regulated, and Artem limits them to a maximum: during the twelve-hour shift, he takes two or three cigarette breaks and eats nothing. When, at the beginning of a shift, he steps on a nail that pierces his foot, he does not even take off his shoe to inspect the wound, preferring to limp until evening. Later, I injured my finger with a drill. Trying to stop the bleeding, I asked Artem where I could find the infirmary. Surprised, he replied that he didn't know because he had never been there. When I finally found the infirmary door, it was locked. Another day, work was slowed upstream and the sashes arrived drop by drop. The break could have been used to restock supplies or smoke a cigarette, but our entire team was idle on site, queuing for new sashes: according to an implicit convention, everyone had to wait so that lost time would be distributed fairly.

At the bar after work, everyone showed themselves passionate about their work, boasting of its intensity and complexity. This topic occupied most exchanges, leaving little room for criticism of bosses, a theme nonetheless recurrent among workers in large factories. In other words, Screenwind workers do not perceive their work as an alienating process organized by the dominant class, but rather as a free exercise of their individual prowess.

Worker ingenuity and creativity, expressed within the Screenwind context, create what can be called "subcontracting Taylorism." Freed from any external control that would impose a work rhythm on them, workers ceaselessly invent their own ways to increase this rhythm. Each has their individual tricks – body postures or sequences of gestures and operations deemed most effective. Saniok counts every second of his working time, always seeking to increase his speed and automatism. Traditionally resistant to all attempts to impose NOT by decree, Screenwind workers invent their own NOT for themselves, voluntarily submitting to "human-scale Taylorism." The goal of this atomized Taylorism is not to rationalize the collective work process but to maximize individual profit.

Instead of transparent norms imposed centrally by management, a dense network of obligations and mutual sympathies governs the production process. Celebrating the arrival of wages at the bar at the end of the month, one worker recounts that the shift director asked him to substitute for a colleague in another workshop sector for a day. He accepted on condition: "You know me, I'll do everything without flaw, but then you must calculate my salary properly." Trust and mutual dependence links weigh more than official instructions.

Ioulik ceaselessly compared the work organization at Screenwind with that of his Polish factory. He was disgusted by the complications of the work process, dependent on obsolete equipment and manual labor. In Poland, Ioulik produced 150 windows in an eight-hour shift. At Screenwind, he reaches the same production (225 windows in twelve hours) but through much more demanding and intensive work. In other words, the same results are possible within a more mechanized framework, with tasks distributed more meticulously.

This testimony attests to the unexpected effectiveness of the work process at Screenwind, which can compete with Western factories by mobilizing other social mechanisms. It is individualistic, but at the same time deeply rooted in the social fabric. The factory relies on family ties, using them to increase loyalty and productivity. It also exploits workers' need to confirm their personal value – professionalism, but also masculinity articulated with professional prowess (Morris, 2013). The work process mobilizes the soft skills of workers – their diplomacy and ingenuity.

Political developments at the national and international level also play a role. A number of my interlocutors were of conscription age; the desire to avoid military service in the context of the war in Donbas pushed them to choose irregular employment at Screenwind, since legal hiring would imply transmitting their coordinates to the military administration. War normalizes and makes irregular employment attractive.

The playful element, described by Michael Burawoy in Chicago, is also present at Screenwind. Profit is not the sole motivation to produce more: it is also a matter of prowess and personal virility, as well as a game of productivity. When my work pace began to increase over days and weeks, I incorporated the incentives of this game viscerally. Every day, I set myself a numerical goal: how many openers I had to make by the end of the work shift. Every day I increased this figure, without really thinking about the salary. The semi-playful competition with Andrei (who was almost at my level when I came to the factory) and Saniok's encouraging attitude (who hoped to turn me into an effective team member) made me constantly push back my meal time.

This competition remains individualistic, in accordance with the generally autonomous character of the labor process. Even when it comes to competition between two teams (for example, ours versus our counterparts from the other shift), it is isolated individuals who mechanically unite against the opposing group, without there being organic unity among the members of the group.

This allows reaching performance targets at the company level more easily, but sometimes this spirit complicates things for the bosses. Thus, when the production manager agreed to hire a deaf-mute worker, to satisfy the standards of corporate social responsibility, he could not convince any foreman to accept him in his brigade. He succeeded by force of increasing the foreman's salary, but once formally accepted, the novice received no support from his colleagues, who did not want to lose their individual time. Reduced to trying to understand operations by reading official instructions, the disabled worker resigned two weeks later.

The atomized and laborious production process allows saving on capital investments and managerial interventions through the empowerment of the worker. Contrary to the idea of deskilling of work, which would eventually lead towards automation and deindustrialization (Braverman, 1998 [1974]; Marx, 2007 [1932]), Screenwind workers are closer to the ideal-type of a pre-industrial artisan working within the framework of the putting-out system: an autonomous worker who controls the entire work process and bears full responsibility for the quantity and quality of the product. Seeing the number of remaining orders for the current week, being largely interchangeable with other colleagues, he grasps the production process in its entirety and shares with the boss the interest in accomplishing it as well and as fast as possible. This "artisanal" system fits into post-Fordist capitalism (Campbell, 2016), reproducing the neoliberal logic of homo œconomicus (Brown, 2015, p. 79‑84). This attitude manifests notably in the choice of words to talk about his worker earnings: one does not "earn" money by doing work for the boss, one "sells" finished openers to him – a reproduction of classic manufacturing imagery measured against European industrialization.

