French Industrial Relations in the New World Economy

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FRENCH INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN THE NEW WORLD ECONOMY Nick Parsons

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French Industrial Relations in the New World Economy

Nick Parsons

ISBN 978-0-415-36852-0

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French Industrial Relations in the New World Economy

In the last decades of the twentieth century, economic globalisation was seen by many to be threatening organised labour and the social protections it had won around the world. The national regimes in which labour movements were embedded, and the state policies and structures that supported them, came under increasing attack from a more mobile international capital. French Industrial Relations in the New World Economy analyses the impact of such a change in France, a country in which the state has traditionally played the predominant role in shaping employment patterns and social policy. The book looks at the changing economic context of industrial relations, and particular emphasis is placed on the notion of a shift from a national, Fordist form of economic regulation to an international, post-Fordist form. The impact of this shift on the role of the French state and on the balance of power between employer and trade union organisations are examined in detail. The consequences for changing strategies amongst these actors are analysed in chapters on the organisation of work, collective bargaining and workplace representation and conflict. Nick Parsons takes issue with the prevalent ‘microcorporatist’ thesis, arguing that the state still has a major role to play in French industrial relations. Nick Parsons is Senior Lecturer in French in the School of European Studies at Cardiff University. He has published on French politics and French and British industrial relations and is currently working with an EUfunded international research group on globalisation, employment and social security in Europe and China.

Routledge research in employment relations Series editors: Rick Delbridge and Edmund Heery Cardiff Business School

Aspects of the employment relationship are central to numerous courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Drawing from insights from industrial relations, human resource management and industrial sociology, this series provides an alternative source of research-based materials and texts, reviewing key developments in employment research. Books published in this series are works of high academic merit, drawn from a wide range of academic studies in the social sciences. 1 Social Partnership at Work Carola M. Frege 2 Human Resource Management in the Hotel Industry Kim Hoque 3 Redefining Public Sector Unionism UNISON and the future of trade unions Edited by Mike Terry 4 Employee Ownership, Participation and Governance A study of ESOPs in the UK Andrew Pendleton 5 Human Resource Management in Developing Countries Pawan S. Budhwar and Yaw A. Debrah 6 Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions International perspectives Edited by Fiona Colgan and Sue Ledwith 7 Inside the Factory of the Future Work, power and authority in microelectronics Alan Macinlay and Phil Taylor

8 New Unions, New Workplaces A study of union resilience in the restructured workplace Andy Danford, Mike Richardson and Martin Upchurch 9 Partnership and Modernisation in Employment Relations Edited by Mark Stuart and Miguel Martinez Lucio 10 Partnership at Work William K. Roche and John F. Geary 11 European Works Councils Pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will? Edited by Ian Fitzgerald and John Stirling 12 Employment Relations in Non-Union Firms Tony Dundon and Derek Rollinson 13 Management, Labour Process and Software Development Reality bytes Edited by Rowena Barrett 14 A Comparison of the Trade Union Merger Process in Britain and Germany Joining forces? Jeremy Waddington, Marcus Kahmann and Jürgen Hoffmann 15 French Industrial Relations in the New World Economy Nick Parsons Also available from Routledge: Rethinking Industrial Relations Mobilisation, collectivism and long waves John Kelly Employee Relations in the Public Services Themes and issues Edited by Susan Corby and Geoff White The Insecure Workforce Edited by Edmund Heery and John Salmon Public Service Employment Relations in Europe Transformation, modernisation or inertia? Edited by Stephen Bach, Lorenzo Bordogna, Giuseppe Della Rocca and David Winchester Reward Management A critical text Edited by Geoff White and Janet Druker

Working for McDonald’s in Europe The unequal struggle? Tony Royle Job Insecurity and Work Intensification Edited by Brendan Burchell, David Ladipo and Frank Wilkinson Union Organizing Campaigning for trade union recognition Edited by Gregor Gall Employment Relations in the Hospitality and Tourism Industries Rosemary Lucas

French Industrial Relations in the New World Economy

Nick Parsons

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Nick Parsons Typeset in Garamond by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-36852-9

Contents

List of tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations

1

viii ix xi

Introduction

1

Changing contexts: from Fordism to the ‘new world economy’

6

2

The role of the state

25

3

Trade unions

48

4

Employer organisations: from the CNPF to MEDEF

71

5

The organisation of work: from an authoritarian to a democratic workplace?

91

6

Collective bargaining

113

7

Workplace representation

133

8

Conflict

153

Conclusion

174

Notes Bibliography Index

183 207 217

Tables

1.1 3.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 8.1 8.2

Main economic indicators, 1960–85 Works committee election results, 1968–99 (% of votes cast) Workers engaged in repetitive work (selected categories, %) Task control Changes in employment structure, 1983–99 ‘National days of action’, 1954–86 Strike levels, 1992–8

15 51 99 100 102 159 160

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank the Leverhulme Trust, who generously awarded me a grant to enable the research for this book to be undertaken in 2000–1. This would not have been possible, either, without the support and cooperation of colleagues, who I also consider to be friends, in the French Section of the School of European Studies, Cardiff University. I thank them all for the efficient and effective manner in which they covered my teaching and administrative duties in order that I could benefit from a sabbatical year to carry out the groundwork for this book. In particular, I would like to express a deep debt of gratitude to Gordon Cumming, not only for judicious comments made on earlier drafts of parts of this book, but also for the manner in which he took on a great extra burden to facilitate my study leave in 2000–1. Part of that year, April and May 2001, was spent in the CNRS-LEST (Conseil national de la recherche scientifique-Laboratoire d’économie et de sociologie du travail) in Aix-en-Provence. I would like to express my gratitude to all staff in the ‘Labo’ for making me feel welcome and for generously giving their time to help me in my research. I had many useful discussions and received much valuable feedback from many of the researchers there, but special mention must go to Robert Tchobanian who was always ready to help, talk and listen, and who certainly clarified many of the profound complexities of French industrial relations for me. I am also indebted to many people who gave up their time to be interviewed during my research for this book. In no particular order, I would like to thank the following: Marc Blondel (FO), Jacques Bass (CFDT), Roland Metz (CGT), Alain Olive (UNSA), Jean-Pierre Roux (UNSA-Education), Annick Coupé (SUD-PTT), Gérard Aschieri (FSU-SNES), Louis Weber (FSU), Dominique Tellier (MEDEF), Lionel Strouillou (Conseiller d’Etat and former Inspecteur du travail ), and Jean Marimbert (Direction des Relations du Travail, Ministère de l’emploi). Next, I would like to thank my publishers, and in particular Anthony Haynes, for their patience with me during this project. Despite their patience, it would not have been possible to complete this project without the support of Laure, particularly during my prolonged absences on research trips to France, when she was left alone with the double burden that many women know only too well –

x Acknowledgements that of employment and child-rearing. Finally, I would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to Max, just for being Max, making me laugh and giving me a sense of perspective. I dedicate this book to him, the most important person in my life, while, of course, assuming total responsibility for its content.

Abbreviations

AFEP AGIRC ANACT

Association française des entreprises privées Association générale des institutions de retraite des cadres Agence nationale pour l’amélioration des conditions de travail ARRCO Association pour le régime des retraites complémentaires des salariés ASSEDIC-UNEDIC Association pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce-Union nationale interprofessionnelle pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce CFDT Confédération française démocratique du travail CFE-CGC Confédération française de l’encadrement-Confédération générale des cadres CFTC Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens CGC Confédération générale des cadres CGPF Confédération générale de la production française/Confédération générale du patronat français CGPME Confédération générale des petites et moyennes entreprises CGT Confédération générale du travail CHSCT Comité d’hygiène, de sécurité et des conditions de travail CJD Centre des jeunes dirigeants CJP Centre des jeunes patrons CNNC Conseil national de la négociation collective CNPF Conseil national du patronat français CRDS Contribution au remboursement de la dette sociale CSG Contribution sociale généralisée DARES Direction de l’animation de la recherche, des études et des statistiques ESC Economic and Social Council ETUC European Trade Union Confederation EWC European Works Council FDI Foreign direct investment FEN Fédération de l’Education nationale FGAAC Fédération générale autonome des agents de conduite

xii Abbreviations FO FSU GATT GDP G10 INSEE IRES ISO MEDEF OECD OPEC PARE PCF PDG PPESV PTT RATP SMIC SNCF SUD TUC UIMM UK UNEDIC UNSA UPA US WTO

