The Batignolles, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, used to be an industrial neighborhood. Walk there now and you’ll see a mix of chic, quirky boutiques and new social housing. A century and a half ago, in the romantic little park you’ll spot lying behind the Sainte Marie des Batignolles church, prisoners taken from the fallen barricades of the Paris Commune in the area were gathered, shot, and thrown into a mass grave. It is said they still lie there, in that romantic little park, somewhere under the music pavilion. Go down from the church, cross through the park, and you’ll find a small train station. Standing there, a century ago, you would see mile after mile of warehouses. Then, the railways connected Paris with France’s industrial northwest, and beyond that the factories of Great Britain.

Today, like much of French industry, the warehouses of the Batignolles have nearly all moved away. Twenty years ago, in the early 2000s, one warehouse – owned by a menswear company – was still clinging on, a link in the logistical chain carrying stock to retail stores all over the country. When I first met the man I’ll call Kwasi through my work for his trade union, he told me how he started working for the company back then, moving to a flat in the Batignolles’ social housing blocks not far from the warehouse. Right at the limits of the city but still just inside the walls of Paris, his flat was even then a rare luxury for any low-wage industrial worker. Almost two decades later, he is still living in the Batignolles, along with a dozen other warehouse workers. The warehouse itself is gone.

A few years after Kwasi was hired, management said it couldn’t afford Parisian rents, so it moved the warehouse a few miles out of town, to a densely populated working-class area in the city of Épinay-sur-Seine. I hop in Kwasi’s car for the ride; half an hour later, we get out where the warehouse was moved, next to a cemetery in Épinay. At the time of the move, workers living in the Batignolles had to take the train to work at the new location, while others were hired from those living nearby. The workforce began to look more like the population of Épinay: black and brown people whose families came from Africa, the Caribbean, or the Indian subcontinent.

But operations had to expand, costs had to shrink, and – although Épinay wasn’t exactly a high-end real estate area – everything had to move again, even further away from Paris. Now the warehouse is several hours’ drive to the north, in the Picardy region: a flat land of crops, thinly populated by working-class whites. And again, management hired new workers from among people living nearby. The warehouse’s walls came to contain three very different types of workers. There was a scattering of the final generation of industrial working-class Parisians, the childless heirs of the communards buried in the romantic little park. The workers from Épinay, sometimes called banlieusards, often recent immigrants, taking their nickname from densely populated projects on the outskirts of Paris, the banlieues – known for episodic rioting, often triggered by police violence. And lastly, the working-class whites of Picardy, who lived in semi-rural communities spread out on the plains, far away from the cultural centers: their employment was dependent on car ownership and their economic equilibrium hinged on the price of gas. These are the people who protested in the streets in 2018 and 2019, during the “yellow vests” revolts.

The banlieusards never joined the yellow vests in great numbers, and the working-class whites never showed any significant support for the struggles against police brutality in the banlieues. The two groups are so different – in their culture, interests, and day-to-day lives – that the left-wing political parties have trouble building a coalition with which both strands of workers could identify. To some on the left, uniting “those of the towers and those of the towns” is the ultimate political goal. Others think these aspirations are just a fantasy. Even when the two groups are doing the same work, as in the warehouse, their demands on management often diverge: where banlieusards would like help with childcare or public transport costs, their white coworkers prefer higher wages to spend on gas. It would be very easy to assume that these people do not belong to the same working class.

Entering the warehouse, I see the rapid movements of the conveyor belt workers who fill the packages, watching them silently wearing out their nervous systems. I feel the unbearable temperatures in the trucks where young guys pile heavy packages.

When they heard about the warehouse moving again, some of the workers living in Batignolles and Épinay simply left for another job. Many who remained stayed because they had no other choice: they were too old to reenter the job market, or their bodies had been beaten down by the work, or they were single women with kids to feed at home. The workers from Batignolles and Épinay bargained with the company for a free shuttle leaving from the warehouse’s old site in Épinay to their new workplace out in the fields of Picardy.