5. Conclusion: subsumption, profitability, control

In his study of labor politics in Jamshedpur, Andrew Sanchez discovers, under the shadow of the paternalistic giant Tata, the existence of other employers, small and radically disembedded. Just like Screenwind which exists under the shadow of large mining and steel companies, the Lohar scrap in Jamshedpur offers neither social benefits nor even legal employment. Having no expectations towards their boss, employees construct themselves as autonomous subjects and benefit from the flexibility of their informal job by taking leave whenever they want to organize long drinking sessions (Sanchez, 2018).

In the same way, my interlocutors at Screenwind do not see their boss as a dominant figure – this character deserves neither recognition nor condemnation. They see themselves as free electrons, or rather rational agents, gathered under the roof of a workshop to carry out their respective economic activities. Jeremy Morris has described these "disobedient entrepreneurs" workers in Russia (Morris, 2012).

As a "new" factory created by a private entrepreneur in the post-Soviet period, Screenwind escaped the moral economy of industrial paternalism. Situated in a post-Soviet industrial town, the factory nevertheless benefits from the culture of "negative autonomy" of the labor process, which allows it to make workers responsible under conditions of formal subsumption to capital (Campbell, 2016; Mezzadra, 2011; Mezzadri, 2020). Production costs are minimized on all fronts: the boss invests only the minimum necessary to maintain the old equipment and reduces labor costs below the sectoral average, while paying competitive wages. Profitability is due to the embedding of the factory in the pre-existing socio-political fabric.

An attempt to "taylorize" or "toyotize" Screenwind, that is, to bring the factory closer to the ideal of rationalized labor, would undoubtedly lead to its bankruptcy. The assembly-line workers who perform standardized and strictly delimited tasks would not have gone looking for scrap metal in the company's trash cans following the director's request. Yet, this story did indeed take place during an economic crisis: for the company to survive, Saniok and his colleagues agreed to sort through the trash to extract valuable materials. They received their wages from the money thus earned. The pressure of the law of value directly disciplines and motivates the workforce, without the boss having to invent methods of controlling the labor process.

Recent literature gives us examples of other post-Soviet "new factories" that have established a similar regime. A confectionery in Russia, created after 1991 and now acquired by a multinational company, stands out for the large proportion of manual labor in the labor process and the age of its equipment. Working hours are set by management according to production needs, but numerous violations of legal norms do not provoke indignation among either temporary female workers or the core of the workforce (Pinchuk, 2021).

Labour and Monopoly Capital: execution is intimately linked to conception, the worker enjoys wide autonomy in their work, free to organize it as they see fit and having a fairly complete understanding of the production process in its entirety. This does not, however, bring them closer to socialism. The artisanal organization articulates with the entrepreneurial attitudes of the workers to give a labor process that ensures productivity and profitability fully competitive compared to companies organized according to the latest advances in management science. It is therefore indeed a variant of the capitalist labor process, which is neither a pre-industrial aberration nor an image of socialism. This labor process is indeed increasingly present everywhere in the world (Campbell, 2016). To distinguish it from worker autonomy that figures in socialist programs, it would be judicious to read the authors who described the Soviet work regime as "negative autonomy" (Clarke, 1993b; Connor, 1991; Filtzer, 1992; Ticktin, 1992).

In Marxist terms, the unfinished taylorization of post-Soviet industry means that the subsumption of labor by capital remains formal. Labor processes remain impenetrable to capital, which is content to extract absolute surplus value from them without reshaping them as it sees fit to move on to the extraction of relative surplus value. If the workers in the Bravermanian narrative suffer mainly dequalification, professional downgrading, and loss of autonomy, the workers of Screenwind and other comparable companies focus in their narratives on complaints typical of the extraction by capital of absolute surplus value: extension of working time, intensification of required efforts, and underpayment.

These complaints find echoes in contemporary capitalism, affected by the systemic profitability crisis (Carchedi, 2017; Roberts, 2016). Contrary to expectations of a «normalization» of capitalism through real subsumption (Clarke, 2007), it turns out that entire industries can be profitable and competitive without the labor process being completely restructured by top-down pressures. This is even more likely in the conjuncture where an excessively high organic composition of capital makes the continuation of intensive accumulation (i.e., through the extraction of relative surplus value) impossible. Following the imperative of profitability, capitalists withdraw from material production towards speculation (financialisation) or invest in production with a low organic composition of capital. If this is true, one could expect factories like Screenwind to become increasingly present in industrial landscapes without the heritage of «real socialism». And so until a new crisis similar to World War II destroys enough accumulated capital and launches a new cycle. It is possible that this crisis is coming about, by a game of chance, precisely from Ukraine.

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Notes

[1] The name of the factory has been changed, as well as the names of all persons appearing in the text.

[2] Fieldwork was carried out before the Russian invasion of 2022, so the shelter is old and no longer functional.

[3] A document introduced during the Stalinist era, which keeps information on all hires and voluntary resignations or dismissals of the person throughout their life, as well as promotions, encouragements, punishments and reprimands.

[4] The legitimacy of these harsh working conditions is the subject of my other article, submitted to Nouvelle revue du travail.