The economic crisis ushered in by COVID-19 means that more of us live in fear of losing our jobs. Many have already been fired outright. In the resulting climate of insecurity, workers seek strategies to deal with the uncertainty that is a feature, not a bug, of the gig economy. Private coping mechanisms frequently involve self-medicating, overeating, or gentle sobbing. Less often do we collectively threaten to destroy our desks and detonate our workplaces so that management has to rethink letting our contracts expire. But in 2017, a group of 277 autoworkers at the GM&S Industry metal stamping plant in France decided to do exactly that. The consequences of their decision would lead the GM&S workers all the way from rural Creuse to the red carpet at Cannes.

It was footage of GM&S workers slicing up a twelve-meter-long, €250,000 metal press with a blowtorch that first caught the attention of press agencies around the world. And that was just for starters. Confronted with the total, irreversible liquidation of their livelihoods, and with scarcely a week to go until the commercial court made its ruling on the matter, workers committed themselves to destroying a machine a day until the future of the factory was settled. And when they eviscerated a welding machine with a forklift later that day, their seriousness was confirmed.

The most enduring images, however, were those of the gas cylinders. Workers had laced these enormous, highly explosive containers with petrol cans and rigged the lot to homemade detonators. On the face of this grisly assemblage, they had scrawled a desperate threat: on va tout péter — we’re going to blow it to bits. If the factory was to be handed over to the creditors, it was not to be handed over intact.