When I get on the shuttle, Kwasi introduces me to the passengers. My line of work – union-appointed expert in health, safety, and working conditions – only exists because of a few paragraphs in the Code du Travail, the thick compendium of French labor laws. They were inserted in the code by a socialist government in the early 1980s. It was the culmination of a movement as old as industrial capitalism, advanced over decades by a coalition of left-wing politicians, Catholic social activists, labor sociologists, and progressive managers. These people believed that working life had to become more democratic, that bosses and workers had to enter into dialogue about how to regulate the workplace, and that, if this could be enforced, a new type of society would emerge. Some envisioned a stabilized, ethical capitalism; others, a socialism defined by workers’ self-management from below.

One of the requirements in the Code du Travail is that workers’ representatives should be able to call for the help of experts, so they could debate with the bosses – and their armies of hired consultants – on a slightly more equal footing. In 1981, some commentators warned voters that Russian tanks would parade down the Champs-Élysées the day after the election of a socialist president. The tanks never showed up. People like me did instead: inviting themselves into factories, opening the workshop doors, encouraging usually silent workers to talk about their experiences, demanding managers answer questions that made them angry and uneasy.

The people I meet in the warehouse shuttle are mainly black and brown women. They have no cars: most have already ridden public transportation for an hour or more just to reach the shuttle. From Épinay, it takes more than another hour to get to the warehouse. On the shuttle, the women – and a few men – tell me how the commute eats up almost all their free time, making it difficult for them to care for their kids, who seem to be the main motivation to continue working a grueling, dangerous job.

Rolling up their sleeves, a few of them show me scars running from their wrists to their elbows. The quick, repetitive movements of their work at the warehouse wear out their nervous systems and, over time, cause partial paralysis of their hands. Some of them have had the same injuries three or four times, multiplying the scars. The medical procedures to patch up arms and hands are too slow to heal to match the rhythm of the machines they work alongside. Laughing, these women tell me about the time one colleague had a finger cut off by one of the warehouse’s machines: “We never found it, it must be in a box somewhere in a store.” They point me to a man sitting in the back of the bus, who obliges us with a wave of his four-fingered hand. He does not laugh about it like his workmates do. I think about this guy’s mummified finger, perhaps sitting in a box of low-rise jeans, somewhere in logistics purgatory, still waiting to be found.

It’s a simple story: work moves with capital. If that’s the way things must go in the end, why couldn’t we go along to get along and spare ourselves the drama, the anger, and the screams?

Kwasi wanted me to ride with his colleagues, to hear directly from them: to see their faces, their arms and hands. I am here because the company claims it can’t afford the shuttle anymore. Kwasi hired me and a colleague to show the consequences this choice would have on the workers, and, hopefully, to convince the company to abandon its plan.

One of the guys here, an older man with a thick Greek accent, takes my phone number. He tells me he wants to meet in person. He says he has documents that prove the company is not acting in good faith. We meet in one of the last working-class bars in the Batignolles area, near where he lives, just in front of the train station. Over his shoulder, I can see the music pavilion of the romantic park. He shows me the documents. Maybe he guesses from the look on my face that what he has given me is not nearly enough to change the company’s decision, because his hands grab my arms, pleading, with visible anguish, for me to “save the shuttle,” as if this little bus is the last thing holding his professional life, and maybe his life in general, together. On his face I see the vulnerability of these workers to decisions about their lives, made without them, over which they have no control.

As an expert on worker safety, I was appointed by the unions to go talk to workers on the shop floor, ask them about their troubles, and look at the conditions they were working in. Most of the time, the workers didn’t have a problem with our presence there, or our questions. Managers did. They found our inquiry intolerable; all the more so because, by law, the company had to pay for it. They wanted to know, and even have a say in, who we met, what questions we asked, where we went, and what we saw. They agreed that workers’ safety and well-being were important topics; that they were happy to hire experts to help them understand problems and reduce risks. They weren’t happy that the experts they got were us. Seeing how nervous we made managers told me my presence was more than a piece of bureaucratic red tape. Unusually for them, there were decisions being made in their workplaces which weren’t on their terms. It was Kwasi who decided that the choice to scrap the shuttle had to be investigated, that my colleague and I would be the experts to investigate it, and that we started our inquiry by talking not to the company but to the workers themselves.