Force ouvrière Fédération syndicale unitaire General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gross domestic product Groupe des dix Institut national des statistiques et études économiques Institut de recherches économiques et sociales International Standards Organisation Mouvement des entreprises de France Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries Plan d’aide au retour à l’emploi Parti communiste français Président-directeur général Plan partenarial d’épargne salariale volontaire Administration des postes et télécommunications et de la télédiffusion Régie autonome des transports parisiens Salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance Société nationale des chemins de fer Solidaires, unitaires, démocratiques Trades Union Congress Union des industries métallurgiques et minières United Kingdom Union pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce Union nationale des syndicats autonomes Union professionnelle artisanale United States World Trade Organisation

Introduction

In the final decades of the twentieth century, economic globalisation was seen by many to be threatening organised labour and the social protections it had won around the world, as the national regimes in which labour movements were embedded came under increasing attack from a more highly mobile international capital. In essence, in order to attract such capital to invest in national economies, states need to reduce taxation and welfare provision in a shift to neo-liberal economic policies. This also means abandoning any commitment to full employment as market forces play a greater role in determining employment and wage levels. The state’s capacity for macroeconomic and social regulation is thus subordinated to the dictates of an internationally mobile capital. Consequently, the power of organised labour is also undermined, particularly as these market forces now operate on an international scale. The prospect for workers is therefore one of reduced social protection, lower wages and poorer working conditions. The problem has been neatly summed up by Harris: Workers in different countries compete with each other for employment, offering employers the lowest price at a given level of labour productivity. The power of trade unions to influence this bargain without the support of the state is limited in a national context; in the international, it hardly exists for most occupations.1 From this perspective, the system of labour regulation in France – the ‘rules of the game’ by which wages and working conditions are established – is coming to resemble more closely that of other advanced industrial democracies under the pressure of a stateless and mobile investment capital. When comparing the industrial relations systems in advanced capitalist societies at a macro-economic level, what are immediately apparent are the characteristics they have in common and the trends towards convergence. These characteristics and trends concern the political economy, economic and social policies and institutions and labour markets. Thus, across Europe in the post-war period, welfare state institutions were created to protect workers from the risks of unemployment, accident, illness and old age;

2

Introduction

Keynesian economic policies aimed to maintain high employment levels and demand in order to sustain mass production industries oriented primarily towards national markets; and wage rises were granted to workers in exchange for the productivity gains afforded by their acceptance of Taylorist work practices. In effect, what has now become commonly known as the ‘Fordist compromise’ ensured that increased productivity led to increased wealth for wage earners and sustained a generous social welfare system. This benefited industry in a virtuous cycle, through the provision of mass consumer markets as an outlet – and therefore source of profits – for the increased output and productivity of industry. Within this, trade unions played an essential mediatory role between workers, the state and the interests of capital, ensuring that wage growth was tied to productivity gains. Since the mid-1970s, this ‘European model of society’2 has come under strain for several reasons but notably due to economic crises and globalisation and, to use Aglietta’s term, the ‘financialisation’ of the economy.3 The results of these processes have been, first, an increase in the severity of international economic competition. Second, the increasing investment role of (particularly US and British) financial institutions has led to the need for high profit margins in order to maintain shareholder value. In addition, the markets for the standardised goods typical of Taylorist production were becoming saturated from the late 1960s onwards, with more sophisticated consumer demand requiring differentiated products. As far as labour regulation is concerned, these trends have affected advanced capitalist societies in broadly similar ways. At the micro-economic level, the consequences have been an emphasis on quality and innovation in production while reducing costs. Taylorist production lines have been replaced by forms of work organisation that allow for flexible production through the use of computerised machinery, and more flexible forms of work organisation that rely increasingly on a worker’s responsibility and initiative. At the macro-economic level, the economic role of the state has been called into question, and the post-war commitment to full employment has been abandoned in favour of neo-liberal economic policies that are supposed to ensure price and wage stability, stimulate and attract investment (particularly from abroad) and promote growth by restoring company profit margins. Welfare systems in many countries have been reformed in order to reduce their financial burden on the state. Labour markets have become increasingly tertiarised, as national production systems have moved into high value-added areas and abandoned traditional industries under the challenge of cheaper production in developing economies. They have also become increasingly casualised through the growth in part-time and temporary employment. As employers seek greater control over production costs and greater flexibility from their workforces, the decentralisation (often centrally coordinated) of industrial relations has occurred, resulting in trends towards ‘microcorporatism’.4 The above developments have been harmful to

Introduction

3

trade union movements, which have lost members in many countries, and this shift in the balance of power away from labour towards capital has been accompanied by a marked decline in strike levels across all European countries.5 Thus, in the post-war years up until the late 1970s at least, a ‘European social model’, based upon the notion of the ‘Fordist compromise’ can be identified. However, an examination of how this regulation takes place reveals considerable national variation in institutions, levels of bargaining, legal regulations and so on.6 In effect, all countries in some way or another deviated from the ‘ideal’ Fordist model. Since the late 1970s, however, advanced capitalist societies have faced common problems associated with the maintenance of national competitiveness, and balancing this with the imperatives of social cohesion, in the face of economic globalisation. Although changes in the world economy may pose common problems, however, this does not mean that different countries will react in the same way. Thus, as for the post-war period, although common trends can be discerned at a fairly abstract level, closer examination again reveals considerable national variation in responses.7 The aim of this book is to examine one industrial relations system – the French one – and the changes that it has undergone in response to economic globalisation. France represents a pertinent case since, as we shall see, the system of industrial relations that developed within its borders after the Second World War was one that, for several reasons, relied upon a highly interventionist state. This state, in effect, often substituted itself for weak trade unions in the process of labour regulation. If changes in the global economy have deprived the state of its capacity for social and economic regulation this can therefore be expected to have a profound impact on the country’s industrial relations system. On the other hand, one could argue that a strong state could well be expected to mediate such changes and maintain high levels of social protection more successfully than a weak state. In this respect, a state-centred industrial relations system could prove more robust, ceteris paribus, in the face of pressure for change. By ‘industrial relations system’, we mean the actors in the industrial relations arena and the interactions between them that produce a ‘web of rules’ governing relations between employers, employees and their representative organisations.8 The focus of this book will therefore examine these actors and the ways in which they interact in a systematic fashion. To begin with, we start in Chapter 1 with an overview of the French industrial relations system as it developed in the post-war period, and set this within the economic context of the time, before examining the changes in that context. The following chapters then treat different parts of the industrial relations system to examine how this change of context has affected them. The format is essentially the same throughout. Each chapter examines the relevant part of the industrial relations system in the post-war period before examining how it has changed over the last three decades. We start with the actors in

4

Introduction

the industrial relations system, before dealing with the interactions between them in several domains. Given its centrality to economic and social regulation in the post-war period, the first actor dealt with is the state (Chapter 2), followed by the trade unions (Chapter 3) and employers (Chapter 4). Following an examination of national level employers’ organisations, we next look at how employers act, and interact with employees and unions, through the organisation of work, in Chapter 5. The next two chapters, 6 and 7 respectively, look at forms of cooperation between employers and the collective representatives of employees – collective bargaining and collective workplace representation. Finally, Chapter 8 deals with conflict, before the general conclusions from these different chapters are brought together. Such a dissection of an industrial relations system is in many ways an artificial one. It is very difficult, for example, to separate levels of conflict from the fortunes and strategies of trade unions; the difference between consultation via representative bodies and collective bargaining is at times blurred to the point of non-existence; and in the French context is it difficult to avoid talking about state actions and strategies whatever part of the industrial relations system is being examined. Although each chapter is designed to give insight into a particular part of the industrial relations system on a stand-alone basis, there is multiple cross-referencing across the chapters. This is inevitable as an industrial relations system must be seen as a more or less coherent whole, with the constituent parts interacting to form a system of regulating the employment relationship. Dissecting the system along the above lines does, however, have the advantage of bringing out such relationships more clearly than if a more general overview were attempted. It also reveals how each part of the system has changed, or been changed, as adjustments to new economic circumstances have been made. This is not to argue any form of economic determinism. Indeed, as suggested above, changes in the industrial relations environment are not inevitable in their form and content. Rather they will be mediated by the pre-existing institutional characteristics of the industrial relations system and the former compromises they embody as well as by the pre-existing actors, all with their own attitudes and values, which inform their past, present and future strategic choices. The underlying assumption of what follows is that the state, trade unions and employers are all actors in the industrial relations system. That is to say that they can all adopt strategies that they see as commensurate with their own aims, and can exercise choices within the framework of those strategies, as they respond to the stimuli of their environment. This is not to say that they can freely select their actions from an infinite number of paths. All are constrained by structural political, economic, social and cultural variables, including their own histories and their perceptions of the strategies of their interlocutors. These variables will limit the range of choices open to them. Furthermore, some actors are likely to be more constrained than others in their choices as the distribution of power resources, itself influenced by structural variables, will favour some

Introduction

5

actors rather than others in their interactions.9 Thus, underlying economic changes, combined with the pre-existing characteristics of the French industrial relations system are likely to make certain developments more likely than others as they affect the power resources and strategic choices available to the actors in the system.

