Just like any other leader? Overwork and building the profession of permanent staff in the CFTC and the PCF in the 1960s – Paul Boulland

This paper examines how the CFTC labour union and the French Communist Party (PCF) took up the topic of managerial overwork, a theme borrowed from the literature on the health of economic elites in the 1950s and 1960s. After reconstructing the international trajectory of this discourse, which lay partway between the medical sector and employers’ milieus, the paper describes how Dr Wisner leveraged this discourse with the CFTC permanent staff in the early 1960s. The reactions of the activists, as recorded in the archives, are interpreted in the light of their social trajectories, reconstructed from various sources. The same reflection was taking place within the PCF apparatus, which in some respects faced a similar internal situation to the CFTC. In both cases, the emphasis on health enabled staff members to express some of the suffering inherent to their status as permanent staff. It allowed them to distance themselves from a message of self-sacrifice in order to give greater value to their professional status as permanent staff, in some ways homologous to the social or economic elites.