an excerpt from Daewoo

Then I began to think, that it is very true what is commonly said, that the one half of the world knows not how the other half lives.

—François Rabelais, Pantagruel, 1532

The three Daewoo factories are practically in a straight line on the four-lane highway that connects Metz and Thionville to Luxembourg, via Longwy, through the Fensch valley, once studded with great steelworks but now just surviving, or—like the blast furnace in Uckange, an imposing, frozen ruin gone cold now twelve years—testifying to the era when the entire valley lived off the transformation of iron to steel.

On September 16, 2002, the closing of the Daewoo factory in Villers-la-Montagne was officially announced. In Villers-la-Montagne, as in Fameck, the factory is a simple white parallelepiped among other, smaller industrial buildings, overlooking the road. Since 1989, microwaves have been produced there by 229 employees, all women. In 1989, a microwave in the kitchen was a small sign of luxury, an appliance that signaled modernity. Now microwaves are as banal as toasters, and every one of the fifteen different brands found in supermarkets are made (I checked) in China.

Nine miles further, the flagship factory. The biggest of the three installed by Daewoo, and the most recent. Mont-Saint-Martin is in the immediate periphery of Longwy, a town that formerly did not take sufficient care of itself, when factory chimneys filled the night with their orange flames, and so appears now like someone who lost weight but is still wearing clothes many sizes too large. Too many dead façades. The town of Mont-Saint-Martin was searching for a new vocation, beyond the scar of the disaster of the three steelworks, those I had known in the ’70s when they were noisy and smoky, the night sky as if illuminated—those years when we would come for the summer to find temporary work to pay for school, listening to Led Zeppelin and discovering that our music harmonized with the factory’s power, its abstract geometries. Five hundred fifty people employed in Mont-Saint-Martin for the production of cathode ray tubes, vacuum cones equipped with electron cathodes, and high frequency double-spools.

During the strikes following the announcement of its closing, the factory will be occupied. Workers, hacking into the computers, discover evidence of fifty Swiss bank accounts. But they don’t think to demand the seizure of the machines. A few days later, an arson ravages the factory and its inventory. The very next day, the administration will remove the computers and the financial records from the surviving administration building. Missed opportunity.

In Fameck, directly past Uckange, located at the opening of the Fensch valley, Daewoo had built a unit for assembling televisions. It employed 260 people, again the overwhelming majority of them women. In 1998, over a million televisions are assembled there. In 2000, it’s from Poland that Daewoo exports its television sets, and in Fameck only 600,000 are produced. In 2002, they decide to reduce the amount further, to 450,000, and the administration announces in January that a first planned redundancy will terminate 90 jobs by the end of the year, beginning with voluntary departures. In April 2002, workers take to the streets. Their demand is, simply, for “transparency.” On Friday, December 13, the Korean director Kwok Sik Im announces, to the 170 remaining workers, the definitive closure of the factory in January. The workers occupy, sequester, march, as they did in Villiers. An office is ransacked. In the newspapers, numerous articles.

The 229 workers of Daewoo Villiers are laid off in December 2002, and the factory is closed. The closing of Daewoo Fameck and the firing of the 170 workers who had survived last year’s planned redundancy is announced for January 31, 2003. On January 23, the Daewoo factory in Mont-Saint-Martin, on strike since December 19, occupied January 20, but where work had resumed that same day, is destroyed by fire.

The end. But for the women, the men?

Interview: on the fire at Daewoo Mont-Saint-Martin...