1

Changing contexts From Fordism to the ‘new world economy’

Industrial relations in post-war France After years of oppression and operating clandestinely, the French labour movement emerged from the Second World War stronger than it had ever been. Many employers were discredited by collaboration and profiteering, while the labour movement, and its communist wing in particular, gained new legitimacy due to its opposition and resistance to the Nazi invaders. Indeed, the CGT could claim nearly four million members immediately after the war,1 and the PCF was the most powerful political party, participating in the 1944–7 tripartite government alongside socialists and Christian democrats. Old divisions soon surfaced, however, as a split in the CGT in 1947 led to the establishment of FO the following year. Ostensibly, the split was over a pay strike at Renault after the government used its continuing wartime controls over prices and wages to block an agreement between the CNPF and the CGT for an 11 per cent pay rise. The PCF supported the CGT, and its ministers were promptly expelled from government, while the opposition of the Force ouvrière faction within the CGT resulted in division. Behind this split, however, there were other issues: concern at the growing hold of the PCF over the union confederation, and division over Marshall Aid, which was seen as a question of national independence versus subservience to the US. Thus, once the threat of fascism had receded, the French labour movement once again split into its pro- and anti-communist factions. Such division was to leave it seriously weakened in the new Cold War climate. Nevertheless, in the early post-war years, left and centre governments attempted to regulate industrial relations and to strengthen the position of labour through institutional means. Thus, at the workplace level, works committees were made obligatory in all companies of 50 or more employees in 1945, and, in 1946, worker delegates were re-established along the lines of the 1936 law, that is to say in all companies of ten or more employees. The 1946 Constitution of the Fourth Republic enshrined the right to form associations and to strike, and in the same year the Parodi–Croizot decrees extended the classification structures first introduced in the metalworking

Changing contexts

7

industry. This meant that the qualifications and skills needed to perform a particular job, and the pay awarded for them were formalised, rendering the allocation of a worker to a certain classification dependent upon bureaucratic structures rather than arbitrary management authority. In the public sector, arbitrary management authority was also curtailed by the Statut de la fonction publique. Introduced in 1946, this set out the terms and conditions of employment, as well as the rights of representation, for public sector workers. The position of trade unions in the public sector was enhanced by this move as joint consultative committees were established to examine promotions as well as technical problems. At the national level, attempts were also made to regulate class antagonisms by the institutionalisation of capital–labour relations. Thus, Planning Commissions were introduced in the aftermath of war to coordinate strategies for economic recovery and associated trade unions and employer federations with their work in order to give them the opportunity to air their views on national economic management. A new generalised social security system was also established in 1946, and trade unions were associated with its management through their place on the bipartite boards that managed the system. In 1958, the management of the UNEDIC unemployment benefits board was devolved to representatives of capital and labour. To encourage dialogue between employer and trade union organisations, a 1950 law aimed to institutionalise collective bargaining as the main means of conflict resolution, particularly at national level. This law defined the content of agreements, as well as the union organisations able to sign them at national level. These organisations were deemed to be nationally representative due to their membership numbers, political independence and attitude during the war, and since a decree of 1966 established their representativeness for all time, they now include the CGT, CFDT, FO, CFTC and CGC. Furthermore, an extension procedure was introduced so that any agreement deemed worthy could be extended to a whole region, industry or even to the whole nation after consideration by the tripartite Conseil supérieur de la convention collective. Finally, the Economic and Social Council was established in 1958 as a tripartite body to enable representatives of both capital and labour to be consulted on new legislation going before parliament. In addition to this legislative and institutional framework, the state attempted to regulate industrial relations through its role as the single largest employer in the economy. A wave of nationalisations in key sectors of the economy following the Second World War meant that the state directly employed one-tenth of the workforce in France,2 and could use this position to promote a strategy of gaining the cooperation of the working class for essential economic reconstruction. Thus, the state played an important role in promoting laws on employee representation by offering a model for the private sector to follow. It gave an impetus to collective bargaining in the 1950s when the then publicly-owned Renault became the first company

8

Changing contexts

to sign company agreements. In particular, the ground-breaking 1955 agreement in the company gave workers a third week’s paid holiday, a complementary company pension scheme and linked wage rises to productivity. The first two elements were subsequently extended economy-wide, using the extension procedure, while the third element aimed to give a lead to the private sector for productivity agreements. Despite such attempts to foster dialogue at national and local level, however, the system of industrial relations that evolved in the post-war period was a politicised and conflictual one, with class antagonisms always near, if not at, the surface. The unions were ideologically divided and therefore weakened by internecine struggles amongst themselves, despite periods of cooperation such as the CFDT-CGT ‘unity in action’ pact of 1966–78. Employers, keen to guard their prerogatives in the workplace, refused any official trade union presence in the company and were able to play unions off against each other, particularly as only one representative union needed to sign a deal for it to be applicable. In such circumstances, the pattern was generally for a reformist union – FO, the CFTC or CGC – to sign deals with employers, usually at industry level, and for the CGT to denounce these as class collaboration and betrayal. The CGT, however, benefited from a certain hegemony over a large part of the working class for much of the period,3 undermining the legitimacy of any negotiated agreement between employers and reformist trade unions. Under such circumstances, collective bargaining remained underdeveloped, with conflict and state arbitration providing the main means of conflict resolution. More generally, the radical, anti-capitalist stance of the CGT rejected any power-sharing arrangements that might imply the integration of labour into the capitalist enterprise whether at national or local level. Thus, the confederation withdrew from the Planning Commissions following the removal of the PCF from government in 1947. Such attitudes found reciprocation in employer paternalism and authoritarianism in the workplace, rendering face-to-face bargaining difficult as each side denied the legitimacy of the other. In such conditions, disputes often moved up from the shopfloor to the national level, where they became imbued with a wider political and societal significance. Heightened class antagonism inevitably resulted in frequent strikes, particularly given the severe discipline imposed by employers in the absence of trade union defences in the workplace. Even when agreements were signed, they were not considered binding, but rather as a reflection of the balance of power at the time of signature. Once this changed, everything was up for grabs again, and the CGT in particular saw the agreement as a truce in an ongoing war. Although agreements were signed at the national level, the workplace was neutralised as an arena for bargaining, with trade unions only gaining the legal right to set up workplace branches following the May 1968 strike wave. Although originally vehemently resisted by employers when they were legislated for, works committees came to be seen as a means of

Changing contexts

9

enabling dialogue to take place in the workplace while excluding unions from it.4 Such an attitude was reflected by trade union concerns. Although it left employer authority largely unchecked in the workplace, it also avoided the risk of incorporation for local activists and ensured against local deals being made that would contradict national strategies. Lacking influence on the shopfloor, unions, particularly the CGT and later the CFDT, followed a political strategy aimed at getting a sympathetic left-wing government elected in order to further the interests of the working class.5 In the same vein, protests and demands were directed against the state, rather than employers, in order to build up pressure for reform and legislation favourable to the working class. In effect, a traditionally weak trade union movement had never managed to impose collective bargaining upon reluctant employers, as had been the case in Britain for example. In the absence of regular and institutionalised collective bargaining, both employers and unions turned to the state for reform in their favour. Management authoritarianism predominated in the workplace, while unions – and particularly the dominant CGT – neglected concrete workplace issues in favour of generalised demands at the national level in order to concentrate upon class mobilisation for a political transformation of capitalist society. As state action in the labour market arena often acted as a substitute for collective bargaining, the industrial relations system that evolved in the post-war period in France was, despite the attempts of the state to integrate labour into the political economy, underinstitutionalised, politicised, conflictual and state-centred. Ideological divisions between union confederations and the ideological gulf between the CGT, as the main collective representative of labour, and employers meant that the system was based upon ‘raw power relations’6 rather than upon direct compromise bargaining between capital and labour.

