| Sumario: | In 2008, the Molex company announced the closure of its French site at Villemur-sur-Tarn. The 283 workers then began a long struggle to save their jobs but failed to prevent their redundancy. This article analyses the ways in which gender influences men's and women's capacity to resist when faced with the brutality of redundancy and the loss of social bonds that follows job loss. Studying gendered configurations within the factory, the context of the strike, and workers' families, it puts forward a rereading of the work of Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel on the unemployed of Marienthal and of the work of Durkheim on suicide that is inflected by the theoretical advances developed by gender studies, notably concerning the conception of ‘work’ as a vector of social integration. Considering domestic tasks and political commitment as forms of labour, it argues for a triangulated analysis of work, political mobilisation and the family, three spheres that generate the social bond, in a way which moves us beyond the classic division between public and private and allows us to track in finer detail the effects of the crisis on a social group, the workers, too often considered as homogenous (and male).
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