1925voicesEn


Directed by Jean-Pierre et Luc 
Dardenne

Producted by Les Films du 
Fleuve

Unplugged - Voices:
Two days, one night (2014)

Research in management and  organization may only gain by being inspired from 
arts, culture and humanities in order to rethink practices but also to  nourish its 
own perspectives. Life  in organizations is artificially separate from ordinary life: all 
of mundane objects are thus conducive to astonishment, inspiration, and  even 
problematization. The unplugged subsection “voices” gives the opportunity to 
academics and non-academics to deliver an interpretation about an object from 
the cultural or artistic world. Interpreted  objects are or not directly related to 
organizational life, resonate or not with the moment, but share some intriguing 
features. These interpretations suggest a patchwork of variations on the same 
object.   

M@n@gement
2016, vol. 19(2): 124-151 

124



Introduction: Two days, one night

! This issue of M@n@gement’s Unplugged - “Voices”  draws together four 
academic essays that reflect on the  struggles of solidarity, ethics and personal 
realization in the context of the contemporary workplace. Recent literature on the 
changing context of work has noted the pervasive precarity arising from 
workplace “flexibilization”, and the social and  personal difficulties that precarity 
creates (e.g. Prosser, 2015; Mole, 2010; Kalleberg, 2009). Attempts to increase 
worker “choice” often have the paradoxical effect of augmenting control, and 
putting workers in the position of choosing their own forms of subjugation 
(Endrissat, Islam & Noppeney, 2015; Ekman, 2014). The cynical use of choice by 
management is nowhere more evident than in the film Two Days, One Night by 
the brothers Dardenne, which is the object on which these four essays reflect. 
Each, in its turn, looks at a distinct but related aspect of Sandra’s struggle as she 
attempts to convince her co-workers to forgo  their monetary bonuses and “vote” 
for her to  keep  her job. Struggling with her own personal demons, Sandra is 
forced to come to terms with herself and her situation, ultimately leaving the 
workplace that maintains conditions of injustice, losing her job  but gaining  self-
respect. In these four essays, we reflect on Sandra’s condition, and how it can 
inform the conditions of contemporary workers more generally.
! Bénédicte Vidaillet’s essay draws upon Slavoj Žižek to examine the 
conditions of objective and  subjective violence that confront workers in the film. 
She attributes the difficulties they have opposing  their boss’s blackmail not to 
their own “evil” intentions as individual agents, but to the form of violence 
characterizing this situation, which is purely systemic and anonymous. She 
argues that such violence  has, with global capitalism, come to occupy an 
unprecedented central place  in our society. Taking a Lacanian perspective, 
Hélène Picard examines how the simulacrum of the  “vote”, in creating a false 
sense of democracy, builds an imaginary of the workplace that juxtaposes the law 
of the market against the personal, intersubjective  connection between workers. 
Comparing the movie  with another story of precariousness and isolation (The 
Measure of a Man, 2015), her contribution questions the  ways in which face-to-
face, embodied dialogue may or may not subvert pervasive competition in the 
contemporary workplace. Yoann Bazin provocatively asks us “Why don’t 
employees rebel?”, using the film as a way to understand continued employee 
submission to a patently unjust system. In his essay on time, Gazi Islam reflects 
on the paradoxical juxtaposition of the  weekend, during which the  action takes 
place, and the conventional work week, placing contemporary work in the space 
of liminality where social reproduction takes place. The  essays, written 
individually and then reviewed collectively by the other authors, share a common 
concern with a pressing sense of injustice. But each description presents a 
distinct angle of this, creating a kaleidoscopic vision of the film. They are meant to 
be read individually and together.
! Finally, underlying  all of the essays is an enduring concern, reflected in the 
objectives of the Unplugged section: How does popular culture, by imagining, 
constructing and screening visual narratives about organizations, compel us to 
rethink how we work, collaborate and organize? Is film real, and, if so, in what 
sense? Does Two Days, One  Night tell a dystopian tale of a current reality for us 
to reflect upon? Does it express in the language of fiction issues that are too 
sensitive to  discuss in our own, real-life, workplaces?  Or does the film provide us 
with a warning, of the  workplace of tomorrow that we  may confront if we do not 
take measures to prevent it? Film speaks, but to whom, in what language, from 
what position of enunciation? Each essay struggles with the content but also the 

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filmic representation of Two Days, One Night, and in so  doing, challenges future 
research to consider forms of organizational representation that are  distinct from 
those usually deployed in constructing our knowledge.

!

REFERENCES
Ekman,  S. (2014). Is the high-involvement worker 

precarious  or opportunistic? Hierarchical ambiguities in 
late capitalism. Organization , 21 (2 ), 141–158. 

Endrissat,  N., Islam, G., & Noppeney,  C. (2015). 
Enchanting Work: New  Spirits of  Service Work in an 
Organic Supermarket. Organization Studies, 36(11), 
1555–1576. 

Kalleberg, A. (2009). Precarious  work, insecure workers: 
Employment  relations in transition.  American 
Sociological Review, 74(1), 1-22.

Molé,  N. J. (2010). Precarious subjects: Anticipating 
neoliberalism  in northern italy’s workplace. American 
Anthropologist, 112(1), 38–53. 

Prosser,  T. (2015). Dualization or liberalization? 
Investigating precarious work in eight European 
countries. Work, Employment & Society, forthcoming. 

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Two days, one night, or the objective 
violence of capitalism
! Violence is omnipresent in the  Dardenne brothers’ film Two Days, One 
Night. But does the violence lie with the characters, willing to sacrifice  one of their 
already vulnerable colleagues, or does it lie with the system, which forces them to 
make an impossible choice where everyone, ultimately, has something to lose? 
Using the works of philosopher Slavoj Žižek as a framework, I shall attempt to 
ponder this question of violence and how it might be overcome.

MORAL DILEMMA AND REDEMPTION

! The position of having to make an impossible choice, in which the 
characters of the movie are placed, could not, under current labour law, occur in 
France, Germany or Belgium. In this small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) of 
seventeen employees, including one working  under a fixed-term contract, the 
workers are  asked by their boss to decide by vote whether they would prefer to 
receive a €1000 bonus, or to  reinstate Sandra, a permanent employee due to 
return to work after long-term sick leave (the two options being irreconcilable for 
economic reasons related to international competition). Indeed, according to 
employment regulations, the dismissal of an employee cannot result from such a 
choice. Moreover, in reality it is the fixed  contract position that would be 
eliminated in such a case, a solution which Sandra's boss only considers at the 
very end of the film.
! However, this situation of being forced to make a choice, though fictitious, 
does refer to an already large  number of cases in which employees have been 
placed in such a dilemma and made  directly responsible for solving such a 
problem. For instance, in France, in 2004, the German Bosch group  asked its 
employees to vote between a reduction in wage  costs or 400 job  cuts. The 2013 
National Inter-sectoral Agreement (ANI), or "competitive employment agreement", 
allows employers to negotiate with their employees whether to increase  working 
hours without increasing wages, or to cut wages without reducing working  hours. 
Thus, in 2015, the management executives of the Smart factory of Hambach 
(Moselle) organized a referendum in which its 800 employees were asked to vote 
for or against a proposal to increase their working hours (i.e. to work 39 hours a 
week and be paid for 37) in exchange for guaranteeing their jobs until 2020. Such 
situations are likely to  become more  common in France, as the government 
wishes, through the new labour law, to  give  more weight to local agreements at 
company level than to sector-wide agreements and  legal codes, and to 
encourage the widespread use of company referendums. Such local 
arrangements risk creating the situation described in the film. The film can 
therefore be  understood as a fiction built around a very simple plot line1, which 
strongly brings to light the implications of the practical application in the 
workplace of a neoliberal paradigm based  on deregulation and individual choice, 
and the way in which workers may confront it.
! The movie could at first be perceived  as conveying a message about 
individual morality. Indeed, the decision each of Sandra's colleagues faces can 
be  understood as a moral dilemma which conflicts personal interests with values 
of solidarity. The movie  shows individuals absorbed by a pressing need  to earn 
money, some having to moonlight at weekends to make  ends meet; some with 
materialistic motivations, such as wanting home  improvements, to buy new 
household  appliances or a bigger house (such as Sandra and her husband, for 
whom moving back to social housing is out of the question); and some with 
problems such as an unemployed  spouse, debts or school fees to pay. But, 

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Bénédicte Vidaillet            
Institut de Recherche en 

Gestion, Paris Est Créteil 
University, France 

benedicte.vidaillet@u-pec.fr

1. That is, that, over the weekend following a first 
round of votes in which her co-workers 
overwhelmingly opt for her dismissal, Sandra 
attempts to convince each of her colleagues to 
change their minds and relinquish their own 
bonuses.