Post-war growth and industrial relations in France: an exclusionary settlement or a tacit (Fordist) compromise? And yet, from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s, France went through ‘thirty glorious years’7 of high and sustained economic growth. From 1951 to 1973, the French economy grew at an average rate of 5.4 per cent per annum, accelerating throughout the 1960s to reach 5.6 per cent for the 1967–73 period.8 Growth was based upon continually increasing levels of productivity, which allowed companies to respond to the wage demands of their employees while maintaining high profit levels. In effect, wage rises fed through into growing and high levels of demand, which in turn stimulated productive investment, productivity growth and full employment in a ‘virtuous circle’.9 Such an apparent contradiction between the presence of a hegemonic anti-capitalist trade union fostering industrial unrest and unprecedented economic success merits closer examination. The first explanation comes from the field of political economy, and was

10

Changing contexts

put forward by Ross, Lange and Vannicelli in the early 1980s.10 They essentially argue that the CGT did not pose a threat to French capitalism because, while it may have had an ideological hold over a large section of the French working class, it was nevertheless weak. Indeed, the post-war period is characterised by Ross et al. as a ‘labour exclusionary settlement’ due to the absence of labour representatives from power throughout the whole of the ‘thirty glorious years’. As we have seen, the PCF was pushed out of government in 1947, never to return until 1981 when it formed a very junior partner in the first Mitterrand government, until 1984. At the local level, as we have seen, labour was also excluded from the workplace as a collective actor until 1968. Thus, although able to shake French capitalism from time to time, such as in 1968, the labour movement could pose no serious threat to it, and concentrated upon a political strategy aimed at capturing the liberal democratic state through the ballot box rather than on attempts at revolutionary political and economic change. Such an explanation, however, seriously underestimates the extent to which labour was being integrated into the political economy of France at this time. It is true that the political representatives of labour were excluded from power, first by the ‘republican discipline’ and coalition politics of the centre-left and centre-right under the Fourth Republic, then by the bipolarisation caused by the presidentialism of the Fifth Republic. It is also true that trade unions, especially the CGT, came up against a reluctance on the part of employers to enter into bargaining arrangements, and therefore concentrated their efforts on the political rather than the industrial sphere, thereby neglecting workplace concerns. Neither were they ever strong or disciplined enough to enter into corporatist arrangements whereby wage restraint is exchanged for beneficial macro-economic policies. By and large, the state could ignore the maximalist demands of the CGT, for example over wages and nationalisations. Yet despite the withdrawal of the CGT from the Planning Commissions, trade unions were given an admittedly limited role in national economic management by the establishment of bipartism in social security fund management. More importantly, the ‘labour exclusion’ thesis does not explain how workers were able to secure continual wage and social security gains at a time when they were apparently marginalised from macro-economic decision-making. Indeed, it could be argued that, although the collective political and industrial representatives of labour were excluded from wielding power, workers themselves were being integrated into capitalist political and economic structures in France. First, the long period of sustained economic growth after the Second World War brought real increases in wages and standards of living as workers moved from the countryside to take up jobs in the developing urban centres of the economy. The introduction of the generalised social security system also undid many of the harsher elements of pre-war French capitalism, providing insurance against unemployment, accident, sickness and old age. Thus, while workers may have continued to

Changing contexts

11

vote massively for the PCF, it cannot be assumed from this that they had a revolutionary consciousness. When they joined the students in the May 1968 strike wave, some may have believed that the time for revolution had come. Most, however, were concerned with more mundane issues such as wage rises and an end to the rigid hierarchical structures and harsh management discipline of the Taylorised workplace.11 Indeed, unemployment, which reached 400,000 in 1967, and inflationary pressures were already creating tensions among workers before the events of May 1968. The drift back to work following the Grenelle Accords is also hardly evidence of a revolutionary working class, and many workers voted for stability in the legislative elections just a few weeks later.12 Furthermore, one of the most significant themes to emerge in May 1968, in terms of industrial relations, was that of the ‘humanisation of work’. This was certainly a rejection of the productivist ethos and rigid, authoritarian hierarchies that prevailed in French industry at the time, and echoed CFDT demands for autogestion (workers’ self-management), but it was not necessarily a demand for an end to capitalism. Rather it was a demand for respect from bosses at work, and for more interesting work. Up until this time, workers may have put up with boring, alienating work, but the sacrifice was seen as worth it due to the material rewards it brought for generations used to the hardship of war and post-war reconstruction. It is only with the entry into the labour force of new generations of workers, who were better educated and more used to continually improving standards of living, that authoritarian management practices and alienating work come under serious challenge. In the 1970s, even the PCF realised that its maximalist Marxist rhetoric was out of tune with the feelings of the majority of workers, and made attempts to tone it down, dropping, for example, references to the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976. Thus, while labour movement weakness is undoubtedly a major factor in the explanation of how an anti-capitalist union could coexist with an economically dynamic capitalist state, the underlying explanation may have more to do with the economic integration of workers into the capitalist economy, rather than with the political and economic exclusion of their collective organisations. The second explanation, a more convincing one, is derived from theories of economic regulation. Regulation theorists basically argue that ‘a particular pattern of [capital] accumulation may be said to correspond to a set of institutions that are necessary for that accumulation to take place. In the language of the Regulation School: for a “regime of accumulation” to reproduce itself, it requires a corresponding “mode of regulation” ’.13 In other words, economic growth and efficiency are not a function of purely market forces determining rates of wages and profit, but of an institutional framework – the mode of regulation – that allows a productive system – the regime of accumulation – to achieve its potential for securing growth. For the Regulation School, a regime of extensive accumulation, based upon expanding the productive sector of the economy as capitalism

12

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expanded into new sectors and countries, was replaced by an intensive regime of accumulation based upon the building up of domestic demand as a source of profit. This occurred, first, in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, then in Europe in the post-war period and involved a shift in perspective so that wages were no longer seen as merely a cost to capital, but also as a component of demand. The ‘mode of labour regulation’ correspondingly shifted to one based upon a competitive labour market to a ‘Fordist’ mode of regulation involving full employment, Keynesian demand management and high productivity interacting in a virtuous circle of growth.14 One of the main concerns of the Regulation School has been to examine the different ‘national trajectories’, or institutional frameworks, appearing in different countries that enabled Fordist accumulation to take place within different patterns of national development. There is considerable debate about the stage at which Fordism arrived in France and, indeed, the extent to which it ever did arrive. Hewlett, for example, speaks of ‘the absence of Fordist compromise’ due to the ideologically polarised and conflictual nature of French politics until the 1980s.15 Howell argues that France did not become ‘fully Fordist’ until the effects of the Gaullist modernisation programme of the late 1950s and 1960s were felt.16 For him, this shift from extensive to intensive accumulation started with post-war reconstruction but was not completed until industrial modernisation and the loss of protected colonial markets. This only occurred towards the end of the 1960s, as no regularised collective bargaining occurred to ensure stable wage increases for workers, while fiscal and welfare policy was only weakly progressive and not aimed at developing mass demand, but at shifting resources to productive investment. The mode of regulation thus remained based upon labour markets until after May 1968, with wage rises the result of conflict rather than any institutionalised compromise tying wages to productivity. Boyer, on the other hand, argues that all of the characteristics of the Fordist compromise, save a rise in mass consumption, were in place well before the 1960s.17 Lastly, Freyssinet also places the development of Fordism in the first half of the 1950s, as workers accepted new forms of work organisation and higher productivity in exchange for the increasing purchasing power that was to make possible higher consumption and a virtuous cycle of economic growth and social progress.18 What these differing perspectives hide is the extent to which emphasis is placed upon the existence or not of mechanisms to ensure the consensual redistribution of the fruits of economic development. In the French case, however, it could be argued that a broadly defined Fordist compromise, as understood by Freyssinet, came into being despite the absence of such mechanisms. In this respect, French Fordism was not incompatible with a weakly integrated labour movement. The weakness of this, and the concomitant underdevelopment of collective bargaining, ensured that rather than being regular and consensual, Fordist redistribution occurred sporadically and was associated with conflict.