Entering the warehouse, I see the rapid movements of the conveyor-belt workers who fill the packages, watching them silently wearing out their nervous systems. I feel the unbearable temperatures in the trucks where young guys pile heavy packages. Management has told us not to worry about them: all packages are weighted, the weight carefully managed, to ensure the work never meets the legal standard of “hard working conditions” (which would oblige the employer to offer early retirement). One of the workers shows us how the scale weighing their packages has been tampered with, containers always measuring as lighter than they really are. On paper, and in company policies, French labor law makes workers here better protected than anywhere else in Europe. On the other hand, France is one of the most dangerous countries for workers in the European Union: it’s the fourth deadliest and the most accident-inducing. In my visits to shop floors, warehouses, and many other workplaces, it is clear why: the laws and regulations are rarely applied in full, controls are rare, and when employers are caught red-handed, the fines are modest and their amount is capped by law.

We talk to forklift operators whose spines are deformed from years of constantly looking upward to the giant shelves where the product is stored. One of them, hired three or four years ago in one of the rural white communities local to the last stop in the warehouse’s travels, tells me she’s had two spine operations because of work-related injuries. Sports were an important part of her life when she first took the job, but she has had to leave all that behind. However, she is grateful that the managers didn’t throw her out after they ruined her back – and she has no sympathy for the shuttle people, or any attempt by the union to defend those (to her mind) vindictive banlieusards.

After a month of investigation, and some forty interviews with workers, another union-appointed expert and I go from the trucks and conveyor belts of the warehouse to a windowless room in the menswear company’s headquarters. Facing us are the workers’ representatives and the company management, headed by a human resources manager who specializes in labor relations. We are there to present the results of our study about the shuttle and the working conditions of those who use it. As the PowerPoint slides light up behind us, we talk about the twisted spines and the rigged scales, the high temperatures and the eroded nerve endings. We try to show how the shuttle is a central piece in a fragile equilibrium keeping the lives of its users together. We provide evidence, pictures, statistics, and verbatim quotes.

In our report, we set down on paper words from the workers that higher-ups in the company would never otherwise have to consider, or even see. A lofty conference room where board members usually meet to talk about work in abstract, esoteric language – costs, growth, market shares, return on investment – hosts a presentation filled with facts and figures that speak of an inconvenient reality. The company can still shut the shuttle down after we’ve finished our work. But it can no longer claim to have no idea about the consequences. And if, one day, the untenable pressure their decision had placed on their workers’ lives results in someone’s injury or death, our report could become a decisive piece of evidence in a criminal court.

Solidarity is the only force that can hope to push back against power and money. It is not about kin, tribes, or shared culture. It’s about who you choose to serve, who you stand with, who you’re willing to stand up to.

We stay six hours in that room. Much of this time is spent shouting. One of the executives doing most of the shouting – shouting till he is red in the face, till he has literal foam at the mouth – is the head of HR. The others take it in turns, interrupting our responses, disparaging our research, telling us that none of what we are telling them is true. While the lead of the management team, the specialist in labor relations, isn’t competing in the shouting match, he is playing with a sheet of paper, smiling. He holds it so we can read the contents during our presentation. It is a letter informing us that we are being sued for excessive use of our license to investigate working conditions. The letter will never be sent. It is just a way to mess with us during our presentation while telling us to play nice.

We have to maintain a face of neutral expertise over these hours of intense and chaotic exchange. Our report relies on the assumptions written into the Code du Travail all those decades ago: that presenting convincing evidence to reasonable people will lead to progress on goals they profess to hold in common, like protecting the health of workers.

