Untitled

64 THE SALARIED MASSES
find themselves in difficulties is no consolation to those who have not
been involved in the big game.
Different from the mass of plaintiffs are all those employees who
would like to be seen as such legally, but not socially: commercial
travellers, �gents on commission, insurance brokers, publicity ladies,
etc. Formerly they were officers or middle-class characters of modest
independence. In the rationalized world of the salaried employee, these
bourgeois ruins stand out strangely with their private feelings and whole
bygone inner architecture. They would probably collapse completely if
they did not sustain themselves with the thought that they were once
something better. Things mostly go worse for them than for other
employees. In disputes over expenses and commissions they appear
before the Labour Court, which as we all know also has jurisdiction
with respect to 'employee-like' persons. They lodge complaints there
on their own initiative, personally injured private individuals seeking
above all to give both themselves and others the impression that they
are socially on a par with the masters. It is as though they still dwelt in
their sold-off front parlours. Which is certainly where the elderly agent
emerges from, who spices his conversation with Latin quotations and
tells the Labour Court, among other things, that his son is in the upper
sixth. Denied his commission because an order was not given, he claims
that his predecessor alone was to blame for the mishap. 'Mr Chairman',
he declaims, 'King Louis XV died for the sins of his predecessor. Must I
now pay for those of mine?' 'It was Louis XVI', the chairman retorts.
Incidentally, dispossessed big businessmen sometimes turn up among
the employees made redundant and as such demand their rights. The
chief clerk of one large firm is dismissed due to differences of opinion.
The firm takes the opportunity to check back every penny he has used
for private purposes. For example, he took coal from the factory and
had domestic repairs done by workers - all of this is now brought up
against him. But perhaps the ex-chief clerk is merely paying for the sins
of his father, who was somewhat similar to Louis XV: i.e. the former
owner of the firm, which later passed into other hands through a
merger.
Complaints follow one another in unbroken sequence. They are
already sifted before they are brought forward: either by a court official
in the registry or, more usually, by the employee organizations. On
their way through the works council the majority of them simply come
to the notice of the trade unions, whose interest is thereby engaged.
From the fact that wherever works councils intervene actively they
behave like union officials, one Labour Court chairman friend of mine
infers the absence of company-union leanings among the employed.
'Employees', he says, 'are individualists, or they are organized in trade