beyond the diversity of these individual situations, the movie paints the portrait of 
an individualized and weakened contemporary subject. The  film depicts a range 
of possible  responses, which often affect the workers’ families, to an extremely 
difficult moral dilemma: from support, avoidance, denial, remorse, ambivalence, 
and finally to  violence. This violence can be  direct, in the form of criticism of 
Sandra, for instance for "asking us to give  up  that bonus we so badly need for our 
children", or for "taking our bonus from us"; or in the form of a physical attack, 
when someone attempts to hit her. But it can also be  more subtle, as when a co-
worker disqualifies Sandra by mentioning the depression she went through and 
his doubt as to her ability to work again.
! The series of scenes in which Sandra  meets with each of her colleagues 
to ask them what they have  decided, does seem to reduce the situation to  a 
direct face-to-face in which one of the  two characters necessarily loses 
something. But each face-to-face  interaction also serves as an opportunity for the 
characters to identify with each other, in terms of the co-worker imagining 
Sandra’s risk of losing her job  on the one hand, and Sandra’s understanding of 
her colleague's personal reasons for wanting to  receive  the bonus on the other. 
Exhortations to "put yourself in my shoes", for instance, punctuate all these 
sequences, and each party has the same argument: the  need  for money, either 
the salary or the bonus. "I'd like you to vote for me; we need  my salary", "without 
my salary, we can't make it", Sandra repeats, which meets responses such as: "I 
can't, I need my bonus". This confinement within a closed-door encounter during 
which, through a mirror effect, Sandra and a co-worker are set up  to identify with 
each other, makes it difficult to condemn their decisions (except in the  case  of the 
few who respond malevolently). Sandra frequently responds with "I put myself in 
their place: one thousand  Euros", "I understand, don't apologize", "that's too  bad 
for me but I understand" when people try to apologize  or ask her to "not take it 
the wrong way". When the reasons given for preferring to receive the bonus are 
"understandable" and human, the only argument likely to make them change their 
mind seems to  be one of a moral nature, arguments that counterbalance the 
others based on values of solidarity, which invariably involve some  form of 
sacrifice. 
! Analysed  from this perspective, the movie can be seen as depicting 
Sandra's journey to redemption. The beginning of the movie  describes a woman 
in a state of vulnerability, who relies on drugs to cope, is about to give up 
everything, including life, but who gradually starts fighting back (beginning  with 
her meetings with co-workers), and in so doing  regains health and dignity. Initially 
beset by a feeling of loneliness, she realizes that she is loved and  supported by 
her husband, but also by some colleagues. When Sandra’s boss eventually 
proposes to reinstate her once one colleague (who had voted  for her 
reinstatement in the second round) employed  on a short-term basis has 
completed  his contract, she  is faced with the same dilemma with which she has 
relentlessly confronted her colleagues. Sandra then makes the decision to leave 
the company and the final scene shows her beginning her job  hunt and  moving 
on. 

OBJECTIVE VS. SUBJECTIVE VIOLENCE

! This initial interpretation of the movie might suggest that the only right 
choice to make when faced  with such a dilemma is to choose the option that 
involves sacrificing oneself in the name of solidarity. The idea being that this self-
sacrifice allows subjects to keep  their dignity — even if this means losing their 
money or job  — and keeps them from behaving like the bastard the system relies 
on to survive. The movie  can thus be seen to be  teaching the ethic of reciprocity: 
"Treat others as you wish to be treated", "Do not do to others what you would not 
want them to do to you". 

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But this limited interpretation of Two Days, One Night would not seem to do 
justice to the Dardenne brothers’ work overall. The first of their films that met with 
international success and recognition, Rosetta (1999), portrays a young woman 
desperate to find a job  and a way out of poverty, following a first failure  which was 
the result of an injustice. Despite Riquet being the  only person to have given her 
comfort and support, Rosetta betrays him to his boss in order to get his job. The 
point of the movie is not to condemn Rosetta, but to question the  system that 
causes the characters to go to such lengths. Similarly, Two Days, One Night 
shows the system to create situations in which everybody loses. This “system” is 
not referred to directly, but is implicated, for instance, in the references to the 
competitive situation and financial difficulties in which the company finds itself, as 
well as the pressure the company's management is under. This pressure is 
passed down to Sandra’s colleagues who are forced  to make  a difficult decision 
within a short timeframe. The cinematic technique of repeated close ups of 
characters’ faces during their one-to-one confrontations with Sandra conveys the 
strain of their struggle with this. Because Sandra's appeal to her co-workers takes 
place outside working hours (please see Gazi Islam below for more  on this), the 
fiction of common objectives around work is dissolved, and all that remains is a 
fight for the job (de Gaulejac, 2014).
! One can infer from this analysis that the only way out would be to 
challenge the rules of the system, by, to begin with, refusing to be placed in this 
dilemma. Although they understand that the rules are unfair, no one  directly 
disputes them. When Juliette one of Sandra's colleagues, who supports her from 
the start, calls on the managing director of the company to hold a new vote, she 
contests the validity of the first poll's results, but not the  principle of the vote itself. 
Whatever their ultimate choice, the characters implicitly agree  to participate in 
what philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2009, p.2) refers to as “objective” violence. 
Objective violence is “systemic”, cannot be attributed to an identifiable agent or 
agents (e.g. global poverty or the sexism embodied in some habitual forms of 
language), and exists insidiously and almost invisibly within the system and  "the 
'normal' state of things" (Slavoj Žižek 2009, p.2).
! According to Žižek (2009), “subjective” violence, however, is more 
immediate, physical and can easily be attributed to a specific agent (subject) or 
agents (States, groups, etc). One example of subjective violence in the movie is a 
fight initiated by a son against his father because he chooses to support Sandra. 
Subjective  violence produces a sense of horror, revulsion and fascination, and, 
above all, disrupts a "zero level" of violence. Thus, subjective violence  is seen to 
disrupt the normal state of things, whereas objective violence  remains within it, 
and is thus, barely visible or recognizable, while, ironically, simultaneously 
working to sustain the illusion of the existence of the zero-level. Žižek compares 
objective violence to the "dark matter" of physics, a major constituent of the 
universe, which seems undetectable but which is the only explanation for certain 
gravitational effects on visible matter. Similarly, objective violence  is the only way 
to make sense of outbreaks of subjective violence which otherwise seem 
irrational and gratuitous. Žižek argues that such violence has, with global 
capitalism, come to occupy an unprecedented central place in our society. 

Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much 
more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this 
violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ 
intentions, but is purely ‘objective’, systemic, anonymous. Here we 
encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and  the Real: ‘reality’ is 
the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the 
productive  processes, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract’, spectral 
logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality. (Žižek, 2009, 
p. 11)

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! One aspect of the fundamental violence of capitalism is that it creates a 
social space experienced as "worldless", in the sense meant by Alain Badiou, 
which is  a space in which the  subjects are no longer endowed with the mental 
representation that helps them make sense of the world they live in. ‘Perhaps, it 
is here that one of the main dangers of capitalism should be located: (...) it 
sustains a stricto sensu 'worldless' ideological constellation, depriving the large 
majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first 
socio-economic order which detotalizes meaning’ (Žižek, 2009, p. 67). Capitalism 
deprives individuals of the cognitive references that could provide a framework of 
intelligibility. Thus, objective violence must be understood as what, within this 
system, prevents the subject from contesting or actively resisting it (see Yoann 
Bazin below). The Dardenne  brothers' movie shows how the objective violence of 
capitalism creates an internal struggle between employees in the same team. It 
creates in them a sense of guilt which they try to  justify (–("understand my 
situation"), or deflect by blaming Sandra, who takes on much of the responsibility: 
"It's my fault; I'm the  one who causes this violence ", "It is because  of me that 
they are prepared to get into a fight".

THE POSSIBILITY OF A POLITICAL COMMUNITY?

! However, the film seems to outline  the beginnings of a possible shift 
beyond this boxed-in position. First, each of the characters eventually expresses 
some opposition. Sandra, who eventually rejects the  rules of the game she 
initially thought "normal", overcomes her sense of guilt and refers to the 
responsibilities of her superiors in the matter: "I'm not the one  who  decided that 
you would lose your bonus if I stayed"; "It's not my fault that they force you to 
choose." She overcomes her fear, confronts her foreman and  makes him face up 
to his actions: "You called them on the weekend; you tried to scare them" (it is 
almost regrettable that she accuses him of being "heartless", because this 
continues to situate the problem at the level of the subjects' identification with 
others, of individual choice  and subjective violence, rather than at the level of 
objective violence and political struggle). Eventually she opposes her boss 
altogether by refusing his offer.
! Some  opposition also emerges among those of Sandra's co-workers who 
publically support her even though the vote  is secret. Their choice to forgo their 
anonymity and accept the consequences possibly creates the conditions for the 
birth of a political community. This is what one of the  final scenes, when Sandra 
meets her waiting colleagues in the factory's canteen to  say goodbye, seems to 
suggest. Sandra no longer addresses individuals one by one, but faces a group 
of people  who have dealt with a difficult choice in a similar way. This shared 
experience, which they will always have in common, makes their choice 
collective, rather than individual, and marks the possible beginning  of a 
community. They no longer face Sandra alone, but instead she seems to have 
been the condition for their coming together, and it is a group  that she leaves 
behind and  feels bonded to: "I will never forget what you did for me". The seeds 
of this outcome can be found in other scenes in the movie. For instance, when 
Sandra's colleague, after being confronted by her, becomes conscious of the 
need to make  choices and stop  being  a victim, thus decides to leave her 
husband; and  then, when the same colleague  unexpectedly offers her support, it 
inspires Sandra to choose to fight for herself. Other examples occur when 
another colleague reminds Sandra that she once  took the blame for a mistake he 
had made during his trial period, and when Sandra realizes that another 
colleague is "afraid of Jean Marc [the foreman], just like  me". All these moments 
posit the possibility of building a human community endowed with self-
awareness, made of bonds, relationships, reciprocity, with a common memory 
and a common history; all conditions for the formation of a political community.

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2. An administrative entity representing the state 
locally.

