LIP (company) - 1976: The Second Movement

1976: The Second Movement

Shareholders forced Claude Neuschwander to resign on February 8, 1976, and the Compagnie européenne d'horlogerie started liquidation proceedings in April. Problems between workers and management began again. On May 5, 1976, LIP workers again occupied the factory, restarting the production of watches. Libération newspaper, founded three years before by Jean-Paul Sartre, printed the headline, "Lip, c'est reparti!" (Lip, it's starting again!). No one offered to take over LIP this time. The firm was definitively liquidated on 12 September 1977. After long internal debates, on November 28, 1977, the workers created a cooperative, named "Les Industries de Palente" (Palente's Industries) – Palente was the neighborhood of Besançon where the factory was located. The LIP acronym remained.

Charles Piaget testified in 1977, in the Quotidien de Paris, about the self-management experiment:

"A few more than 500 workers are effectively in battle, gathering every day, and this, nineteen months after having been fired. It is living proof of democracy. It is impossible to have such a collective force without the sustained practice of democracy, without sharing responsibilities, and without participation of all sorts. It must be pointed out that at LIP, the workers are in charge of approximately thirty jobs, from the restaurant, which serves 300 meals a day for 4 francs, to a hairdresser for the unemployed, to a judicial commission for these same unemployed, to various artisanal activities, one being the game Chômageopoly

The second struggle did not end until 1980, when six cooperatives, employing 250 workers out of a total of 850, were created. Most of the other workers who had joined the struggle (around 400) were either hired by the city, or signed agreements granting them early retirement. The cooperatives lasted between 3 and 12 years. Three of them, which have since become incorporated, still exist today, employing a hundred workers each. For instance, some former LIP workers returned to work in Palente with the SCOP (Société coopérative de production) cooperative Lip Précision Industrie, which employs about twenty persons. SCOP focuses on precision mechanics. According to Charles Piaget, the difficulties of the second conflict, compared to the large victory obtained in 1974, could be explained by the May 1974 election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, whose government decided not to help companies in a difficult situation, and by the 1973 oil crisis.