Plutôt un ou deux ripeurs derrière le camion-poubelle ? Quand la réalité du travailleur brise le rêve du gestionnaire

The concept of age management is proving to be powerless to fight against the exclusion of ageing employees from the labor market, particularly for health reasons. It is by questioning ourselves on a new idea, the management of employability and career paths through occupational health, that we have approached this question within the framework of a research project anchored in the field of waste collection. The aim is to study the consequences on working conditions of a "managerial" decision: the change from two-man teams of household waste collection workers (or "garbagemen") to a single one. We had the opportunity to enrich the managerial approach with the contribution of a physiologist and an ergonomist. This uncommon multidisciplinary approach allows us to confront the managerial temptation of rational cost optimization with the materiality of its consequences on the working conditions, and even on the health of the refuse collectors. The presentation of these results then leads the manager who gives the orders, for the duration of a call for tenders, to become a preventionist, proving that the two worlds, that of the manager and that of the preventionist, are not tight.