| Summary: | EDF was founded in 1946 in line with the manifesto of the Conseil national de la Résistance in an attempt to ensure France’s sovereignty by creating “national champions”. As part of its anti-inflation policy, the state sought to impose wage controls across the board. This involved setting objectives for corporations like EDF that extended beyond their own concerns. In flow industries like EDF, wage setting entailed specific problems. Plants have to run non-stop to maintain output. Workers engaged in “supervision and control” use their skills to operate on the edge of what is predictable. This supports the idea of above-average wages and a protective employment status so as to stave-off labour unrest to some extent. However, this logic clashes with the supervisory authorities’ desire to control public-sector wages because of their supposed knock-on effect on the private sector. Under the management of André Decelle, EDF tried to link wage rises to productivity by developing overall productivity computations. The aim was to prove that wage increases were warranted because of improved productivity. These wage struggles raised the wider question of the status of a publicly owned corporation: could it be self-managing or was it necessarily an instrument subject to national economic issues? This paper aims to show that the wage issue crystallizes the tension between government – and the political objectives it pursues – and rational management by the engineer-economists running the corporation.
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