In this regard — the link between the ability to fight and building a community — 
Two Days, One Night can be compared to Mark Herman's movie Brassed Off 
(1997). When a group  of miners is rendered helpless in the face of the closure of 
their pit, a prospect which threatens their identity and their sense  of belonging to 
a community, the characters focus on saving their colliery brass band at all costs 
and participating  in a national music competition. While this objective may seem 
futile  in the context of a struggle for the survival of their livelihood, it becomes a 
symbolic challenge, and while the mine is eventually closed, their community, 
symbolized by the band they belong to, remains, and this belonging is itself an 
act of affirmation of their fidelity to their political struggle. As one of the miners 
puts it, "when there's no  hope, only principles remain". In this respect, Žižek 
(1999: 472) notes that fidelity to such principles keeps the political subject, a 
subject that belongs to a community, in existence. In the Dardenne brothers' 
movie, hope, and the potential creation of a new, symbolic community, stems 
from the characters' fidelity to the ordeal they go through and  to what develops 
between those who support Sandra. Those who choose  to keep  their bonuses, 
however, are left alone to face  a world that remains unchanged for them, and in 
which there is no possible mediation.
! But another possible outcome can be  illustrated by the film directed by 
Gustave Kervern and  Benoît Delépine, Louise Michel (2008). When the workers 
of a factory in Picardy discover with dismay that the factory has been relocated 
overnight, despite the efforts and concessions they had been making for years, 
they meet at a local coffee shop  and decide to pool their small severance pay to 
hire a hit man to kill the boss. One of the workers, Louise, takes it upon herself to 
find  a suitable  professional — Michel, who has never actually killed anyone 
before — and together they set off in search of the unscrupulous boss. But as 
their adventure unfolds, they discover that the man they have  just killed was not 
the person responsible but merely the executor of a decision made in a company 
which itself was owned by another company, and so on. This leads them into an 
endless series of murders. When they identify the “real”  boss, hiding in Jersey, 
they appear to  have  reached the end of their search. But it turns out that this 
boss is in fact under the thumb  of an American pension fund, and so the series of 
murders continues. 
! In this caustic movie, the main theme, which is the difficulty of identifying, 
and thus resisting, the ultimate source of power and responsibility, goes hand in 
hand with the reactions this causes: initial acceptance, resignation and apathy, 
which give way to a form of violence which, because it remains non symbolized, 
can become radicalized and directed  towards all those who, at some time or 
other, have played a part — inadvertently or not — in the system. This subjective 
violence, terrifying and visible, emanates from the objective violence of the 
system, which had been invisible and is suddenly revealed for what it is. 
! Although this is a fictional case, the gap  between fiction and reality may not 
be  that narrow. For instance, in France and other countries, recent outbreaks of 
anger and violence have followed sudden announcements of factory closures or 
mass layoffs. A human resources director of Air France once had his shirt ripped 
off his back, for example, and there was an explosion of violence  in 2009 when 
some employees of a Continental plant in France heard that a court of justice had 
rejected their request for the  suspension of the plant closure procedure, which 
resulted in the immediate destruction of the Sous-Préfecture2. In the years prior 
to this outbreak, the factory's employees and trade unions had made a number of 
concessions and accepted significant pay cuts in the hope  of saving the site. As 
in the Louise Michel film, the ultimate outbreak of destructive violence  was the 
outcome of a long period of acceptance of and participation in the system. The 
sense of having been fooled, and of being personally affected, can generate a 
level of anger that can no longer be mediated or controlled. It is as though the 
objective violence  (Žižek, 1999, 2009) which for years was directed from within 

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the system is transferred to the employees themselves. What will the Two  Days, 
One Night employees who choose to  sacrifice Sandra for their bonus do  when 
their turn comes around?

REFERENCES
Dardenne,  J.P. & Dardenne,  L. (1999), Rosetta, ARP 

Selection, Belgium. 
de Gaulejac, V., (2014), La lutte des places, Paris: Desclée 

de Brouwer.
Herman, M., (1997), Brassed Off, Channel Four Films, UK.
Kervern, G. & Delépine B., (2008), Louise-Michel, France. 
Žižek , S., (1999), Le sujet qui fâche, Paris: Flammarion.
 

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Hélène Picard                          
EM LYON Business School, 

OCE Research Center, DRM-
MOST, Paris-Dauphine 

University           
picardhelene1@gmail.com 

Two Days, One Night and The Measure of a 
Man Subjective struggles in the 
contemporary world of work: 
Fighting for what?

Caught up in the competitive gears / 
Small employees full of sparkles and glints / 
Often are more insane than the rules themselves. 
So, if competition never ceases to tease you /
Come on, let us remain as humane as we can.
One gets exploited / one exploits in turn / 
This world turns us into small-time tormentors.

Rocé1
   
“We put up a good fight, didn’t we? 
I am content2.”

Sandra (played by Marion Cotillard), Two Days, One Night 
(J-P. & L. Dardenne, 2014)

! In the movie Two Days, One Night, the main character, Sandra, works for 
Solwall, a Belgian solar panels factory. Returning after almost a year-long sick 
leave, it is unclear whether she will be allowed to keep  her job. The factory 
manager delegates responsibility for this decision to her colleagues, who  must 
vote either to give up  their annual €1000 bonus so that Sandra can keep  her job, 
or to lay her off and keep  their bonuses. In the first poll, the majority vote against 
Sandra’s reintegration. Yet, because of suspicions that Jean-Marc, the plant’s 
foreman, pressurized people before the  first vote, a second is to be held on the 
coming Monday. The focus of the film is, then, on the weekend, during which 
Sandra tries to meet face-to-face with each of her colleagues to convince them to 
switch their vote. 
!  Beyond this simple plot, the first few minutes of the  film begin to raise  
questions, particularly apparent in the dialogue  between Sandra and her 
husband, that go on to  structure the narrative. Such questions first arise during 
an argument with her husband, after Sandra receives a call from her colleague 
Juliette who wants to head back to the factory that Friday night to  get the 
manager to agree  to a second vote. For Sandra, still fighting to recover from her 
long depression, to learn that all but two of her colleagues have voted against her 
is tough news and she wants to give up: “they would rather have their bonus, it’s 
normal”. Her husband, however, sees things differently: “no, it isn’t normal. The 
only way to stop  crying is to fight. You have to fight this”, he says. This raises 
questions about what can be considered “normal”, or rather legitimate  about the 
dilemma that this pretence  of a democratic vote presents. What is the nature  of 
the fight that Sandra “has to” fight? How will she be able to justify this fight to 
herself and particularly to the colleagues that she will try to convince to  give up 
their €1000 (close to a month’s salary) bonuses, so  that she can keep  her job? 
Finally, what has Sandra’s struggle really been about as we see her walking away 
from the factory at the end of the film, telling her husband on the phone: “we put 
up a good fight… I am happy”?
! The film stimulates a critical reflection on the stakes of such subjective 

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1. This extract is my own translation of lyrics from 
the song “  De Pauvres Petits Bourreaux” (Poor 
Small-time Tormentors), by Rocé, from the album 
L’Etre Humain et le Réverbère, 2010: “Pris dans 
l’engrenage concurrentiel / les petits employés 
plein d’étincelles / sont souvent plus démentiels 
que les règles elles-mêmes. /Alors, si la 
concurrence ne cessent de vous tendre / allons, 
gardons d’humain le peu que l’on pourra 
défendre. / On se fait exploiter / on exploite à 
nouveau / ce monde fait de nous de pauvres 
petits bourreaux.”
2. All quotations of dialogue from the film have 
been translated by the author.



“fights”, giving us an inside perspective on the difficulties of connecting to one’s 
other. However, some scenes of infra-collective, or even individual, resistance, 
raise the issue of what the potentialities and resources of “togetherness”  might be 
for this shaken collective. Relying on a psychoanalytical framework referred to 
Jacques Lacan’s work, I will study the fight led by Sandra, focusing on its 
subjective and  intersubjective implications. The perspective  taken here allows me 
to question the hurdles that need to be overcome in order for people to move on 
from the scattered, subjective fights of the individual, to  organized collective 
resistance as political action (see Yoann Bazin’s contribution on this matter, 
below). The limitations restricting this move are linked  to the “objective violence” 
inherent in the  contemporary world of work (see Bénédicte Vidaillet’s contribution 
on this matter, above). This perspective  will also highlight how face-to-face, joint 
presence  in speech may help  to subvert the dominant, market-economy-driven 
logic in intersubjective encounters.
! To enrich this reflection, I will compare it to another film, The Measure of a 
Man, by Stéphane Brizé, released in 2015, which, although painting a much 
darker picture, also focuses on the  narrative of a vulnerable worker looking to 
secure his situation. The main character, Thierry, is a former specialist worker 
who is fired as a result of restructuring. We follow him in his fight, a succession of 
confrontations where his value as a subject and as a worker is constantly put to 
the test, whether it be by an employment agency worker or by the management 
of the supermarket that hires him as a security guard.  
! One particularly striking scene  shows Thierry joining his former co-workers 
at a café, where they try to convince him and each other of the necessity to carry 
on the struggle and bring their bosses to  trial, so that the abuse they have 
suffered and the injustice of their redundancy can be acknowledged. Yet, pushed 
to react by his mates, Thierry says he “merely”  wants to find a new job, and “put 
all of this [the redundancy, the trial] behind”. His stake is “merely” to gain back a 
measure of his own dignity by securing a job  which will enable  him to support his 
family, and this seems to be incompatible with a more collective form of 
engagement and struggle. 
! In Sandra’s, as in Thierry’s, narrative, the tension between subjective and 
(infra) social struggles raises questions particularly pertinent to  the conditions and 
the seeming fragility of the connections that the  most precarious of workers can 
forge (Standing, 2011). Moreover, the staged face-to-face  interactions bring into 
question the ability of workers to open up  and listen to the other’s speech, as well 
as their capacity to inscribe their dialogue in a shared symbolic dimension, 
beyond relations of opposition and hyper-local negotiation.

A FIGHT “FOR ONESELF”, AT WHAT COST?

! At first, Sandra’s battle in Two Days, One Night is exposed in 
straightforward  terms: the point being to save her job, her income, and the 
material living conditions her income guarantees (meaning, for Sandra, being 
able to  meet her mortgage payments and avoid, at all costs, returning to social 
housing). These are the points she systematically brings forward in her 
discussions with her co-workers: “my job… vote for me… what about my 
income…”, while recognizing  their implications for the  others: “… to make you 
lose your bonus”. Furthermore, a rumour spread by Jean-Marc suggests that if 
Sandra stays someone else will be laid off, which means they risk both bonus 
and job. The dilemma is thus framed as a binary opposition: either “her or me”.  
Still, as Sandra eventually realizes, the rules of the vote are not her responsibility. 
It is Dumont, the plant’s manager, forcing her colleagues to make this decision 
under the pretence of a democratic process, which deprives the subjects of the 
space and time to discuss and  deliberate together through intersubjective 
speech. The vote, thus, appears to have taken place in a tense atmosphere, 

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loaded with rumour and suspicion of Sandra, who has returned from her illness to 
“take our bonus from us”. 

