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

Mayotte seismic crisis: building knowledge in near real-time by combining land and ocean-bottom seismometers, first results

International audienceSummary The brutal onset of seismicity offshore Mayotte island North of the Mozambique Channel, Indian Ocean, that occurred in May 2018 caught the population, authorities, and scientific community off guard. Around 20 potentially felt earthquakes were recorded in the first 5 days, up to magnitude Mw 5.9. The scientific community had little pre-existing knowledge of the seismic activity in the region due to poor seismic network coverage. During 2018 and 2019, the MAYOBS/REVOSIMA seismology group was progressively built between four French research institutions to improve instrumentation and data sets to monitor what we know now as an on-going exceptional sub-marine basaltic eruption. After the addition of 3 medium-band stations on Mayotte island and 1 on Grande Glorieuse island in early 2019, the data recovered from the Ocean Bottom Seismometers were regularly processed by the group to improve the location of the earthquakes detected daily by the land network. We first built a new local 1D velocity model and established specific data processing procedures. The local 1.66 low VP/VS ratio we estimated is compatible with a volcanic island context. We manually picked about 125,000 P and S phases on land and sea bottom stations to locate more than 5,000 events between February 2019 and May 2020. The earthquakes outline two separate seismic clusters offshore that we named Proximal and Distal. The Proximal cluster, located 10km offshore Mayotte eastern coastlines, is 20 to 50 km deep and has a cylindrical shape. The Distal cluster start 5 km to the east of the Proximal cluster and extends below Mayotte's new volcanic edifice, from 50 km up to 25 km depth. The two clusters appear seismically separated, however our dataset is insufficient to firmly demonstrate this