What makes these six hours of shouting even more of an ordeal is that everyone in the room recognizes that nothing I and my colleague say or do can ultimately stop the company from scrapping the shuttle. We can point out how detrimental that and other decisions would be to the workers’ health and wellbeing, but we can’t give those workers – the older man in the bar, the women from the banlieues with kids to feed, the people in the warehouse with broken spines and faulty scales – the power over their own lives that these decisions represent.

From the company’s point of view, it must all seem like a terrible waste of time and energy. Why should anyone toil to ask questions with no real chance of receiving a positive answer? What’s the use of giving voices to those workers who are already on the way out? Even some of the workers from the new location see the shuttle crowd as unreliable and not productive enough.

Shutting down the shuttle is not only a way to save a modest amount of money, but also an easy way to detach from workers who are increasingly tired, old, wounded, and socially disconnected from the rest of the workforce. Getting rid of the annoying old faces could even be a way to tighten the solidarity between the more recently employed and their employer. The old employees are a visible reminder that the commitment an employer promises to a community only goes so far. It is in the interest of the company for workers to imagine their contracts could last forever, since people invest themselves in their jobs when they feel they are in a long-term relationship with the company that hired them. That belief is useful until the last minute before the company moves on. It’s a simple story: work moves with capital. If that’s the way things must go in the end, why couldn’t we go along to get along and spare ourselves the drama, the anger, and the screams?

As personally grueling as it is to endure hours of shouting, three things sustain me: the support of my colleague, the seriousness of the work we produced together, and most importantly, the fighting spirit of the workers’ representatives, who do not hesitate to stand up to management, when our official neutrality forbids us to do so. They are used to standing up for each other, in boardrooms but more often on the factory floor. To some, they are likely annoying old faces, people who never cared too much about being liked, who don’t let gratitude for good treatment give a pass to bad.

This kind of solidarity is the only force that can hope to push back against power and money, even if, nine times out of ten, the effort fails.

Those few lines in the Code du Travail might not have created the society their framers dreamed of, but they succeeded in a way they hadn’t foreseen. The law forces management to consider the consequences of its decisions on workers’ lives – to consider the voices of workers themselves. Through the work of legislators and social scientists, stories that would have remained rumors or opinions shared by a handful during coffee breaks are recorded in black and white, heard in conference halls and boardrooms. In the words and statistics of reports, workers who otherwise would be long gone and forgotten hang around, creating an unusual kind of solidarity.

For our part, socially speaking, skilled knowledge workers like my colleague and me have far more in common with these managers than the workers we have come to speak for. Before all this, I would have felt far more at home in the angry HR manager’s living room than in the shuttle among workers showing me their scars. But after I leave the windowless room, the thought of spending time with a person like him seems obscene. Solidarity is not about kin, tribes, or shared culture. It’s about who you choose to serve, who you stand with, who you’re willing to stand up to. Capital wants to move smoothly and silently, muffling the cries of the workers it uses and throws out. A façade of empathy makes the process more efficient, but the smiles quickly fade when you cross an invisible line.

This is what solidarity feels like to me: not warmth and close companionship but naked vulnerability and cold fear. Breaking through the wall of bland PR language corporations use in self-description felt like waking up into a recurrent nightmare of mine: I’m strapped into my seat in a shuttle bus, empty but for me and a driver whose face I can’t see. I can feel him start the engine, but I don’t know the direction, or the destination he has in mind. As he picks up speed, I watch helplessly as the landscape around us begins to change into something horrifying. My instinct is to try to force open a door and jump out unnoticed. From the dangerous realities of work that shuttle might be driving to, there’s no such escape. But even when it feels like it, we’re not alone. Look around, and the shuttle is full of passengers just like you and me. Enough to force the driver to reveal his face. Enough, maybe, to break his rules, to take the wheel and pull the emergency brake.