Ubi Free : a story of "virtual union".
Subjectivity of immaterial labour and communication.
The software sector is, par excellence, a sector with a high capacity for valorisation, both financial and individual. A certain mythology that is attached to it drives the nail in and thus abounds in these modern cheap romances that renew, with a hi-tech patina, the fascination for those who, "starting from nothing", have become the unavoidable figures of economic modernity. From John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, who became a billionaire at the age of 27 thanks to the Lotus 1-2-3 software suite, and who is now fighting for civil liberties on the electronic frontier, to Bill Gates, the nerd genius who imposed his MS-Dos and Windows standards on the giant IBM, and then on the whole world, there is no shortage of examples.
But behind the success stories, and what is real about them, there is also a reverse side of the coin: an "industry" in perpetual mutation under the pressure of the accelerated rhythms of innovation and competition, based on the exploitation of deposits of a totally immaterial "raw material" - technical-scientific knowledge and empirical competence - and organized around a highly cooperative working model, although extremely individualized and totally flexible. The "modern" productive sector par excellence ... where the success of the new class of entrepreneurs comes at the price - for the employees, that is - of an increased submission to the capitalist organisation of labour.
It is precisely here that new challenges are at stake from the point of view of social relations. Indeed, if the soft sector has its stars, its elites and its aristocracies, it also has its "invisibles", its proletariat of maketing, graphic design or programming, its little people of "sign manipulators", subjected to the crossfire of a particularly deregulated employment sector and a profession entirely based on the demand for a very strong personal involvement in professional activity. Postfordist work in its fullness, in a way, as it can be deployed at least in a sector of activity where it is free of the rigidities still imposed elsewhere by the "workers'" trade union tradition. "It is a work that is built entirely around the necessary over-involvement of a rather young employee who is asked to do much more than just "professional" skills, but also to invest his experience, availability, creativity, flexibility.
It is therefore not surprising that, little by little, this branch, which likes to present itself as a "big family", is finally experiencing the first fires of social protest, which - leaving behind the classical paths of union and militant action - is resorting to new and experimental forms of collective action and demands, even inventing its own ways of reclaiming the word and acting as a social subject in a work space that is becoming increasingly confused with that of existence itself.
A short French-style story
Thus, on December 15, 1998, all employees of Ubi Soft France and those of its subsidiaries in Quebec, Morocco, Romania and China received a message by e-mail (via internal electronic messaging) announcing the launch of Ubi Free, a "virtual union" for the company's employees, the first of its kind in France: "Ubi Soft employs more than 400 people in Montreuil, with an average age of 26, who can neither express themselves, nor join a union, nor defend their rights [...]. In response to these practices, the employees are now launching the first virtual union: Ubi Free [..., an alternative to the lack of social structure within Ubi Soft"
The initiative in question consists first of all in the launch of a website, "The joyful land of happy children", under the Ubi Free banner, which describes, with a definite sense of humor and derision, the reality of working conditions at Ubi Soft. Pages of colorful text on a black background that looks like a real bomb! In the company itself first of all, where the modest and hypocritical veil that until then covered with a kind of omerta the rather "archaic" and "feudal" working conditions that everyone was finally forced to live in the strictest intimacy is now lifted. In the French software sector, as a result, since - by way of the press - a thorny question was for the first time publicly raised that had not even been raised until then.
It must be said that the company concerned by this "virtual" irruption of online trade unionism, Ubi Soft, is not just any company. "Ubi Soft is one of the Top 20 global publishers," as one of its managers likes to say. It is indeed one of the largest French distributors, adapters and producers of video games on all media (CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, Nitendo64, PlayStation, Dreamcast, etc.), whose figures speak for themselves: 1,120 "employees", 16 subsidiaries, sales of FRF 631 million as of September 30, 1998, prestigious titles in the catalog (Myst, Riven, Starwar, F1 Racing Simulation, Rayman)... In short, a prosperous company and a model for the sector, as we like them to be in France.
Run "as a family" by the five Guillemot brothers, the Ubi Soft empire demonstrates a strong sense of commercial initiative, investing every nook and cranny of a promising and fast-growing market. Behind the image of success, those of Ubi Free are thus delivering to advertising a way of operating worthy of another era, a "strategy of opacity", the reign of "cronyism", the renewal of fixed-term contracts "at will", the interweaving of the many sub-companies (none of which exceeds 49 employees) that make up the Ubi Soft empire, the precariousness of the system, the "merit-based" salary policy, etc. From this point of view, Ubi Soft is undoubtedly neither a model nor an exception: in the end, we find here a clever mix of the exceptional and the banal, of the particular and the common, which undoubtedly describes fairly well the situation in a cutting-edge economic sector that has undergone numerous and rapid changes over the last twenty years - in addition to a veritable commercial "explosion" -.
A situation in which a complex mixture of modernity and capitalist archaism is combined in the inextricable web of post-Fordism. This is perfectly described by Paolo Virno in Embivalence of Disenchantment, when he states: "Unlike Taylorism and Fordism, the current productive reorganization is selective in nature, it unfolds like stains on the leopard's fur, it attaches itself to traditional modules of work. The technological impact, at its peak, is not universalist: rather than determining an univocal mode of production, it keeps alive a myriad of differentiated modes of production and even resurrects some that are outdated and anachronistic". With what this also implies of a "return" to forms of servility of labour.
