By Sherry Mangan

Editor's note:Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite storyfrom our magazine archives. Bastille Day, France's national holiday, took place this weekend. We bring you this piece from 1948 on how workers were living in post-WWII France as seen through the eyes of motorcycle factory worker Roger Buquet.

FORTUNE -- Roger Buquet, thirty, mtallurgiste, works for the Socit des Ateliers Motobcane in Pantin, a northern industrial suburb of Paris, as a final assembler of motorcycles. He puts in a forty-eight-hour, five-day week for an average income of 8,200 francs or approximately $27 -- on which he supports a wife and three children (a fourth child is coming any minute). With the cost of living as it now is in France, this constitutes a minor miracle.

Buquet's blue eyes bug at the living standards of his U.S. counterpart ("Detroit Auto Worker," FORTUNE, August, 1946), above all, at his automobile. The very idea of a workingman's being able to afford a car practically stands his red hair on end. Buquet thinks he's doing pretty well to have a bike for himself and a tandem on which to take his wife.

Not that it's a car he's mostly worrying about: his troubles are much more elementary. Before the war, whatever international statistics may have indicated, French workers lived not too badly. Leaving all ego-tickling display to the middle classes, they concentrated on such fundamental things as a formidably comfortable bed and a commodious dining-room table, and ate the world's best food blended with good gros rouge-and champagne, too, for birthdays and baptisms. The war has put a smashing end to all this: the French workers' standard of living today is marginal in the statistics and all but insupportable in the reality. All of which explains a lot about French politics today.

Whistle while you work

Roger Buquet's day begins at 6: 15 A.M., when he gets breakfastfor himself and his family, and prepares a midmorningsnack to eat at the plant. From a closet workshop in his apartmenthe unhooks his light, semi-racing-type bicycle, andcarries it down the three flights to the rue de Chartres. Ittakes him under twelve minutes to cover the three miles tohis division of the scattered Motobecane plants in Pantin.There, with another heave of the bike to a wall bracket, aquick change to overalls, and a whack at the time clock, heis ready for a working day that from Monday through Thursdayruns from 7:00 A.M. till noon and from 1:00 to 6:00 P.M.,on Friday stops at 4:00 P.M.

Buquet is on the dividing line between semi-skilled andskilled. He works in a twelve-man team on the company'slightest model, most complicated to assemble. Picking uptwelve mudguards, he walks down the line placing one oneach motorcycle frame, then more slowly retraces his stepsbolting them on. Other workers come one machine behindhim with head lamps, tail lamps, gas tanks, etc. On his secondtrip his turn falls on, say, the rear wheel or the main drivechain, which is similarly handled. Each trip finds him distributingand attaching a different part. This system, makingfor variety, causes the machine-minded Buquet much lesspsychological fatigue than a repetition of a single process.

Motobcane is, comparatively, a pretty nice place to work.The management has the sense to impose, not hourly rhythms,but only an over-all daily output. The pace, determined bythe team itself, is therefore easy and flexible. The foreman isno straw boss, but works with the others. Smoking is permitted,though the favorite proletarian "smoke" is usually acigarette that went out half an hour ago pasted to the lowerlip. Space is tight: workers must squeeze past one another,but long experience and a good team spirit avert all frictions.Half a dozen of the team will be whistling a tune in unison,and it is a tossup whether it is the popular Pigalle or L'lnternationalein march time.

"Look at them from here," said a top management officialon a balcony overlooking the assembly line, "and you'd saythey weren't doing a damn thing; yet they turn out as manymachines as twice the number of men in a competitor's 'rationalized'plant." The production norms were determinedscientifically twenty-two years ago. "The operation hasn'tchanged; human beings haven't changed; so naturally thenorms haven't changed," he adds. The flexibility of the systemallows Buquet to knock off at ten o'clock for a midmorningsnack, and permits the team members free choicebetween eleven and twelve-o'clock lunch hours. And unlessthere has been some quite exceptional holdup in parts, theteam is usually finished with its daily stint at least a quarterof an hour before closing time.

Read more:
The life of the Parisian motorcycle worker