Liberalisation, surveillance and suicide at La Poste

This article examines how the contradictory dynamics of freedom and control that characterise neoliberal capitalism are played out on lived experiences of work in the context of the newly liberalised and restructured French postal services (La Poste). At La Poste, liberalisation was framed as a great emancipatory project that would reinvigorate a moribund state-owned company, remove regulatory constraints, deepen economic freedoms and strip away deadening bureaucracy. Yet, whilst liberalisation freed La Poste of regulatory controls, it was accompanied by an intensified surveillance and control of everyday working life. The new control measures were not limited to external working practices and structures, but sought to capture the individual worker’s personality, communication and values and harness them towards the company’s redefined commercial goals. Drawing on critical scholarship on neoliberal capitalism and labour, the article shows that when capitalist rationality extends beyond working activity and encroaches on complex, intimate and vulnerable dimensions of the person, this can have dangerous human consequences. At La Poste, liberalisation triggered a profound crisis across the company, transforming it into an ‘entreprise en souffrance’ characterised by escalating levels of psychological distress, chronic stress and a series of employee suicides.