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13

Nevertheless, at the heart of all patterns of Fordist growth was a compromise between labour and capital within which workers accepted the modernisation of productive processes. This basically meant the introduction and expanded use of Taylorist mass-production methods, leaving control of the production sphere and of labour processes in the hands of employers and managers in exchange for wage growth and higher standards of living. In effect, a frontier of control was established that saw the fruits of production, but not the production process itself as a legitimate area for dispute and bargaining. A link between productivity, wage growth and profitability was thus established: the large productivity gains generated permitted significant wage rises to be conceded without damaging the conditions for capital accumulation due to the effect of wage rises on consumption and the consequent development of a consumer society. Productivity had therefore to continually rise at least in line with wages and inflation to ensure stable conditions for capital accumulation, while a market had to be available for the goods thus produced. Within this logic, the role of the state was to achieve low levels of unemployment and to provide welfare benefits to those not in employment to ensure high and stable demand for mass-produced consumer goods. At first glance, such a system of capital accumulation would appear anathema to a trade union with revolutionary aspirations such as the CGT. The role of unions in such a scenario is effectively to dampen discontent among the workforce, and to accept the frontier of control – i.e. employer hegemony in the French case – in the workplace, in exchange for increasing real wages. And yet, in many ways, Fordism suited CGT strategies. First, until 1968, the confederation was legally excluded from the workplace anyway, and so could not hope to push demands for workers’ control with any great success. Second, it was hoped that the conditions of the Taylorised factory, with its alienating work and management control of processes, would bring home to workers the conditions of their exploitation and therefore push them into the arms of the PCF. Developing a class consciousness among the working class was effectively seen as facilitated by the homogenisation of labour resulting from the spread of Taylorism. Within this outlook, workplace demands were potentially divisive: the ‘mass and class’ orientation of the CGT and its recruitment of workers from all economic sectors required concentration upon national level aggregate demands. Third, in its ‘underdeveloped’ French guise, Fordism effectively sanctioned the CGT’s strategy of concentrating on national level political change through the tacit abandonment of any attempt to challenge employers in the production sphere. Productivism itself was not an issue for the CGT, indeed it actually welcomed it. The problem was one of ownership, with the CGT arguing for the nationalisation of industry, and of the equitable distribution of the fruits of production; a highly productive national industry could only be good for the socialist state when it came into being. Finally, Fordism was well suited to the CGT’s wage strategy that dominated the industrial

14

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relations system in the post-war period. As no regular bargaining channels existed to distribute the fruits of growth, this occurred through sporadic, often generalised, conflict, which the CGT saw as functional to the formation of a radical class consciousness. Economistic wage demands could therefore be given an ideological hue as any gains were won through struggle. Further ideological justification was given by tying demands for maximum wage gains for workers across a sector, or even the whole economy, to the undermining of conditions for capital accumulation and therefore to the hastening of the end of the capitalist system. Whether such arguments were realistic or even sincerely believed is not important here. What is important is that this challenge could be accommodated within a Fordist framework as long as wage rises did not outstrip productivity, and it allowed the CGT to espouse a revolutionary rhetoric whilst claiming to secure material gains for workers. This latter point was also facilitated by a division of labour amongst trade unions. Thus, the CGT could remain free to denounce agreements between reformist unions and employers in the knowledge that its own supporters would also benefit from them. In effect, incremental gains could be won without the organisation having to betray its revolutionary aspirations and heritage, thereby upholding the confederation’s bedrock of working-class support.

The break-up of Fordism and economic globalisation The problem for the CGT was that the Fordist system of capital accumulation came under increasing strain from the 1960s onwards, and was all but torn asunder by economic crises and globalisation from the 1970s onwards. The tripling of the price of oil in 1973–4 and its subsequent doubling in 1979 provoked economic crisis in all western capitalist economies. Although the crisis was not felt in France until later than in other countries, with economic recession not appearing until 1975, 1973 nevertheless marks a turning point. The main economic indicators all show dramatic deterioration from the mid-1970s onwards (see Table 1.1). Rates of economic growth fell dramatically from an annual average of 5.6 per cent between 1967–73 to just over half that rate for the rest of the 1970s, and remained sluggish for the 1980s and 1990s, averaging 2.1 per cent from 1981 to 2000.19 Increased costs of raw materials, including energy, fed through into inflation, which doubled within the space of a year to reach 14.8 per cent in 1974.20 It was only to be brought under control by the deflationary policies of the 1980s and 1990s, falling to an annual average of 6.2 per cent for 1981–90 and 1.6 per cent for 1991–2000.21 The increased cost of imports and slack export markets in a sluggish world economy also resulted in constant balance of payments deficits from the end of the 1970s until 1992. Since then, constant surpluses have been recorded thanks to the compression of internal demand through monetarist economic policies and a strong export performance, with a high point of 2.8 per cent of GDP being reached in 1998.22 Finally, a

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15

Table 1.1 Main economic indicators, 1960–85

GDP growth (% p.a.) Per capita productivity growth (% p.a.) Real wages growth (% p.a.) Inflation (%) Balance of payments on current account (% of GDP) Budget surplus/deficit (% GDP)

1960–73 1973–9

1979–85

5.6* 4.9 5.0 4.7 0.2

3.1 2.9 4.0 10.4 0.6

1.1 1.6 1.5 9.9 1.5

0.5

0.9

2.4

Source: Boyer, R. (ed.) (1988) The Search for Labour Market Flexibility: The European Economies in Transition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 20, 210. Note *OECD figures put this growth rate slightly higher, at 5.8%.

growth in unemployment had a negative effect on public accounts, with deficits being the order of the day from 1975 onwards. These averaged 2.3 per cent of GDP from 1981–90, and rose to 3.9 per cent from 1991–2000. A high point of 6 per cent was reached in 1993 before attempts to control public spending to meet the targets of the Maastricht Treaty for European Monetary Union paid off with a fall to 3 per cent by 1997.23 The deteriorating economic environment provoked by the oil crises reduced the profit margins of employers, with gross profit levels falling from around 31 per cent of value added in the early 1970s to just over 26 per cent by 1975. The downward trend continued until 1983 when a low of 24 per cent was reached, before profits recovered and surpassed the levels of the early 1970s from the mid-1980s onwards.24 In response, employers reduced their productive investments, which fell from an average annual growth rate of 6.6 per cent for the 1970–4 period to 1.0 per cent per annum for the remainder of the decade. They also laid off workers in order to reduce costs in the face of reduced demand. Thus, unemployment began its inexorable rise in 1974, climbing from half to one million between June 1974 and September 1975, and only dipping slightly between 1989 and 1990, and in 1995, before reaching its record level of 12.6 per cent of the active population in 1997. Wages followed the trend only belatedly, their general progression falling only slightly from 1973–9 (see Table 1.1). The indexation of public sector wages until 1983 and the rise in the minimum wage following the electoral victory of the Left in 1981 reinforced this situation and compressed profit margins. From 1983 onwards, however, the trend was reversed as governments pursued deflationary policies (see Chapter 2). Thus, growth in net wages per head fell from an average annual rate of 2.7 per cent in the 1970s to 0.4 per cent in the 1980s, and 0.9 per cent from 1990–7.25 Likewise, as a percentage of company value added, wages rose from 64 per cent to 69 per cent from 1970 to the beginning of 1983, before falling to oscillate around the 60 per cent mark in the 1990s.26

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Thus, the virtuous circle of high productivity, high growth and high wage progression of the 30 glorious years seemed to have been transformed into a vicious circle of low growth, low demand, wage compression and high unemployment as employers reacted to squeezed profit margins by reducing their costs. The effects of the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 threw the strains of a regime of economic growth based upon Fordism into sharp relief, although some of these tensions were already present in the system itself. Indeed, although 1973 may mark a turning point as far as economic indicators are concerned, the terms of the Fordist compromise were already being unravelled by deeper structural changes in the nature of late twentieth-century capitalism. Some of the reasons for the break-up of the Fordist system of capital accumulation were inherent in the system itself. First, the limits to continually increasing productivity through the intensification of work using Taylorist production methods were being reached. Put simply, production lines can only be speeded up so far until workers can no longer keep pace, no matter how young, fit and dexterous they are. Second, the new generations entering the labour market benefited from a better education than their predecessors27 and had higher expectations concerning material wealth and their own role in the workplace. They were no longer prepared to put up with the alienation engendered by the separation of conception and execution inherent to Taylorism, and protested against authoritarian management and ‘inhuman’ working conditions. Thus, a wave of semi-skilled workers’ strikes in the early 1970s picked up on a theme that emerged in the May 1968 strike wave – that of the humanisation of work – with demands for less boring jobs and more autonomy at work. Third, expectations of continual wage rises fuelled inflation. Wage growth only outstripped productivity growth by 0.1 per cent for the 1960–73 period, but the large wage gains following the May 1968 strike wave had contributed to pushing inflation up to 8 per cent by the end of 1973. For the rest of the decade, wage growth outstripped productivity growth by an average of 1.1 per cent per annum. Finally, with increased wealth and the development of a consumer society, came a demand for more differentiated products. The demand for cheap, standardised products was saturated as the scarcity of the post-war period became a distant memory. In many ways, these tensions could have been accommodated by reform within the system, but Fordism also came under exogenous pressures that compounded, and in many ways were more important than, these endogenous ones. First, industrialised countries were faced with competition from emerging countries such as Japan from the 1960s onwards, and this provoked a change in productive systems. Unable to compete in terms of price in the market for cheap standardised products (a market that was in decline in advanced industrial countries anyway), western manufacturers turned to competition on the notion of quality and differentiated, rather than standardised, goods. Some commentators argued that the appearance of new