Lacanian interpretation: pretence democracy, binary oppositions and “imaginary” 
dynamics 
! A Lacanian framework allows us to interpret the dual logic as “(s)he or I”, 
and to reflect further on the  consequences of such an ersatz democratic process, 
which is preventing intersubjective encounter. Lacan, returning to Freud’s 
foundations, introduces an original understanding  of human subjectivity as 
“divided”, in order to  stress the difference between the (conscious) ego and the 
subject (as an effect of the unconscious). Thus, the  ego is expressed in the 
conscious, “official” discourse of people. It is moved by their impulses, wishes 
and needs, and is driven toward  the securing of certain objects and images. For 
instance, in pursuing the accumulation of consumer goods or social prestige, the 
ego strives to stabilize  a coherent image of the self in order to give satisfaction to 
others by presenting them with this stable “identity”  (this, thus, repeats the 
processes of the “mirror stage” of child development and the “imaginary” order) 
(Lacan, 2006: 75-81). What is more, such ego discourse is an objectifying and 
instrumental language, aiming for exactness rather than truth, as can be 
observed  of modern information systems (Faÿ, 2008).In turn, the “subject” (S) is 
referred to the desire of the Other, meaning that it depends on what happens in 
the unconscious. The Other is “the locus from which the  question of his existence 
arises for him” (Lacan, 2006: 459). Thus Lacan develops the concept of a 
subjectivity founded “elsewhere” than in the sole images or identifications of the 
ego (Lacan, 2006 : 197-267), in a founding act of division that marks the exit from 
imaginary duality and the entry into the “symbolic”  dimension that is marked by 
the third presence of radical alterity, that of the big Other.
! Speech, open to the language of the unconscious (as “discourse of the 
Other”), bears its effects in the speaking subject, the parlêtre  (speaking being). 
That is why Lacan can state  that entry into the symbolic order prevents the 
subject from being trapped in a binary, instrumental, imaginary relation to a little 
other, in which he or she might be indefinitely looking for “confirmation”. Going 
back to the issues involved in the sham democratic vote, although it appears to 
give a voice to  the employees, it actually immediately closes any speech 
outcomes that might provide an alternative to the binary, oppositional logic of 
“Sandra or me” or “her job  or my money”. Likewise, for Sandra, the stakes are 
binary: “them or me”. This same binary logic leads us to analyze the  psychic 
dynamics that lead  the Solwall workers to retreat into the  imaginary position in 
discourse.
! The (imaginary) discourse of economic exactness is introduced by the 
plant manager at the  very beginning of the film, when he justifies the need to cut 
a job  or cancel bonuses because of global competition. Such are the market laws 
(La loi du marché (market law) also being  the French title of The Measure of a 
Man) that dictate the terms of human exchanges, following the  model of pure and 
perfect competition, thereby preventing the  advent of intersubjectivity as borne by 
living speech.
! This analysis can also be applied to The Measure  of a Man in order to 
interpret the construction of face-to-face confrontations that Thierry goes through 
during his months of job  seeking. The  director, Stéphane  Brizé, films the face-to-
face encounters in long and static close up  shots rather than using a more 
dynamic, “shot reverse shot”  technique. This effectively emphasizes the 
polarisation of the interlocutors’ discourses and the isolation of subjective speech 
faced with the  (objectified) “criteria” and “expectations” of the other party of the 
dialogue. Human relations are thus revealed to be reduced to a trade, a 
negotiation, in which everyone is trying to subjugate the other.

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! Violence then, is not, solely, that perpetrated by the dominant (the plant 
manager, executive director, foreman) against the dominated actor (the jobless, 
precarious, short-term salaried worker). These films show the widespread 
violence of human relations governed by liberal capitalist precepts, and of 
interactions which are first and foremost conducted through the objectifying, 
instrumental and imaginary dimension of language. In this world, maybe all 
individuals will eventually find  themselves in the position of acting as “small time 
tormentors” (Rocé).
! Furthermore, the main characters in both films face expectations that the 
“new spirit of capitalism” brings to bear on salaried workers as individuals and 
subjects (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) through the image of the “new ideal 
man  (sic)” (Sennett, 2006). This “ideal” figure is a subversive entrepreneur 
(Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Žižek, 1999), creative to the point of constantly 
reinventing their own identity, seemingly maintaining control of their own destiny 
and even their own happiness, for which they are perpetually competing with their 
fellows (Cederström & Grassman, 2010). By claiming that each individual is 
responsible  for their own destiny, for who and what they are, and what they 
present as their identity (as entrepreneur, consumer, etc.), this “new spirit” 
effectively distracts people from making any analysis of or dissenting from the 
social and the political (ibid.).

Social and psychic consequences of a retreat into the imaginary: violence and 
discipline 
! I will now examine the way in which such violence is displayed, and how it 
surfaces in the embodied  interactions performed in Two Days, One Night and 
The Measure of a Man. I will analyse the symptoms of a retreat into the imaginary 
position, as structured by the dispositive of generalized competition and 
precarization of the contemporary world of work. 
! In the  confrontations staged by the Dardenne brothers in Two Days, One 
Night, violence at first translates into silent hostility, typically when Sandra shows 
up  at her colleagues’ residence. For instance, she is not invited in, her colleagues 
appear to step  back in hesitation and to  just want to get the discussion over with 
as quickly as possible. One co-worker she was close to, Nadine, even pretends 
to be absent and refuses to talk to her.
! This urge to make one’s counterpart, (or “little other”), disappear as fast as 
possible, culminates in physical violence. A brawl is sparked between a father 
and his son who are  repairing a car when Sandra visits them. “This violence is 
because of me… and  I want to punch them too…” says Sandra, caught up  in the 
net of a fantasy of disposing  of the little others who get in her way. Fantasy is 
itself on the side of the imaginary, operating  in the form of a narrative structure, 
an ideal scenario opposing the promise of a recovered unity in fusion and 
jouissance, to  a disaster scenario (Glynos, 2008). In Sandra’s case, the ideal 
scenario may be one in which the angry co-workers disappear so that the bonus 
dilemma is solved.
! Organizational psychoanalysis sheds light on such dynamics, suggesting 
in particular that a subject’s retreat into the  imaginary order will tend to reinforce 
the disciplinary effects of managerial control (Roberts, 2005). Indeed, the 
imaginary relation is at the core of power/control dynamics because individuals 
seek an, illusory, objective image  of themselves (notably, through complying with 
the expectations of the “ideal”, obedient and  committed employee), and place 
themselves in a position of dependence on the confirming gaze of an other (little 
other). This dynamic can be  interpreted, for instance, in the case  of the colleague 
that Sandra meets outside his local pub. Given the current situation, he says, it is 
time for him to work twice as hard, to accept whatever extra hours might come 
his way, and since  he can perform better than the weak and sick Sandra, she is 
even more dispensable. 

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3. In this regard, Vidaillet (2013) suggests that the 
general application (with very little questioning) of 
individual, sometimes anonymous (as with some 
forms of 360° appraisal), feedback appraisal in 
company and job evaluations, allows the 
expression of unconscious forms of sadism, 
particularly because the symbolic frames that 
gave the professional appraiser a distinct, and 
thus independent, role have been abandoned in 
favour of a posture of “all-appraisers”.

! The colonization of human relations by the economic logic of exactness is 
conveyed in both films through the staging of incessant appraisal situations: who 
is worth what exactly? Past experiences are  discounted, and everyone is 
authorized, and  even encouraged (in a vote, in the collective assessment of a job 
interview, etc.), to evaluate the individual (professional as well as personal) worth 
of others. 
! This, notably, leads to one of the roughest scenes in The Measure  of a 
Man, which takes place  during some training of unemployed  workers. 
Participants have  to assess Thierry’s filmed performance  in a mock job  interview. 
The naked violence and almost sadistic3, destructive  criticism — “well, he does 
not make me want to hire him”, “it doesn’t look like he wants that job!”, “I would 
not trust him… he should smile more”  — that each seem to indulge in highlights 
the absence of solidarity between subjects, despite the fact that they all take this 
same test. 
! In Two Days, One Night, as Sandra confronts her colleagues, she tries to 
provide justification for deserving  to keep  her job: she is cured, fit for work and as 
competitive as before; she is worth as much as those who, as her colleague  puts 
it, “have really worked hard to get their bonus”. The workers are trapped in an 
imaginary pursuit of some sort of validation, of elusive and illusory evidence of 
their worth, and, ultimately, of domination of the others (Vidaillet, 2013). As a 
potential employer asks Thierry: “How far are you willing to go?”

THE FIGHT TO MEET THE OTHERS IN SPEECH

! The Dardenne brothers’ film, and, notably, the most intimate scenes that 
take place between Sandra and  her husband at home, does, however, allow a 
second interpretation of the fight that is being fought.
! For Sandra keeping her job, and, perhaps even more importantly, for her to 
be  supported by her co-workers to that end, represents confirmation of her 
existence. For instance, Sandra says in the opening  section after learning that 
only two of her colleagues have voted in her favour: “I don’t exist, no one thought 
of me”. Such an existential stake can be interpreted when Sandra participates in 
open and careful listening to others, as this provides her with confirmation of her 
own subjectivity, which the first vote deprived her of. Thus, while  The Measure of 
a Man offers a compelling case in support of the  “dead men working” notion of 
the contemporary work environment (Cederstrom & Fleming, 2012) and leaves 
little room for hope for solidarity at work, Two Days, One Night conveys a more 
nuanced depiction, which includes the possibility of the emergence of localized 
spaces for, and  instances of intersubjective speech, which allow people to relate 
to their other in difference, as opposed to only through imaginary modes (such as  
fusion or opposition). 

