The latest addition to my website isLydie Salvayre‘s La Médaille (The Award). The book consists of speeches given at a ceremony in a French car factory where medals are being handed out to long-serving/exemplary workers. The speeches are given alternately by a management representative and the employee. Management tries to show how much it has the workers’ well-being at heart (rooms to masturbate in!) while trying to cope with dissent and increased absenteeism, while the workers are generally unhappy – poor working conditions and bullying bosses,and neither enjoy the job nor seem to get on with their fellow worker. As the ceremony progresses, we learn that there is unruliness going on on some workshops which turns into a riot, spilling over into the room where the ceremony is being held. Salvayre gives us a first-class saltire on modern labour relations.