Une expertise CHSCT pour faire face aux suicides au travail ? Les usages limités d’une expertise pour risque grave dans l’industrie automobile

• Main Author: Lucie Goussard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2016-03-01
• Series: Sciences de la Société
• Subjects: expertise; health at work; union activities; erudite discourse; negotiation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sds/2585

This paper will examine how labor union activists appropriate the “health at work” expertise conducted within employee representative bodies. It draws on qualitative research (interviews and observations) conducted in three companies that requested assessments after experiencing a serious risk: the occurrence of suicidal acts for the first company and an increase in the number of complaints about occupational malaise for the other two. This paper will demonstrate that the expertise reports provide a basis for union activities: they make it possible to move from an accumulation of isolated findings to a global point of view, to put the relationship between work and worker health into perspective, to call into question individualizing and health-related explanations, and to feed into, build and legitimize the demands of activists. However, several elements impede unions from using the knowledge produced by the experts.