Opening breaches: speech, face-to-face  encounters and subversion of the 
economic logic of exactness 
! “When they see you, they won’t be able to think only of their bonus”, 
Sandra’s husband argues. What does in fact happen when the characters see 
each other face-to-face, when they enter in relation as parlêtres? Two moments 
in particular illustrate a subversion, an overturning of the objectifying discourse of 
exactness: when Sandra goes to meet Timour who is training the local little 
league soccer team on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and later when she meets 
Alphonse at the laundromat as night falls on Sunday. 
! Useful here is the Lacanian notion that the division of the  subject is related 
to the distinction between “language” (discourse, the domain of conscious 
expression) and “speech” (which refers to the unconscious and the discourse of 
the big Other). I refer here to Lacan’s formulation of the “function and field of 
language  and speech in psychoanalysis” in which he  argues for a return to Freud, 

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notably in order to understand the centrality of language and the function of 
speech (2006: 197-267). This conceptualization underlines the type of relation 
that is established between me and an other individual, or many individuals, in 
dialogue: “There is no speech without a response” (Lacan, 2006: 206).
! Such understanding of speech is unmistakeably intersubjective (Frie, 1997; 
Vanheule, Lievrouw, & Verhaeghe, 2003). The parlêtre makes “the gift of speech” 
by speaking to  his or her other, a “you”, who in turn has the power to recognize 
the speaking  subject through listening and responding: “Finally, the speech value 
of a language is gauged by the inter subjectivity of the ‘we’ it takes on”  (Lacan, 
2006: 247). Only by acknowledging that “I” cannot know everything  of the other, 
or of myself, that “all”  meaning cannot be assigned  (because  an unconscious 
dimension always remains), can “I” then come into relation with an other, through 
speech. 
! In spite of binary dynamics, subjects maintain a capacity to reach out to 
others. “Something” (unexpected, unintended) might still happen in 
intersubjective speech and through embodied affect, such as occurs in the 
encounters between Sandra and her colleagues Timour and  Alphonse as they 
carry on their more  personal weekend tasks (see Gazi Islam, below, for an 
exploration of that weekend temporality). The very fact that these events take 
place “behind the scenes” (of daily, supervised work) may  facilitate something 
happening in the speech encounter, that subverts the economic logic of the 
(work) “contract” that defines behaviours and interactions a priori (Chaumon, 
2004). 
! Both Alphonse and Timour remember, in turn, that Sandra had previously 
protected them by taking the blame for mistakes they had made in their early 
weeks on the assembly line. Such moments, in which Sandra acted according to 
her own personal ethics and contrary to managerial instructions (to monitor and 
control individual performance), could be interpreted as moments of free, 
interpersonal solidarity. In remembering such moments, the two characters seem 
to find the resources to mobilize themselves against the binary choice enforced 
on them, to overcome the fear induced by the law of the market and the 
continually underlying threat of precariousness.
! Moreover, these dialogues allow for subjects to know “something” of their 
unconscious desire, through shared  (embodied) speech, or in Lacan’s words, to 
perceive “a little truth” on which they can then build their existence. For Sandra, 
these encounters allow her to connect to the  other, as different from her but not 
as an obstruction (to her reinstatement), and also to (re)connect to herself, to her 
subjective truth. This is manifest in the final dialogue when Sandra finds the 
strength to say no to her boss, to refuse the binary opposition that is again given 
as the only option (either her or her colleague on the short-term contract).
! Beyond Sandra’s subjective itinerary, the Dardennes’s work shows how a 
collective  act of resistance  might emerge, through a local struggle for solidarity — 
in which, notably, the first act of resistance is the individual “no” vote. Indeed, the 
group  thus formed in solidarity only gets together at the very end of the film, while 
waiting  for Sandra after the final vote. What appears to have emerged is a 
fraternal collective, almost the reverse image of the collective aggression in the 
mock job  interview in The Measure of a Man. Such determination to be together 
marks the emergence of a “we”, formed through the intersubjective dialogues in 
which the words exchanged have taken on speech value  and allowed  for the 
expression of the Other’s desire for togetherness.  

BUT THEN  WHAT…? REFLECTING  ON CONTEMPORARY FIGHTS AND 
SUBJECTIVE STRUGGLES AT WORK 

! The ending of the film invites us to reflect on the scope of the symbolic 
bond established within the community of Solwall’s workers during the course of 

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4.	 “Personnellement j’aimerais bien passer à 
autre chose  ! Moi, je pense que… pour ma 
santé… mentale, je préfère tirer un trait. Passer à 
autre chose. Est-ce que tu peux entendre ça  ? 
Est-ce que ça fait de moi un lâche ?!” Thierry (V. 
Lindon), La loi du marché, 2015
5.http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/
1453208692_424660.html	

the two  days and one night. Could a collective capacity of (political) action 
emerge from this togetherness, or would it be limited to a mosaic of individual, 
subjective experiences momentarily aggregated around that Monday morning 
vote, and the (albeit important) refusal of the established rules of the game?
! In The Measure of a Man, this issue is highlighted in a dialogue between 
Thierry and his former colleagues, who have also  been laid off for economic 
reasons. As a trial to get compensation for this unjust lay off is about to take 
place, Thierry says that he no longer wishes to be involved  in the fight. Thierry 
subjectively experiences the struggle as too painful and no longer finds it relevant 
to his current concern — which is, plain and  simple, to  find a job, “at whatever 
cost”:
“Personally I would like to move on! I just, for me… I think that… for my mental 
health… I would rather let it go. Move on. 
! Can you hear this? Does this make me a coward?!” 
! (Thierry, The Measure of a Man, 2015)4

! Some  recent comments come to mind here, notably those of Zygmunt 
Bauman5 who raises the difficulty of rooting contemporary struggles in more 
permanent forms of political action, beyond the  fleeting mobilizations of local, and 
online, communities. This tension is explored further in Yoann Bazin’s piece in 
this issue, below.

REFERENCES
Brizé, S. (2015). La loi du marché, Diaphana Distribution
Boltanski,  L. & Chiapello,  E. (1999). Le nouvel esprit du 

capitalisme, Paris  Gallimard
Cederström, C.  & Fleming, P. (2012). Dead man working, 

London: John Hunt Publishing
Dardenne,  J.P. & L. (2014). Deux jours,  une nuit, Diaphana 

Distribution
Faÿ, E. (2004). Information, parole et délibération  : 

l’entreprise et la question de l’homme,  Québec: 
Presses de l’Université Laval

Lacan,  J. (2006). Ecrits  :  the first complete edition in 
English (translated by Bruce Fink), New York; NY : W. 
W. Norton & Company

Moutout,  J.M. (2004).  Violence des échanges en milieu 
tempéré, Les films du losange/

Roberts,  J. (2005). The Power of the 'Imaginary' in 
Disciplinary Processes, Organization, 12(5) : 619-642

Rocé. (2010). De pauvres  petits bourreaux, extrait de 
l’album L’Être humain et le Réverbère, Big Cheese 
Records

Sennett, R.  (1998).  The corosion of character: the personal 
consequences  of  work in the new  capitalism,  New York, 
NY: W. W. Norton & Company

Standing,  G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous 
Class, London : Bloomsbury Academic

Vidaillet, B. (2013). Evaluez-moi! Evaluation au travail: les 
resorts d’une fascination. Paris: Seuil.

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http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html
http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html


Why don’t employees collectively 
rebel against organizational injustice?

! The Dardenne  brothers’ movie Two Days, One Night can be understood as 
the story of an injustice of which all the actors are acutely aware, but against 
which none of them knows how to actually rebel. Whether they intend to vote to 
receive a €1000 bonus or for maintaining Sandra in her position, few are at ease 
with a decision they have to make within the frame imposed  by Dumont, their 
boss. All through the movie they doubt and argue, they apologize and find 
excuses, they get annoyed, angry or sad, but in the end they do  not challenge the 
authority, or even question the frame.
! The questions I would like to tackle, then, are: What drives men and 
women not to rebel when faced with such an obvious injustice? If they did wish 
to, how could Solwall’s employees protest against the authority of the boss who 
imposes such a situation? Why, beyond individual protests and frustrations, can 
they not build a collective opposition?
! To answer these questions I draw on Nicolini’s (2009) methods for studying 
organizational practices, and  zoom in and then out on Sandra’s situation. In the 
following section, I start by focusing on the individual emotions and dilemmas of 
Solwall’s employees by referring to the many studies conducted in psycho-
sociology on rebellion and protest. I then examine the more collective issues of 
workers’ mobilization in the literature on social movements. I conclude on the sad 
acknowledgment of the infinite difficulty encountered by outraged individuals 
facing an authority against which they try to rebel.

WHY DO(N’T) MEN AND WOMEN REBEL?

! For a long time now, sociologists and political scholars have studied 
matters of collective action and social movements (Davies, 1971; Olson, 1965; 
Tilly, 1975). A classic reference in this literature is Ted Gurr’s book, Why Men 
Rebel (Gurr, 1970), which grounds protests in psycho-sociology, and more 
precisely in actors’ frustration and aggressiveness. Gurr’s theories have  initiated 
a stream of research trying to understand the variables and thresholds of protest 
around one main question: At which point do men and women come to rebel?
Rebellion is not simply triggered by any, however intense, feelings of frustration 
or pain. Indeed, many variables, acceptance of exploitation in submission to 
authority (Zinn, 1968) or social dominance  (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), for 
instance, can limit it. One of the most studied variables in the  academic literature 
is the impact of system-justifying discourse on actors’ mobilization (Jackman, 
1994; Jost & Banaji, 1994; Kluegel & Smith, 1986). Scholars of this perspective 
focus on “the manner in which consensually endorsed system-justifying 
ideologies (or legitimizing myths) contribute to the stability of oppressive and 
hierarchically organized social relations among groups” (Jost & Sidanius, 2004: 
11).
! Jost et al. (2012) study the effects of system justification, group  
identification, collective emotions and uncertainty salience on protest, and, more 
precisely, on disruptive and non-disruptive forms of protest. These variables 
clearly echo the situations presented in Two Days, One Night: solidarity and 
cohesion among employees (or lack thereof), frustrations, sadness, fear and 
anger, hierarchical pressure and domination, discussions and arguments 
between Sandra and her colleagues.
One of the issues studied by Jost et al. (2012) at the centre of the movie  is 
uncertainty salience, which manifests itself in the precariousness and 

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Yoann Bazin                      
ISTEC

y.bazin@istec.fr



vulnerability of the employees’ situations, and consequently in their need for the 
€1000 bonus, and their fear of the future (inside and outside of the company). 
When Willy tells Sandra that he is going to think about voting  for her, his wife 
instantly gets annoyed and aggressive: “There is nothing to think about! (…) I 
wish we could  help  you, but I’m unemployed since February. And  without the 
pavement that we recuperate and sell we cannot make ends meet”. Moreover, 
system justification or submission to an authority figure provide a substantial 
decrease  in uncertainty, even if the near future remains unclear. In this context, 
rebellion and protest would trigger risk and unpredictability (Jost & Hunyady, 
2005), whereas authority, stereotypes and justifying discourses bring a sense  of 
order and structure (Calogero & Jost, 2011).
! Two trends can be seen in the exchanges between Sandra and her 
colleagues: they are afraid of the consequences of the vote and, more 
importantly, they do not seem to feel a sense of belonging to a collective. 

