LIP (company)

LIP is a French watch and clock company whose turmoil became emblematic of the conflicts between workers and capital in France.

The LIP factory, based in Besançon in eastern France, began to experience financial problems in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and management decided to attempt a factory shutdown. However, after strikes and a highly publicized factory occupation in 1973, LIP became worker-managed. All the fired employees were rehired by March 1974, but the firm was liquidated again in the spring of 1976. This led to a new struggle, called "the social conflict of the 1970s" by the daily newspaper Libération.[1]

Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) union leader Charles Piaget led the strike. The Unified Socialist Party (PSU), which included former Radical Pierre Mendès-France, was then in favor of autogestion (workers' self-management).

History

In 1807, the Jewish community of Besançon offered a mechanical pocket watch to Napoleon. Sixty years later, Emmanuel Lipman and his sons founded a clockwork workshop under the name of Comptoir Lipmann. In 1893 it became the Société Anonyme d'Horlogerie Lipmann Frères (Lipmann Brothers Clock Factory).

The firm launched the Lip stopwatch in 1896. Thereafter Lip became the brand name of the company. They built approximately 2,500 pieces per year. The company launched the first electronic watch in 1952, called "Electronic" (considered "electronic" rather than electric due to the presence of a diode). The first 'Electronic' models were worn by Charles de Gaulle and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower; while previously in 1948, LIP's iconic T18 model was offered to Winston Churchill.

However, in the 1960s, this highly specialized company began to have financial troubles. Fred Lipmann, who changed his name to Fred Lip, took the company public in 1967, and Ebauches S.A. (subsidiary of ASUAG, a large Swiss consortium which later became Swatch) took 33% of the shares.

Meanwhile, workers started organizing to improve labor conditions. This proved difficult. Charles Piaget, the son of a clockwork artisan, who began working at the factory in 1946 as a skilled worker, became a representative of the Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC, French Confederation of Christian Workers) trade union.

1973: beginning of the strike and demonstrations

In May 1973, an Action Committee (CA, Comité d'action), influenced by the May 1968 movement, was founded. During an extraordinary works council meeting on 12 June 1973, workers stumbled upon the management's plans to restructure and downsize, which had been kept secret from them (one note said "450 à dégager", "get rid of 450").[4] The company then employed 1,300 workers.[5] At first, Charles Piaget, now an official of the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail union and active in the Unified Socialist Party (PSU[2]), opposed a strike, preferring a slowdown, in which workers would pause for ten minutes an hour.[5]

However, the workers were angry at the secret restructuring plan and immediately occupied the factory. On the same day, 12 June#, they took two administrators and an inspecteur du travail (government labor inspector) as hostages. The workers wanted to exchange them for "more precise information," declared Piaget (as shown in the 2007 film documentary).[5]

An experience in workers' self-management (1973–74)

A large demonstration of 12,000 persons in the average-size town of Besançon, took place on 15 June 1973.[8] Three days later, a general assembly of the workers decided to continue production of watches, under the workers' control, to insure "survival wages." The LIP struggle was thereafter popularized with the slogan C'est possible: on fabrique, on vend, on se paie! (It is possible: we make them, we sell them, we pay ourselves!).

The CGT-CFDT union alliance (intersyndicale) now asked the Cahiers de Mai magazine to assist them in making a newspaper dedicated to the strike. Named Lip-Unité (Lip-Unity), this newspaper would help popularize the movement. To be able to restart production at the factory, this time without an employer, they sold the watches that they had seized. In six weeks, they made the equivalent of half the revenue of a normal year.[5] Michel Rocard, then national secretary of the PSU, took part in the sale of the watches.[7]

"The question of women was a revolution inside the revolution," Piaget declared later.[5]

End of the first conflict

Prime Minister Pierre Messmer wistfully declared on 15 October 1973: "LIP, c'est fini!" (LIP, it's over!).[5] Behind the scenes, some progressive managers of the CNPF employers' union, including Antoine Riboud, CEO of BSN, Renaud Gillet, CEO of Rhône-Poulenc and José Bidegain, deputy president of the CNPF, tried to find a solution to the conflict. Finally, Claude Neuschwander, then number 2 at the Publicis advertising group and member of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU), agreed to become the factory's manager. LIP became a subsidiary of BSN, and Neuschwander managed to have Antoine Riboud bypass the regular control of weekly accounts.[7]

