A survey carried out among 6000 people reveals that work holds second place, after health, as a necessary condition of happiness. But it far supersedes family, money, and love. Work is a crossroads of contradictory values. What is at stake? What conflicting objectives is it supposed to respond to? To whose benefit? What are the new management methods? But, above all, in what exciting or painful ways does a salaried employee manufacture, resist, create, bloom, or collapse?
Stress, harassment, violence, depression, suicide come up more and more frequently when it’s a matter of work. It is this “obscure object of desire and hate” that is captured in this film. Images of work, suffering, and resistance will take on their full meaning through the analysis of researchers, political experts, economists, and psychoanalysts, along with salaried employees at different levels of the hierarchy. The rereading of ads, newsreel images, and fiction films, edited in their context, provide a journey of discovery through the human comedy that is the world of business and employment today.