Mireille – But if I vote for you, I lose my bonus.
Sandra – I’m not the one who decided that
Mireille – It’s not me either… The others agree to lose their bonus? (…) 
Juliette it’s easy for her (…) Me, I can’t afford it

! The first trend clearly relates to uncertainty salience, the second  is rooted 
in the issue of group  identification. Members of a group  with which they strongly 
identify are more likely to engage  in protest and rebellion (Abrams, 1992; Simon 
& Klandermans, 2001). Moreover, strong emotions, such as anger, if shared  in a 
group, significantly reinforce collective movements (Martin, Scully & Levitt, 1990; 
Van Zomeren, Postmes & Spears, 2008).
! In the movie, the emotional reactions of actors tend to conflict. Their 
respective frustrations trigger a potential for rebellion, but the  salience of their 
uncertainty weakens it. Moreover, the fact that Sandra has to meet her 
colleagues one by one during the weekend adds an important variable. Indeed, 
these face-to-face  meetings are symptomatic of an individualization of employees 
in Solwall, a phenomenon that actually happens in many corporations, and which 
renders the emergence of a collective reaction particularly difficult. Gazi Islam 
offers, below, a detailed analysis of the temporality of Two Days, One Night 
(workweek vs. weekend) and of its consequences on the relationships between 
actors.
! The model offered  by Jost & al. (2012) (see Fig. 1) can help  us represent, 
analytically, the situation in which Sandra and  the other employees of Solwall find 
themselves in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s movie.
! Uncertainty salience could reinforce  system justification rhetoric, but in that 
case, the lack of any reflexive or analytical discourse would just maintain actors 
in their emotional reactions. Moreover, the lack of cohesion (or “ingroup 
identification”) among  the workers’ collective triggers two main dynamics: (1) a 
low ability to consider and organize any form of protest, and (2) a tendency to 
protest in a non-disruptive manner, meaning in ways that do not really question 
the frame from within which injustice  and frustration emerge. In that case, the 
vote imposed by Dumont that aims to transfer the responsibility of the decision to 
his employees remains unchallenged. Every time Sandra mentions that the 
situation is not her fault, her colleagues annoyingly remind her that it is not theirs 
either.
! However, these psycho-sociological considerations remain limited by their 
focus on mainly individual emotions and  dilemmas. Consequently, after having 
zoomed in on the actors, I shall now zoom out and try to account for the absence 
of collective organization or protest. Studies of social movements provide a 
powerful conceptual framework for this. 

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Figure 1. Adaptation of the path model illustrating the effects of assignment to the 
system rejection (vs. control) condition on system justification, ingroup 
identification, anger and willingness to protest by Jost et al (2012: 205)

WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS NECESSARY FOR  A COLLECTIVE PROTEST 
TO EMERGE?

! Following Sandra’s personal trajectory, Two Days, One Night can also be 
seen as the story of the failure of a social movement; the  story of one that could, 
but does not emerge. According to  Neveu (2005: 10), social movements are 
“concerted forms of collective  action supporting a cause”. More broadly, they 
have also been seen as collective enterprises aiming at asserting “new public 
values” (Ganz, 2010: 1) and  establishing new orders of life (Blumer, 1946). In the 
movie, however, the  order does not change; it does not even come close to being 
challenged. But what, then, is missing  in the case of Solwall that prevents a 
social movement, even a local and limited one, to emerge?
! A social movement is partly built on the identification of an adversary or 
something  to be against, which is often unclear and changing, but helps to 
structure a collective protest (Neveu, 2005). The fluidity of this “against” allows 
actors with potentially very different understandings, values and emotions to 
come together. To understand this phenomenon, Gurr (1970) builds on the 
concept of “relative frustration”. It is defined  by a state of tension, an expected  or 
desired satisfaction, the absence or denial of which triggers a potential for 
discontent, anger and even violence. It is relative because it depends on a 
comparison, and is therefore contingent on the social contexts and norms that 
define systems of expectation. From then on, the  key question becomes at which 
point does the conjunction of individual frustrations turn into collective action.
! It becomes obvious, when one sees Kader, Nadine and Timour, or when 
one witnesses the violence of Yvon’s son toward his own father, that the 
frustrations of Solwall’s employees are extremely high. Almost no one defends 
the company and Dumont’s decision, or even appears slightly satisfied  with their 
situation. As a matter of fact, Timour bursts into tears when Sandra comes to see 
him:

Timour – I’m so happy you came. Since yesterday I feel guilty to have 
voted for my bonus. I’m so sorry
Sandra – Don’t apologize, I can understand… 1,000€…
Timour – No. I’m ashamed.

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! What, then, is missing from these individual frustrations that stops them 
from triggering a collective action? According to the academic literature on social 
movements, the threshold is generally reached through the emergence of a 
discourse that “tells the story” (Ganz, 2010) and gives sense  to lived experiences, 
and through organizations that channel and frame emotions toward resource 
mobilization (McCarthy & Zald, 1977).
! Discourse can transform a crowd of frustrated actors in a social movement 
by giving them a shared identity, a collective dimension. As Neveu (2005: 100) 
explains: “In their study of a pacifist mobilization in a small town near Amsterdam, 
Klandermans and Oegema (1987) revealed  the strategic dimension of the 
‘political work’ of diffusing an explanatory and normative discourse. They offer, in 
particular, to  decompose any social movement in two  sequences. [The first is] 
consensus mobilization, [which] relies on this activity of propaganda. Through an 
activist work – posters, meetings, flyers -, it aims at diffusing a point of view on 
the world, the  ‘problem’ at hand, and at constituting an audience favourable to the 
defended cause. It is only once this in-depth work is achieved that a ‘mobilization 
of action’ [as the second sequence] can occur”.
! In Two Days, One Night, there is a chronic lack of structuring  discourses 
that could characterize the injustice of Sandra’s situation. What we are witnessing 
instead is individual discussions, personal stories and trajectories that are 
expressed, influence each other, and sometimes clash. Actors remain focused on 
local emotions and individual frustrations in the face of injustice. There is very 
little distance  in the discussions and negotiations between Sandra and her 
colleagues. Even the justifications of their situations, or of the  “system”, to use 
the vocabulary of psycho-sociology, tend not to include mention of any social, 
managerial or political frames of reference. Their collective  inertia is all the more 
important for the fact that a crucial element of social movements remains absent 
from the movie: the organization.
! Indeed, discourse, as powerful and  unifying as it can be, is not sufficient. 
Discourses accumulate without necessarily leading to directed or effective action. 
However, when coupled  with an organization (political party, union, NGO, etc.), a 
social movement can make better progress. Tilly (1986) understands the 
regularities in the many forms of the organized actions of social movements to  be 
variations around  “repertories of collective action”. To stake their claims, actors 
can be inspired by pre-existing, more or less codified, but unevenly accessible 
patterns of protesting actions. Depending on the context and specifics of the 
organization, marches, demonstrations, public meetings and strikes are the 
classic institutionalized forms of demand, with infinite variations and innovations: 
press campaigns, lobbying, happenings, gatherings, occupations, etc. 
! The chronic absence of any “political”  discourse in Two Days, One Night 
can be understood through the symptomatic, and yet discrete, absence of 
workers’ unions, employees’ representatives, or even mere references to labour 
law (Bénédicte  Vidaillet comments relevantly, above, on the legal aberration of 
such a situation). Discourse in the film remains partly personal because Solwall’s 
employees do not have any wider external references that could be  provided by 
social movement organizations. Where unions eventually recuperate frustrations, 
and sometimes manipulate them, they also provide the opportunity to escape  the 
trap of individualization.
! A study conducted by Gamson (1975) on 53 social movements in the US 
shows the essential role of their organizations in terms of efficiency and  success. 
Consequently, the Anglo-Saxon academic literature tends to  focus on social 
movement organizations (McCarthy & Zald, 1977), and organizations have thus 
become the  conceptual basis used to analyze and account for the  way in which 
social movements structure groups, discourse and resource mobilization.
! From this perspective, Two Days, One Night is the story of a social 
movement that does not happen. But there seems to be a close, latent potential 

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in the suffering and frustrations of Sandra, of course, but also Miguel and Yvon’s 
son. Hélène  Picard (above), relevantly underlines the binary oppositions (“me or 
them”, “her or my bonus”) that haunt Sandra and her colleagues. Yet, a collective 
reaction does not occur. And it cannot, partly because Solwall’s employees lack 
the very resources, rhetorical and organizational, that would allow them to gather, 
think of themselves as a collective and thus act together. The absence of 
“political consciousness”, linked to a chronic lack of political references and any 
kind of organization, fundamentally limits their ability to escape the narrow 
context in which Dumont has them trapped.