Neuschwander advocated "the death of enterprise capitalism and the advent of finance capitalism".[1][8]

1976: the second movement

Shareholders forced Claude Neuschwander to resign on 8 February 1976 and the Compagnie européenne d'horlogerie started liquidation proceedings in April. Problems between workers and management began again. On 5 May 1976 LIP workers again occupied the factory, restarting the production of watches. Libération newspaper, founded three years before by Jean-Paul Sartre, printed the headline, "Lip, c'est reparti!" (Lip, it's starting again!). No one offered to take over LIP this time. The firm was definitively liquidated on 12 September 1977. After long internal debates, on 28 November 1977 the workers created a cooperative, named "Les Industries de Palente" (Palente's Industries) – Palente was the neighborhood of Besançon where the factory was located. The LIP acronym remained.

Charles Piaget testified in 1977, in the Quotidien de Paris, about the self-management experiment:

"A few more than 500 workers are effectively in battle, gathering every day, and this, nineteen months after having been fired. It is living proof of democracy. It is impossible to have such a collective force without the sustained practice of democracy, without sharing responsibilities, and without participation of all sorts. It must be pointed out that at LIP, the workers are in charge of approximately thirty jobs, from the restaurant, which serves 300 meals a day for 4 francs, to a hairdresser for the unemployed, to a judicial commission for these same unemployed, to various artisanal activities, one being the game Chômageopoly ('Chômage' means unemployment in French), which has already sold more than 6,000 games, and finally industrial production.[4]"

The second struggle did not end until 1980, when six cooperatives, employing 250 workers out of a total of 850, were created.

LIP in the 1980s to the Present

The LIP cooperative was bought back by Kiplé in 1984, during François Mitterrand's presidency. However, the new firm was liquidated six years later. Jean-Claude Sensemat then bought the brand in 1990, and relaunched the production with modern marketing methods. The sales increased to a million watches a year. The LIP reissued Charles de Gaulle's watch, which Jean-Claude Sensemat offered to U.S. President Bill Clinton.

In 2002, Sensemat signed a LIP world license contract with Jean-Luc Bernerd, who created La Manufacture Générale Horlogère in Lectoure Gers for the occasion.

After retirement, Charles Piaget became a member of AC! (Agir ensemble contre le chômage), a union of unemployed people,[2] while the Dominican Jean Raguenès lives in Brazil, where he supports the Landless Workers' Movement (MST).[1] As of October 2024, the Lip company is advertising just over 100 men's watches and around 95 women's watches on its website.

Famous models

• T10 (La Croix du Sud): created for Jean Mermoz's plane.
• T18: conceived by André Donat, and produced from 1933 to 1949 – a T18 was offered in 1948 to Winston Churchill.
• l'Electronic: 1952 – the first models were worn by Charles de Gaulle and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
• Mach 2000: Conceived by Roger Tallon, the designer of the TGV high-speed train.

See also

• History of clockmaking in Besançon
• List of watch manufacturers
• Electric watch
• May 68
• Workers' self-management
• Fifth Republic (France) and France in the twentieth century

Sources

• Chez Lip: On fabrique; on vend; on se paye!, article in Le Monde libertaire by Maurice Joyeux
• "Lip, une mémoire ouvrière", Les Echos, 22 March 2007
• History of the brand
• Documentaire Lip, le rêve et l'histoire (Lip, the dream and the story)

Bibliography and films

• Maurice Clavel, Les paroissiens de Palente, Grasset, 1974 (novel)
• Christian Rouaud, Les Lip, l'imagination au pouvoir (Lip, Imagination to Power – film documentary, 2007)
• Ch. Piaget, Lip, Postscript by Michel Rocard, Lutter Stock, 1973.
• Collective, Lip: affaire non classée, Postscript by Michel Rocard, Syros, 1975.
• Jean-Claude Sensemat, Comment j'ai sauvé Lip (How I saved Lip) (1990–2005).

External links

• Le grand conflit Lip de 1973: Christian Rouaud's Film Site Les LIP, l'imagination au pouvoir
• Leçons d'autogestion. Interview sith Charles Piaget, CFDT trade-unionist
• LIP, l'imagination au pouvoir, article by Serge Halimi in Le Monde diplomatique, 20 March 2007
• Magazine article in English:
• Archives of the Socialist Unified Party (PSU) hosted by the University of Nantes
• The official LIP website