Can an industrial group be restructured “properly”? Saint-Gobain faces the consequences of strategic, financial, oil and political shocks from 1970 to 2000

Through the history of the Saint-Gobain group between the merger with Pont-à-Mousson in 1970 to the end of the 1990s, we show how the necessary organizational adjustments were made to both implement a new strategy and coping with external shocks on the business. The dismissals that followed were carried out as part of workforce redeployment operations. Although Saint-Gobain did not invent this system, it helped to popularize it to make it a mechanism for social treatment of workforce reductions which will then be taken up by law. Through this example, it is a singular variety of capitalism that emerges, for which labor is not a simple adjustment variable.