MONDEX

In September 2009, the factory of automobile connectors Molex (Haute-Garonne), part of the American multinational company of the same name, closes down, leaving 283 employees without work. This closure has been largely commentated by media, and was used in numerous discourses of politicians as an exemplary case of the consequences of the evolution of world financial capitalism. This research project has the ambition to analyze the particularity of this closure and the echo it obtained in order to understand its conditions and consequences. We will write a social history of the factory and its workers, from its creation in 1942 to 2013, mobilizing sociology of work, social history, political science and political economy. We will combine archival work, ethnography, and a longitudinal study of a cohort. This research will thus reinsert the closure of the factory and its media coverage in the industrial history of post-war France and take into account the singular trajectories of the men and women that were made redundant. This archetypal case of the political and social effects of the evolution of capitalism will also allow us to study the changing repertories of collective action of workers and the uses of law in a globalised world.