Changing contexts

17

technologies in the 1980s was enabling companies to reorganise production in order to overcome the social problems associated with Taylorism – high rates of absenteeism and labour turnover – while responding to consumer demands for differentiated products. Thus, workplaces were increasingly switching to systems of flexible specialisation based upon short-batch production and team-working as Tayorist production lines were dismantled and replaced by new, flexible, micro-electronic and computerised machinery.28 The automation and robotisation of productive processes in many industries meant that workers needed to be more skilled to oversee and operate the more complex machinery. They also needed to be more involved in their work in order to take more responsibility for the quality of their production. Indeed, the Japanese model of industrial organisation, based on lean production and employee participation, was held up as the one to emulate following the success of the Japanese economy throughout the 1970s and 1980s.29 Increased international competition was evidence of a deep structural change in the nature of capitalism, the ramifications of which would not become clear until the economic crises and balance of payments deficits of the 1970s and 1980s. Fordism, being based on the development of the domestic market, was essentially a national strategy for economic recovery and growth, but the world economy was internationalising from the 1950s onwards. In 1955, world exports were worth $93 billion, but by 1975 this figure had risen to $873 billion.30 In the following decades, this trend intensified, with world exports reaching a value of $4920 billion in 1996, twenty-five times their value in the mid-1960s.31 For France, this growth in world trade and increasing international economic interdependence was reflected in the increasingly important place of exports and imports in the economy. In the period 1951–5, imports plus exports accounted for 22 per cent of GDP. This figure had risen to 40.2 per cent by the end of the 1970s32 and to just over half of GDP by 1997.33 For manufacturing produce, the volume of imports and exports has doubled since 1975, with nearly 50 per cent of French produce destined for export and 40 per cent of the domestic market taken up by imports at the end of the 1990s.34 Although international trade is more highly developed for manufactured goods, the internationalisation of the service industry is also developing apace. Services now account for 20 per cent of world trade and 25 per cent of French international trade, with France the world’s second largest exporter of services until 1997, when it was overtaken by Great Britain.35 From the mid-1980s onwards, this growth in world trade has been accompanied by another development that has further reinforced international economic interdependency. With the liberalisation of world trade and financial markets under the auspices of the GATT and the WTO, foreign direct investment (FDI) has grown rapidly as enterprises have engaged in cross-frontier mergers and acquisitions, and split their activities between different countries, seeking the most advantageous conditions for production and distribution. Thus, new companies have been created or

18

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existing ones taken over following the liberalisation of capital movements in many countries from the mid-1980s onwards. The establishment of local distribution networks and the granting of concessionary licences by multinational companies represents another aspect of this development as enterprises have sought alternatives to exportation to conquer foreign markets. As a result, between 1985 and 1997, the world stock of FDI rose from $700 billion to $3500 billion. In percentage terms, this trend represents a rise from 2.7 per cent of world investment in 1980 to 7.1 per cent in 1998, and a rise in terms of proportion of world GDP between 1980 and 1997 from 3.4 per cent to 10.1 per cent for inward FDI and from 2.7 per cent to 13.6 per cent for outward FDI.36 This is a trend in which France has participated fully, with investment abroad representing 15 per cent of total investment in 1997 compared to just 3 per cent before 1984.37 Indeed, France is at the forefront of this growing movement towards international economic interdependency, being the world’s fourth largest investor abroad and third largest receptor of foreign direct investment by the late 1990s.38 In 1999, outward FDI doubled compared with 1998 to reach 543 billion francs,39 once again making France the third largest investor abroad.40 France’s position in the financial flows of the emerging global economy has been described by Chaponnière as that of a ‘crossroads’.41 The importance of France’s insertion into the global economy cannot be measured purely in terms of inflows and outflows of trade and investment, however. Such flows of goods, services and capital translate into a reliance on the global economy for job and wealth creation. Despite the increasing importance of FDI in the services sector, most (58 per cent) is still concentrated in manufacturing industry, where, in 1998, it accounted for 30 per cent of jobs, 36 per cent of investment and 40 per cent of exports.42 FDI in France is particularly important in the high-tech sectors of the economy where foreign-owned firms held 46 per cent of the French market in 1998.43 Overall in 1998, foreign capital had majority control of 14.2 per cent of the 22,000 manufacturing companies employing more than 20 people in France. This represented a rise from 18 per cent to 30 per cent of jobs in the sector over the period 1980–98.44 The development of FDI as a symptom of the growing mobility of capital has led to fears over the impact on employment in France of the globalisation of economic activity. The 1993 Arthuis Report expressed clearly the fear that jobs would be exported from France as companies shifted their production to developing countries to take advantage of cheaper labour costs.45 However, 92 per cent of French FDI abroad goes to OECD countries, particularly to the EU which takes up 61 per cent. Only 10 per cent goes to low-wage countries, defined as having average salaries under 60 per cent of those in France.46 Only in the textiles industry do relocations for cheaper production appear to be significant, and even here it is calculated that only 10 per cent of jobs had been lost in this manner by the mid-1990s.47 On the other hand, it has been estimated that five million jobs in France – or 22 per

Changing contexts

19

cent of the active population – depend directly or indirectly on exports48 and that 860,000 workers in France work for foreign-owned companies.49 Until now, rather than exporting jobs, the strategy of French companies has been to attempt to expand into new markets through FDI via the acquisition of production and distribution units abroad.50 Nevertheless, some high-profile relocations, such as Hoover’s 1993 decision to shift production from France to Scotland to reduce its costs, have had an impact. They show, first, that such a possibility for French workers in any sector cannot be ruled out, and second that regime competition exists from within, and not only from outside of, the EU. Indeed, such behaviour could develop in future years as developing countries catch up with the infrastructure, technology and workforce skills of advanced (post-) industrial nations through FDI inflows from these nations. Furthermore, the development of an international market for services and the expansion of the EU to the east will intensify competition as well as opening up new markets for French companies.

From a Fordist to a ‘patrimonial’ economy? In the light of these developments, the Regulation School has been criticised for its focus on the minutiae of national institutions, in particular those surrounding the employment relationship, in its search for different development patterns. As a consequence, there is a tendency to ‘exaggerate the autonomy of national economic systems in the context of more intense internationalizations and (what is today essentially the same error) to underestimate the weight of relatively autonomous developments in the sphere of money and increasingly internationalized finance’.51 Thus, it is argued that although regulation theory has validity in explaining the long period of sustained growth following the Second World War and the subsequent demise of the model associated with it, it has failed to provide a full and coherent explanation of the dynamics of a new post-Fordist growth model.52 Nevertheless, these criticisms notwithstanding, some progress has been made in outlining the development of a new regime of accumulation in an internationalised economy. Aglietta has theorised the changes in the nature of capitalism brought about by the liberalisation of finance.53 At the root of such change was President Nixon’s decision in 1971 to suspend the convertibility of the dollar into gold, and the high levels of inflation in western economies following the petrol crises of the 1970s. These events introduced uncertainty into international economic exchanges and reduced the control of states over them. Subsequent trade, and particularly financial, liberalisation has led to the development of increasing financial integration on a global level and to what Aglietta terms ‘capitalisme patrimonial’ (equity-based capitalism). Again, this appeared first in the United States, then progressively in Western Europe, as new and more sophisticated savings and investment products were marketed to take advantage of the opportunities for high returns created by financial liberalisation.