CONCLUDING ON A DEAD END

! Sadly, Sandra’s situation is far from exceptional. The emotions and 
frustrations of Solwall’s employees are painfully mundane and unfortunately 
constitute the actual day-to-day life of many people. Injustice, in corporations and 
in society, is an integral part of our lives and does not always trigger indignation, 
let alone mobilization. Some may not warrant it, but some injustices are not 
acceptable. The question that then remains, and  that Two Days, One  Night asks, 
is essential: If we need to, will we be able to face and deal with these injustices 
together, as a collective? And, if so, how can we prepare ourselves?
! The movie can be seen as a story of personal emancipation: Sandra 
recovering part of her freedom. I choose here to understand  it as the failure of a 
collective  action. The Dardenne brothers show us the painful difficulty, and 
somehow the inability, of actors to  gather and unite; not only to  protest, but simply 
to be united in order not to  be alone. Sandra’s colleagues are not responsible for 
the situation in which their boss has put her. As Willy says when she goes to him: 
“I didn’t vote against you, I voted for my bonus. Dumont connected the two, not 
me”. But does this mean they are totally unaccountable for the situation?
! Social movements, whatever their form, are counter-powers, by definition 
misaligned with, if not opposed to, the context from which they emerge. They can 
be  political or union led, as well as spontaneous and independent. And they are 
not necessarily revolutionary. But they have to be  collective by essence. Their 
force and necessity lie there, this is what the Dardenne brothers shed light on. 
While they also illustrate how difficult collective movements can be, they perfectly 
demonstrate the extent to which renouncing  the collective and accepting 
individualization can be a dangerous dead  end, not only for the rights, but also for 
the survival of the employee.

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Breakwell (Ed.) The social psychology  of the self-
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Blumer, H. (1946). Collective Behavior. In A. M.  Lee (Ed.) 
A new outline of the principles of sociology. New  York, 
NY: Barnes & Noble.

Calogero,  R. M., & Jost, J. T.  (2011). Self-subjugation 
among women:  exposure to sexist ideology, self-
objectification,  and the protective function of the need 
to avoid closure. Journal of personality  and social 
psychology, 100(2), 211.

Davies,  J. C. (1971) Why men revolt  and why. New  York, 
NY : Free Press.

Gamson, W. A. (1975) The Strategy of Social Protest. 
Homewood, LA: Dorsey.

G a n z ,  M .  ( 2 0 1 0 ) . L e a d i n g c h a n g e : L e a d e r s h i p , 
organization, and social movements.  Handbook of 
leadership theory and practice, 19.

Gurr,  T. R.  (1970).  Why men rebel Princeton. NJ: Princeton 
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Jackman, M. R. (1994). The velvet glove: Paternalism and 
conflict  in gender, class, and race relations, Los 
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Jost,  J. T.,  & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping 
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Jost,  J. T., & Hunyady, O.  (2005). Antecedents and 
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Jost,  J.  T., Chaikalis-Petritsis, V.,  Abrams,  D., Sidanius, J., 
Van Der Toorn, J., & Bratt,  C. (2012).  Why  men (and 
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Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(2), 197-208.

Klandermans, B.,  & Oegema, D.  (1987). Potentials, 
networks, motivations, and barriers: Steps towards 
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sociological review, 52(4), 519-531.

Kluegel, J. R., & Smith,  E. R. (1986).  Beliefs about 
inequality: Americans' views  of what is and what ought 
to be, New York, NY: Transaction Publishers.

Martin, J., Scully, M.,  & Levitt, B. (1990).  Injustice and the 
legitimation of revolution: Damning the past, excusing 
the present, and neglecting the future. Journal of 
Personality and Social Psychology, 59(2), 281.

McCarthy, J. D., & Zald,  M. N. (1977).  Resource 
mobilization and social movements: A partial theory. 
American journal of sociology, 82(6), 1212-1241.

Neveu, E. (2005). Sociologie des  mouvements sociaux. 
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by switching theoretical lenses and trailing connections. 
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Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action. 
Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Sidanius,  J. P., & Pratto, F. F. (1999). Social dominance: An 
intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. 
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Simon,  B., & Klandermans, B. (2001).  Politicized collective 
identity:  A  social psychological analysis. American 
psychologist, 56(4), 319.

Tily, C. (1975) Revolution and collective violence.  In F. I. 
Greenstein & W.  P.  Nelson (Eds), Handbook of Political 
Science  : Macropolitical theory, (Vol. 7, pp. 483-555), 
Reading, MA : Addison-Wesley.

Tilly, C. (1986). La France conteste: de 1600 à nos  jours. 
Paris: Fayard.

Van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T.,  & Spears,  R.  (2008). 
Toward an integrative social identity model of collective 
action: a quantitative research synthesis  of three socio-
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South End Press.

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Weekend as community, consumption 
and colonization: struggles over liminal 
time in Two Days, One Night

! With this major shift in the location and working lives of the population 
came significant changes in lifestyle and consumption—the rise of a new way of 
life. Days and  weeks were more clearly delineated  into work time and  home 
time…This was, perhaps, the birth of the hallowed “weekend.” (Florida, 2010:31)
! Work in contemporary society is hidden. Work’s products accumulate and 
fill the spaces of leisure with traces and memories of past labour. Yet work, and 
workers, are both necessary for this accumulation and impossible to  imagine 
through its artefacts. The memory of workers’ efforts haunts consumer products 
like a premonition or a limit. This invisibility of work, like the  modern subject itself, 
seems to exist outside of time, inhabiting another kind of time than the linear 
progression of objects that constitute its past. Symbolically positioned as the 
antechamber of subjectivity itself, the body and spirit of the worker are  produced 
and repaired over the weekend.
! The weekend is a liminal, paradoxical space, an ending and a beginning of 
production, a place where subjects are  free to be themselves, yet are faced with 
the anxiety of empty time  to fill and are alienated by the weakening of personal 
ties. Bereft of strong social relations, consumer goods, atomized tokens of 
individualized work processes, fill the gaps left behind. These objects act as 
talismans against the social void they obscure, sparing us the trauma of directly 
facing our lack of solidarity. When the demand to help  those near us confronts us 
in the form of a plea, an accusation, or merely the questioning gaze of a work 
colleague, we realize we are unprepared to meet this demand.
! A growing discussion is emerging around the relationality of individuals in 
work contexts, the relational subject, the people of organizations. But what about 
the time of organizations? If the work week is the space of mundane  ethics, the 
ethics of codes, rules and norms, of responsibilities, then the weekend has its 
own ethics, the messianic, liminal ethics of the  sabbatical, where individuals 
ritualistically invoke the love behind the law. In the mythical space of work/leisure, 
if the work week serves for the production of goods, the  weekend serves for the 
reproduction of society. If the work week works on standardized, linear time, the 
weekend comes to  symbolize unstructured spontaneity. These two spheres co-
constitute each other, the weekend giving meaning to the work week, which 
frames and nourishes the weekend. Opposed, the two times exist in a tenuous 
balance.
! I reflect on the  timing  of work and leisure in response to a certain 
uneasiness I felt when watching the film Two Days, One Night by Jean-Pierre and 
Luc Dardenne, one Saturday afternoon, with the goal of relating the  film to 
contemporary understandings of work and organizations. The  prima facie relation 
was obvious — a film about a firing, a burnout, the roller coaster of contingent 
work, the theatre  of workplace democracy faced  with the brutal reality of self-
interest. I combed through the many work-related  themes, from the personal to 
the societal, from anxiety to alienation, searching  for the hermeneutic key that 
would  reveal to me the complexities of modern work as portrayed in the film. Yet 
a lingering question remained with me: Where is the work in this film?
! I was struck, then, by the ironic fact that the film, a tour de force about 
working life, takes place almost entirely on the weekend. It was right there in the 

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Gazi Islam                       
Grenoble Ecole de Management, 

France

gislamster@gmail.com



title — Two Days, One Night. The movie begins just as the boss is leaving work, 
drawing us inexorably through a Saturday and Sunday that seem both endless 
and exhausting  and yet all too quick, and  ends at the  beginning of the workweek. 
I was left with the lingering question of why a movie  whose focal point is labour 
relations would so obviously situate the action outside of the temporality of work, 
even taking the title of those few moments outside of the working week.
! Despite the volumes that have been written about the intensification of 
work and the erosion of leisure, a quick search revealed that the weekend is a 
largely untheorized domain, perhaps representing an off-limits area where  work is 
considered taboo, or at best a protected space  the social status of which has 
been won through historical struggle  and the subsequent erosion of which is a 
source of nostalgic lamentation. Perhaps scholars of work have better things to 
do  on a Saturday than write about the weekend. Watching a film, however, 
seemed a legitimate weekend activity, and I felt thus justified in using this film to 
enter into  an exploration of the uses of leisure. Whether the film presents a 
welcome catharsis from the work week, or a Trojan Horse bringing workplace 
issues into the leisure sphere, Two Days, One Night seemed  to offer an 
experiment in cinematic representation that was worth exploring.
! It must be said, however, that watching this particular film is far from a 
leisure activity; a hard  film to sit through, it enacts, through its pace, the slow but 
urgent ticking away toward a moment of confrontation — with one’s own demons, 
with one’s boss, and  most of all with one’s colleagues. Each shuffle-step  of 
Marion Cotillard’s hesitant moments of encounter presents us with the dread of a 
woman who must face the judgment of her peers, as she demands the 
reinstatement of a social bond that has long been forgotten. Should she be 
expected to disrupt her colleagues’ hobbies, their shopping and drinking, their 
moments with their families, to stir up  the injustice that they all face? Are  her 
demands unfair, or just? As her colleagues ask her over the telephone or as she 
rings their doorbell – couldn’t this wait until Monday?

