Employability and Industrial Mutations

11What are the Possible Futures in the Factories of the Future? The Case of Operators in an Aeronautics Company

Presented in September 2013 by Arnaud Montebourg, then Minister of Productive Redress in France, the “factory of the future” plan was intended to help industrial companies modernize their production facilities. Indeed, studies showed that France had become deindustrialized over the last few decades. Under the impetus of Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy, Industry and the Digital Economy, the “factory of the future” plan was integrated in April 2015, along with six other plans from the “New Industrial France” program initiated by Arnaud Montebourg, into a new plan called “industry of the future” aimed at “modernizing the industrial tool and transforming its economic model through digital technology”¹. The “industry of the future” plan is based on five pillars: development of the technological offer, support for companies in this transformation, employee training, strengthening international cooperation on standards and promotion of the French industry of the future.

Our research is fully in line with this national “industry of the future” project. It was supported by the ESCP Europe chair “a factory for the future”² and was carried out at SAE, whose Villaroche plant has been labelled a “showcase for the industry of the future” by the “Alliance industrie du futur”. The objective is to examine, on the one hand, the effects of the deployment of technologies ...