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Thus, at the centre of this new regime of accumulation is the extension of employee shareholdings through the growth of investment institutions on a global scale. Boyer points to the role that demographics has played in such a change: an ageing population has exposed the fragility of financing national insurance systems by redistribution, thereby encouraging the growth of private insurance, pension provision and saving via the capital market.54 The consequent financial power of institutions such as US and British investment and pension funds has, according to this argument, led to a change in the nature of capital accumulation, and therefore of corporate governance. Investment became geared towards securing a high rate of return for capital rather than towards increasing productivity, particularly as financial investments secure a higher rate of return than productive investment. With economic globalisation and the growing role of international finance, the main objectives of large companies quoted on the stock exchange became to ensure high profit margins and to increase their share price in order to satisfy shareholders and attract further investment. Thus, ‘The high return on savings in the form of capital gains is the determining characteristic of patrimonial capitalism’, while ‘Institutional investors have become the financial agents that play the most important role in the allocation of capital.’55 Although the US and the UK are seen as the primary examples of this change in the regime of accumulation, the spectacular development of the Paris stock exchange is evidence that the French economy, while not fully ‘financialised’, is not sheltered from such an evolution.56 The total value of stocks and shares on the Bourse was equivalent to 27 per cent of GDP in 1990, whereas this figure had risen to 111 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade.57 This development owes much to international capital flows: in 2000, 36 per cent of the value of stocks and shares on the Paris stock exchange was in the hands of foreign institutional investors, who accounted for 80 per cent of transactions.58 At the level of industrial groups, Le Monde noted in 1998 the rise of foreign capital in many of the largest French companies: half the capital of Elf Aquitaine, Pechiney and Total, and between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of it in Schneider, Saint-Gobain, la Générale des Eaux, Valeo and Accor.59 Sauviat and Pernot speak of the ‘indisputable’ dominance of US and British pension funds amongst institutional investors and of their requirement for a return of 15 per cent on capital invested.60 For Aglietta, these developments have a direct effect upon the ‘wageearning society’. In order to attract the finance necessary to expand in global markets, companies need to comply with the demands of important institutional investors, and therefore need to restore profit margins in order to compete for this mobile investment capital. This has led to the restructuring of companies61 (concentration on core activities, particularly in high valueadded areas, and the subcontracting of others, acquisitions and mergers to achieve ‘critical mass’ for global markets and so on) in an attempt to improve profit margins. It has also led to changes in management policies designed to reduce costs: the casualisation of labour and/or its replacement

Changing contexts

21

by automated machinery.62 The role of social integration formerly played by the workplace under Fordism is lost with the individualisation of the employment relationship and consequent damaging results for trade union organisation. At the level of the state, its power in macro-economic regulation is reduced as exchange controls or currency devaluations are no longer policy options (especially with the advent of a single European currency), and the allocation of investment capital is mediated by financial markets.63 In the words of Aglietta, ‘The judgement of the market becomes something that is imposed upon those responsible for economic policy. The mass of financial information in the media illustrates the extent to which the prices of stocks and shares have become the fickle judges of economic policy’,64 particularly in a context where ‘finance tends to become globalized under the impulsion of the search for profit’.65 Pierre Dockès has summarised the characteristics of the ‘new economy’ and likens the economic changes at the turn of the millennium to a return to nineteenth-century modes of accumulation and regulation.66 In this outlook, ‘capital markets direct, control, restructure and stimulate productive capital and feed off the profits that it makes’ so that ‘power in companies has largely passed (back) to the owners of capital’.67 Consequently, market regulation replaces the former central role of the state. The latter continues to provide institutions, but the role of these is no longer to regulate or manage the economy. Rather, it is to improve the functioning of the market as the public powers are now submitted to a global market logic in which large companies are the main dominant actors. In effect, ‘states themselves act like business corporations in the new international race for competitiveness [. . .] cutting taxes and dismantling protective legislation in order to attract inward investment’.68 The result is regime competition and a form of market self-regulation that has as its corollary the flexibilisation, casualisation and increasing mobility of labour. Mass unemployment is no longer socially or politically unacceptable, but hiring and firing is seen as a central and normal mode of company adjustment to economic and market circumstances. The labour market is therefore marked by the collapse of trade union power and a return to individualised contractual relations. The collective strength of workers is thus seriously undermined, especially as it remains strictly confined within national boundaries, while company mergers and closures place workers in competition with each other on a transnational level. Both Dockès and Aglietta see the financialisation of the economy as potentially underpinning a new era of sustained high demand and prolonged economic growth due to the revenue that investments can secure for households through investment funds. Such revenue, they argue, could sustain dynamic consumption and lead to profits and rising share prices, increasing the demand for shares and therefore their price in a virtuous circle. In this scenario, financial investment revenue replaces the function of wage increases under Fordism. However, both also place emphasis on the instability of the

22

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new mode of capital accumulation through financial investment, based as it is on the notions of speculation, market confidence and mimesis. Furthermore, in this scenario, consumption and future profit levels do not depend upon rising real wages. Rather, in the context of global competition for investment, they will depend upon the compression of wages as companies seek to reduce costs and maximise profits in order to distribute high dividends to shareholders and attract mobile investment capital. In this ‘new economy’, then, the focus of macro- and micro-economic policy shifts from deepening the internal market for goods, as under Fordism, to extending markets. Through acquisitions abroad and other forms of FDI, companies attempt to reach a critical mass to penetrate foreign markets. Domestically, these trends also mean a shift from maintaining full employment and high wages, and therefore demand, to a focus on ensuring the attractiveness of a country for investment and on improving the international competitiveness of production in both goods and services. Thus, the virtuous cycle of Fordist growth, based on the direct link between investment, wages and productivity within national economic systems, is broken. The logic of capital accumulation has shifted from one based on productive investment and high wages fuelling high domestic demand to one based on high returns on financial investment in a global economy. Capital accumulation is extensive in the sense that both productive and financial investments can seek new, expanding markets in their quest for high rates of return.

The new world economy and French industrial relations As the regime of capital accumulation becomes more extensive, the mode of labour regulation in the new economy could be expected to undergo a period of adjustment. In order to attract and retain jobs, national economies need to provide the optimum conditions for investment capital in order that companies can finance their expansion in global markets. However, for this expansion to result in jobs in France, say, good rates of return on investments are required to maintain share prices, ensure high dividends and keep investors happy. Even for companies not quoted on the stock market, the logic is the same, as the communications revolution means that subcontracting is no longer confined to local, or even national, supply chains. In such a context, it is not only innovation in products and processes, but also increased productivity, decreased costs, and increased flexibility in the use and deployment of labour, often aided by the use of new technologies, that become increasingly significant. The actual form of labour regulation that these trends give rise to is not seen as pre-determined by economic structures or technology. Piore and Sabel, for example, argue that flexible specialisation will require highly skilled workers able to organise their work more or less autonomously in small groups, and this will give them the bargaining power to assert some form of control through participatory mechanisms.69

Changing contexts

23

In the French case, however, the assessment of Howell is much more pessimistic. The break up of the Fordist model of growth, based on full employment and a high-wage economy, is seen to have led to a corresponding change in the mode of labour regulation from the mid-1970s. Around this time, employers began to pressure the state for the deregulation of the industrial relations system and a decentralisation of labour regulation to the firm level, while the internationalisation of the economy reduced the possibilities of ‘national’ solutions to economic problems.70 At the time of writing, Howell recognised that the precise mode of labour regulation that was emerging in the wake of Fordism was as yet unclear. Nevertheless he detected a shift from a mode of regulation based on collective bargaining, and in the event of the failure of this, on the state, towards ‘microcorporatist’ regulation in France. This implies a ‘structural bias towards cooperation’ due to the fragmentation of the working class and the weakening of their collective organisations that accompany it. In this form of regulation, corporatist style bargaining occurs between labour and capital within the firm. Hence, workers are integrated into the company and into the logic of capitalist production, and identify their interests with those of the company. In effect, Howell sees this as a ‘structural bias towards cooperation’ as ‘Existing workers receive employment security, and perhaps other forms of protection, from the firm in return for flexibility and an acceptance of the legitimacy of the economic goals of the firm. Thus, wages, bonuses, the organisation and control of work, new technologies, and so on are all centred around the needs of the firm.’71 In this scenario, local firmlevel unions and workers are ‘decapitated’ from the wider workers’ movement that constituted one of their main power resources through its ability to make a nuisance of itself on a national scale. Thus, economic change coupled with the traditional weakness of French labour means that flexibility has brought about precarious employment for an increasing number of workers, coupled with high levels of unemployment. The reduced capacity for state action due to economic globalisation and the reduction in the collective power resources of labour therefore result in a decentralised system of labour regulation, one based on company-level bargaining in which conflict is all but eradicated as cooperation is ‘enforced’ upon workers cut off from their wider collectivity.72 If correct, such a prognosis poses serious questions about the future of industrial relations and trade unionism in France. For the CGT, in particular, economic developments from the mid-1970s onwards meant that the wage maximisation strategy was no longer an appropriate means of forwarding the interests of the working class, particularly as the introduction of new technologies also contributed to the growing unemployment problem. But it is not only the last 25 years of CGT decline that is at stake here. More generally, the industrial restructuring that accompanied global competition would also, and will continue to, require changed trade union strategies, as would the decentralisation of production and the changes in the structure

24

Changing contexts

and demands of an increasingly fragmented workforce. The state, too, would come under pressure to change. In the 1980s and 1990s, in many countries, interventionist policies focusing on a commitment to full employment and high welfare spending in a strategy based upon demand-led growth were seen as dysfunctional, rather than functional to the economy now that it was fully integrated into world capital and product flows. In this respect, markets would be expected to play a greater role in the regulation of labour, further weakening trade union defences, while social protection would also come under attack. In addition, employers could be expected to demand a loosening of the legislative framework surrounding employment relations in order to benefit from a greater freedom of action to respond rapidly to increasing competition from abroad.