A "virtual union" for wage earners' mutants
Precisely, beyond the anecdote, and its immediate circumstances, the Ubi Free experience carries within it precious indications that we must read as so many avenues to explore. In fact, the experience of Ubi Free is worthy above all for its capacity to question, even involuntarily, both the reality of post-Fordist work and that of the figures of immaterial labor.
1. First of all, the importance of communication in the global scenario of post-industrial society. It was in reaction to a laudatory article on Ubi Soft published by the daily newspaper Libération that a few employees and former employees of the company felt the urge to express themselves in order to enunciate and denounce the unspoken aspects of the "official" discourse. "And from this abstract desire to respond comes the desire to speak out, to influence the real situation at Ubi Soft, to get things moving, to shake up a certain torpor among employees. The Ubi Free initiative - which quickly took on the description of a "virtual union" attributed to it by one of the Guillemot brothers - essentially took shape as a site on the web, as a public statement of revolt and aspirations. No picketing, no kidnapping of company executives, no demonstrations, no leaflets... Just words.
But "communication" - in this case, above all the management of its brand image and the promotion of its products - plays a decisive role in Ubi Soft's corporate strategy. And that's precisely where the Ubi Free initiative was aimed at. Benefiting from a certain attraction of novelty, Ubi Free has been given a fair amount of media coverage, which is bound to provide a timely sounding board for the affair, which will cut short the repressive wishes of the group's management. After cutting off employees' access to the Ubi Free site and conducting a "witch hunt" to find out who these anonymous virtual trade unionists might be, the company finally had to get to the heart of the matter, i.e. respond on the ground to the demands put forward.
At a time when communication is playing an increasingly decisive role in the productive cycle, it is also becoming a central issue for social confrontation and a field of action and organization for the figures of immaterial labor.
2. Secondly, the existence of a need for new forms of expression and action for employees in sectors that traditional trade unionism fails to represent and organize. One of the things that is particularly striking about the Ubi Free site is that it quickly gave rise - even beyond Ubi Soft staff alone - to many testimonies from other employees of similar companies. This reveals, of course, that the practices denounced by Ubi Free are obviously quite commonplace (even with different modalities and intensities) throughout the software sector; but also (and probably above all) it is a sign that we are facing a kind of "black hole" of collective action by employees, where the hyper-individualization of the relationship with work curbs the willingness to act and react to the practices of corporate management.
We're young, intelligent, passionate, and can work hard without worries or the desire to make demands," say the employees of Ubi Soft, who have joined forces to create Ubi Free, "We're young, intelligent, passionate, and can work hard without worries or the desire to make demands. A formula that contains all the paradox of the situation of these "mutants of the wage labor force", trapped between the "objective" processes of domination specific to post-Fordism and forms of "subjective" adherence to these same processes. As employees in a particularly deregulated sector, they are just as much subject to the global context of work that requires a maximum of investment from them, without necessarily being fully paid in return, as they are to their voluntary submission to work that is rich in content and individually relatively rewarding. Between these two terms lies the difficulty of initiating forms of collective action that are in contradiction with the "adherence to company objectives" required by this type of profession, and of formulating a global and general content of demands, since it is clear that neither the trade union discourse on the reduction of working time nor the "radical" discourse on guaranteed income seem to be sufficient in themselves to produce the identity and the collective dynamic that would allow a recomposition of the different figures of post-Fordist work.
Like a prologue under the clouds
On 30 March, the Ubi Free team finally put an end to its own experience. About ten days before a press release explained this decision: "Ubi Soft's managers are proposing to correct certain errors, to improve the functioning of their company as a human community. If these changes are accompanied, as in ancient times, by human sacrifices - voluntary and negotiated for some, violent and inelegant for others - the Guillemot brothers' long press release nonetheless announces a social springtime for those who remain [..... It is now up to the staff to ensure that this promise is kept. Vigilance is, and will remain, essential [..... We hope not to have to reappear. »
Faithful to themselves, our Ubi Free "masked avengers", after having been by their actions the revealing agents of a situation, leave it to everyone else to take care of the rest. In the specific case of Ubi Soft, the future will indeed tell whether or not, beyond the concessions announced by management, the clandestine communicative action of the "virtual union" has contributed, or not, to the emergence of forms of collective action by employees, and to a substantial change in relations within the company. But, at the same time, as an early echo to Ubi Free's action, in February 1999 Cryo Secours [another "virtual union", this time concerning the employees of Cryo, another jewel of the French video game industry, was formed, demonstrating - if necessary - that the ground cleared by Ubi Free's experience is largely fertile.
The questions opened up by Ubi Free's action have remained totally open, not being exhausted by the fact that they have obtained satisfaction from their bosses, nor by the deliberately ephemeral nature of the experience. It will undoubtedly take many more experiments of this type, in other sectors of immaterial labor, for a collective identity to emerge, a social figure of post-Fordist labor, capable of having a decisive influence in the class confrontation, as was the case, in other times, for the labor and trade union movement.