A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON THE WEEKEND: TIMES AND DIVISIONS

! The weekend is a modern concept, born out of the struggles of nineteenth-
century British workers (Walton, 2014). The establishment of the weekend  as a 
limitation of work hours formed part of a larger shaping of work and leisure time 
that became a distinctive mark of modern society. The “spatio-temporal” ordering 
of modern life into work and leisure spheres included negotiations about the 
shape of the weekend and  the “disciplining”  of labour time (Ebrey & Cruz, 2014). 
This division, according to Habermas (1981), became an important way of seeing 
modern life, as reflected in the separate spheres of an economic-productive 
“system” on the one hand, and a phenomenal “lifeworld” of intersubjective 
meaning on the other. The former became marked by an ever-increasing 
demarcation and  control of time, as instituted by the imposition and  regulation of 
clocks, whistles and other time-structuring devices, leading to a linear and 
“rational” approach to time. Yet, the cyclical time of “wakes and 
feasts”  (Thompson, 1967: 76) was retained on the Sabbath, but was also seen as 
characteristic of archaic tradition, as well as non-western, “pre-industrial” 
societies (Evans-Pritchard, 1969).
! The division of time into the  linear time of clocks and labour, and the 
cyclical time of events and  festivals, was itself subject to a paradox. Labour time 
was to be increasingly structured and  disciplined, while  festive time was to be 
unstructured and based on pleasure and enjoyment. Yet the distinction between 
the two itself rested on a fundamental structuring which constituted both 
categories. What could unstructured time consist of if it was bound to  the 
structured whole within which it functioned as a catharsis? How can a weekend 
be  leisure if we count down the moments until it is over? No sooner had the 

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division between system and lifeworld, between production and meaning, been 
instituted, than this division began to break down, a process described by 
Habermas (1981) in his discussion of the “colonization of the lifeworld”.
! The paradox of a period of unstructured time existing within a structured 
work-life system could be explained as an ideological move to mask the nature of 
leisure as a support for the productive system, by clothing it in a guise of personal 
and social freedom. If, as Laclau (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) states, hegemony is 
the state in which a part of a system masquerades as the  whole, then ideology 
might be characterized by the illusion that a part of the system floats free from, 
sets limits to, or stands in opposition to the whole. The weekend was a time 
dedicated to replenishing  personal energy, rebuilding family and social bonds, 
and preparing for the coming week. In other words, if the work week was 
dedicated to production, the weekend was meant for social reproduction.
! The institution of the weekend allowed workers to “let off steam”, largely 
through spending the disposable  income accumulated through the week on 
consumption. Peggy (2001: 200) describes the  alienation of working immigrants, 
“On the weekends, they go to the mall, where they can choose from a range  of 
products so vast it is almost unimaginable. But work consumes them.”  Leisure 
time, far from providing  a way to find one’s freedom and enjoy the fruits of one’s 
labour, becomes an integral part of the work system, supporting increased 
performance  and keeping  workers satisfied enough to remain accommodated to 
their working conditions: 
! They are either getting ready to work… working... or recuperating from 
work (from exhausted weekends and too short vacations to retirement). Instead 
of the divorce of family life and  leisure consumption from work we find that most 
such time is still shaped by work or geared  to the reproduction of labor power 
(Cleaver, 2005: 122)
	 The culture of weekend consumerism, far from a countercultural 
movement, positioned itself as a respite from and  not a critique of workplace 
culture. Popular cultural movements progressively relaxed their oppositional 
stances to emphasize enjoyment and positive experience. As Goulding, Shankar 
and Elliot (2002) describe the transformation of oppositional cultures in music, 
“Punks, for example, adopted a highly visible and distinct code of dress and 
ideology which permeated  everyday life. In contrast to this, rave, for the majority, 
is a ‘weekend’ culture of hedonism, sensation and escape.”
! In short, the “right” to the weekend was the right to  a world made 
increasingly meaningless by its inability to locate itself in the  production of 
common values. Personal liberty and enjoyment stood in as consolations for the 
lack of communal and political solidarities, consolations guarded jealously as the 
traces of an illusory respite from an alienation that became  thereby more 
entrenched. Such spaces, soon seen as hedonistic “entitlements”, drained the 
social and political legitimacy of workers’ movements, which came to be seen as 
no  longer standing  for social solidarity but for self-interest. Such a situation was 
ripe for “reform”, and the slow erosion of weekends and other spaces of personal 
time, half expected, drew systematic protest only from the most stalwart of 
activist circles.
! Contemporary workers often work on weekends. Online, on their phones, 
from home, the barriers between system and  Habermas’s lifeworld, are becoming 
increasingly fluid. This reunification has been asymmetrical; work has invaded 
“life” more than the reverse, despite the proliferation of plush, colourful furniture 
and casual Fridays in many workplaces. Yet scholars have noticed that workers 
are often relaxed and enthusiastic about this reunification, and have taken to their 
new “entrepreneurial” roles with surprising zeal. Perhaps a growing sense of 
fatalism, a willingness to embrace the new “realities”  of the  workplace with a 
pragmatic spirit?  Perhaps, a case of ideological capture, where discourses of 
dignity and equality have become eclipsed by messages exalting the free market 

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and individual choice?  Or, perhaps, as suggested above, the  division between 
work and leisure was always wrought by a certain persistent contradiction, a 
feeling of bad faith in the value of the mini-freedoms recycled and anxiously 
guarded each weekend, not knowing what to do until freedom magically 
disappears two days, one night later. If that is the  fate of weekends, then perhaps 
working over the weekend  is not such a bad  idea … perhaps. But is another kind 
of work possible?

OUT OF TIME, OUT OF JOINT

! Faced with being rejected by her colleagues, after a divisive and  unfair 
vote set up  by her manager, Sandra approaches her boss at the last moment on 
Friday, just in time to secure a second vote on Monday. Reticent to come in, her 
physical presence is nevertheless necessary, because “once he saw you, it would 
be  impossible to refuse a second vote.” Similarly, Sandra spends the weekend 
first telephoning, then physically appearing  to face each of her colleagues, one by 
one, with the proposition/demand/plea that she be  “reintegrated” into the social 
group.
! The small universe Sandra traverses feels in the film like  an odyssey 
through different islands of isolated, personal mini-worlds. Apartment complexes, 
corner stores, large, isolated suburban houses, the multicultural, ideologically 
diverse, class-divided social fabric within which Sandra is seeking reintegration 
seems anything but integrated. As Sandra approaches each household, neither 
she  nor the viewer have any idea what may await. She is filled with dread at each 
encounter, a symptom of the lack of community between the workers.
! Sandra has no arguments. She wields no institutional levers, coercive 
power, legitimate reasons or economic incentives. Everything  seems to work 
against her. She  simply repeats — will you vote for me? As an interruption of the 
system of rationality, the weekend would seem a good time in which to  make 
such an irrational demand. Largely, however, the weekend has been filled  with 
alternative logics.
! First, some  colleagues avoid her encounter, asking her to call back during 
the week. She struggles with spouses, who seem reluctant to cede  yet another 
moment to a work-related activity. In the first house she visits, a man absorbedly 
works on his woodwork, too involved and busy, and too cash-strapped to help. 
After all, they have to pay university fees and cannot forgo the bonus. Similarly, a 
colleague quickly entering her apartment with hands full of shopping bags, 
dismisses Sandra off hand, saying that having left her husband she is forced  to 
purchase  all new appliances, television, washing  machine, etc. … “everything”. 
Her first sign of support comes from Timour, who is coaching a sports team. 
Coming off the field, Timour seems relieved  to have the chance to change  his 
decision.  Perhaps not all hobbies are created equal.
! Yet, by and large, those who support Sandra are those who seem 
themselves to  be wrapped in household conflicts. Domestic violence and 
generational conflict mar the bread and circuses of the weekend, and flare up  as 
Sandra appears. As she solicits an older worker washing his car with his son, the 
man is attacked by the latter as he tries to listen to  Sandra. Injured, with Sandra 
wracked with guilt, he pledges his solidarity. Later, Ann, an isolated wife  in a 
surreally elevated suburban home, invites her in, but Sandra pauses saying “I’d 
like to but, I have work, uh, I mean, work”, referring to her continued weekend 
solicitations. Ann, wanting to help, fears her husband, who  wants to use  the 
money to build onto the terrace. She has to check with him, as he tears her away 
from the conversation. Ultimately, Ann breaks free to show her backing for 
Sandra.  Rather than an inconvenience, these two latter individuals seem 
themselves to need support and respite from their home lives, and together they 
build the beginnings of solidarity. 

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! Such a basis, however, is insufficient to provide Sandra with the final vote. 
Tellingly, the last vote she  needs involves a precarious worker, of African origin, 
who is on a temporary contract.  Differently than the home life struggles of the 
other, this conflict centres on work life itself, its temporariness and instability, and 
the struggle to demonstrate solidarity in the face of one’s own precarity. Solidarity 
for the others had involved supporting a colleague as a respite from home life; for 
Alphonse, the  choice is to demonstrate solidarity in sacrifice of one’s own work. 
Yet Alphone affirms that he will support her. This decision seems decisive, 
because ultimately Sandra herself is faced with the choice of sacrificing Alphonse 
in order to keep  her own job, and it is this that most immediately precipitates her 
leaving the organization.
! The sequence of encounters Sandra passes through leads her through 
different visions of the weekend: from a time of shopping and hobbies, through an 
anguished  time of domestic strife, and finally to the intersectional shared  suffering 
of workers more marginalized than herself. Each of these encounters constitutes 
an interruption of the normal course  of the weekend, as she interrupts the 
everyday with a question, escaping timidly from her lips but with the ethical force 
of a demand for a right. Some attempt to  escape her demand: burdened with 
their own problems, they plead clemency; drunk and in denial, they become 
aggressive towards her; too busy to speak, they ask her to come  back during  the 
week. But, it seems that those also in a position of suffering are willing to  meet 
her in this moment of disjointed time, to try to set things right.
! In Spectres of Marx, Derrida (1994) uses the theme of disjointed time to 
interrogate whether it is not exactly in such times of irregularity, of disjointedness, 
that the search for new forms of society could take place. The break from 
homogeneous linear time has a mystical quality, one that can be used to 
ideologically cover the stark reality of material exploitation, and can thus serve 
powerful interests through a strategic reversal. Yet, this break can also open a 
space of insulation, where the meanings of work, solidarity and collegiality can be 
remade. Rather than “setting  time right”, facing the impossibility of the present is 
a step  toward rethinking a just society. Just as the  performative break of fiction or 
performance, and the liminal space of the movie theatre can present a circus-
show that makes us forget about our travails, or, rather, can confront us with them 
in a moment when our defences are down, inviting us to recreate our society out 
of this liminal space. As Sandra tries to patch together a social bond between the 
workers, phone call by agonizing phone call, the Dardenne brothers drag us, 
scene by scene, through the  modern wasteland of the non-work world and ask us 
to whom we will give our solidarity on Monday morning.  

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