Conclusion The period since the early 1970s has been one of great change in French industrial relations, posing serious challenges to the state, trade unions and employers. The pressures and tensions outlined above have undermined and ultimately blown apart the bases of a tacit compromise between capital and labour that enabled the French economy to be one of the most efficient in the world for 30 years following the Second World War, despite the fact that acute class antagonisms were never far below the surface. The economic changes outlined above have called into question the centrality of the state in macro-economic management and, by extension, in the system of industrial relations. Deprived of the support of a relatively homogeneous working class in secure full-time employment, the role and very legitimacy of trade unions has been called into question as they have struggled to come to terms with the new economic environment and the changes in power relations that it has induced. Confronted by intensified international competition, employers have also sought to change the way in which workplaces are managed, as well as their relationship to unions and the state at the national level. The last three decades have thus been a period of trying to come to terms with the new conditions, and of trying to find a new modus vivendi between capital and labour. The rest of this book is an attempt to determine how and to what extent this has been achieved over the course of the last three decades. This appears all the more necessary now due to the changes to which Regulation Theory points. If a change in the mode of capital accumulation is provoking a change in the mode of labour regulation towards one based on the firm and a reduced role for the state, the choices open to all actors in the industrial relations system, the constraints bearing upon them, the strategic choices they make and the actions they take all need to be examined in order to understand, and assess the implications of, such change.

2

The role of the state

Introduction The state is inevitably involved to some extent in the regulation of relations between employers and those that they employ. Macro-economic pressures and policy affect employment levels and profit and wage levels through their impact upon interest rates, exchange rates and inflation, for example. Generally, trade unions push for increased wage levels and social welfare benefits, while employers argue for measures that will maintain competitiveness and profitability, and the state arbitrates between them through its macroeconomic and fiscal policies. It is therefore implicated in the confrontation between social groups, resulting in the creation of state institutions to regulate conflict. This framework within which economic life takes place, and within which the different pressures are resolved, can vary from country to country, with more or less state regulation through legislation, and more or less involvement of social groups in policy-making. In the previous chapter, it was argued that a tacit Fordist compromise emerged in the post-war period in France, based around improved living standards for wage earners in exchange for the acceptance of the modernisation of industry along Taylorist lines. Within this framework, the role of the state was to ensure high levels of demand in the economy in order that increasing levels of profitability fed through into a high demand for labour and higher wages. In many countries, this also led to policies aimed at ensuring the cooperation of labour and capital in national strategies for economic growth through their involvement in the policy-making process. While elements of the former are present in the post-war period in France, conflict rather than cooperation between the two antagonistic parties remained the order of the day. The state failed in its attempts to institutionalise industrial relations but traditionally played a central role in regulating the conflict between capital and labour. This was due in part to its own interventionist role in economic policy-making, and in part to the ideological hostility and lack of collective bargaining between capital and labour. As both parties turned to the state, pressuring it for reform in their favour, the result was a state-centred system that was to come under increasing strain from the late 1960s onwards due to its rigidity.

26

The role of the state

Attempts to institutionalise capital–labour relations in the post-war period After the Second World War, employers were on the defensive, being accused of collaboration with the enemy and/or profiteering during the German occupation of France. The old business and economic leaders and laissez-faire policies were seen as partly responsible for the downfall of France in 1940, which helped to pave the way for a far more interventionist state in the post-war era. Thus, the state took effective control of the French economy, making up for what were seen as the deficiencies of the market. As the state took the lead in post-war economic construction, it also set about establishing a framework for labour relations that aimed to bring about consensus over economic and social goals within and outside of the workplace. Such a strategy to ensure the cooperation of the working classes in the postwar reconstruction and modernisation efforts was based around several essential pillars. First, general macro-economic and social policies aimed to satisfy workers’ demands through ‘fundamentalist Keynesian reformism’.1 Howell argues that in France, at least until the 1960s, economic policy was not concerned with demand management but with building productive capacity through a shift of resources out of agriculture, an intensification of work and low taxation coupled with a regressive social transfer payments system.2 Nevertheless, there was a major break from the 1930s as state-directed growth strategies effectively ensured that unemployment remained marginal, at under 2 per cent of the active population, until the late 1960s.3 With tight labour markets, the shift of production and manpower from agriculture to the industrial and tertiary sectors prompted a significant increase in living standards.4 In order to gain consensus around this economic regeneration, and to provide mechanisms through which the fruits of production could be bargained over, several important structural reforms occurred in the immediate post-war period. First, several trade union confederations – the CGT, CFTC (and later CFDT), FO and CGC – were recognised as the legitimate representatives of wage earners due to their being ‘nationally representative’. This gave them, along with employer organisations, access to state decisionmaking apparatuses through seats on newly-created tripartite bodies such as the Planning Commissions and, later, the Economic and Social Council, the right to sign national, and particularly industry, level collective agreements, and the right to present candidates in the first round of professional elections. As the centrepiece of post-war growth strategies, a National Planning Commissariat was set up in 1946, along with sectoral and problem-specific planning commissions within which targets were set for economic development and resources allocated to the achievement of those targets. As tripartite bodies which brought together state, employer and trade union representatives for consultation on medium-term economic and industrial

The role of the state 27 policy, they were seen as important for gaining consensus for industrial and economic modernisation policies in the post-war period. Likewise, the Economic and Social Council was created in 1958, on much the same basis, although it also included representatives of other social groups, such as consumer and family associations, to examine social and economic policy and to give advice on legislation proceeding through parliament. In addition, a social security system to protect wage earners against poverty due to accident, illness and old age was established by the decree of 4 October 1945. The system was to be run by representatives of wage earners (from the nationally representative trade unions) and employers, and financed by employer and wage-earner contributions rather than general taxation.5 A separate system (the ASSEDIC-UNEDIC) for unemployment benefits was only introduced later, in 1958, following a collective agreement between unions and employers.6 This ‘basic’ regime has been added to in an ad hoc manner, through the addition of complementary pension schemes resulting from further collective agreements (AGIRC for cadres in 1947, ARRCO for non-cadres in 1961). These are financed and managed in the same way and were made obligatory for all wage earners in 1972. Finally, this system is completed by schemes that are established through collective agreements for certain categories of workers (e.g. mutuelles for teachers etc) or that depend upon individual subscription (i.e. private insurance). In opting for the delegation of the management of the social insurance system to employers and trade unions, rather than for a Beveridge-style system funded by general taxation and managed by the state, French elites aimed to integrate employers and unions into one of the essential pillars of post-war social regulation. This delegation to bipartite management aimed to ensure that antagonistic interests would be structurally and institutionally linked. Employer and ‘representative’ trade union organisations would benefit from resources and legitimacy, conferred upon them by the state through their participation in the elaboration and implementation of social policies, and would, in return, ensure social consensus, and an increased legitimacy and efficacy for public policies.7 In effect, labour movement power was to be institutionalised through being granted a greater role in public life. According to Susan Milner ‘it also “nationalised” their activities to an important degree, encouraging a state-centred rather than workplaceoriented strategy’.8 In terms of the employment relationship, the state constructed a legislative framework to mediate capital–labour conflict. The right to belong to a trade union and to go on strike became a constitutional right in 1946, and works committees were legislated for in 1945 in an attempt to promote a joint-interests view of the company. Perhaps the most significant laws, however, were those passed in 1946 and 1950, which set the legal framework for collective bargaining and established some important principles that marked the system until the 1980s. These will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 6, but need to be mentioned now as they are crucial to

28

The role of the state

understanding the strategy of the state as far as industrial relations are concerned in the post-war period. First, the branch was to be the main level at which bargaining would take place. Second, only one union needed to sign an agreement for it to be valid, and finally, agreements could be ‘extended’ by the state to cover companies or groups of workers not party to the agreement. In a context of trade union division and weakness – particularly at the company level, where they had no legal foothold until 1968 – these provisions attempted to reinforce the position of unions as the collective representatives of workers and to promote collective bargaining as the main means of regulating capital–labour conflict within an overall framework of statedriven industrial and economic growth policies.

The failure of institutionalisation and state dominance However, the above attempts at incorporating organised labour and capital into processes of social and economic regulation largely ended up in failure. Although the planning system undoubtedly contributed to the exceptional growth of the post-war period, the provisions for tripartite consultation and consensual policy-making in the areas of economic and social policy proved to be of far less importance. The CGT withdrew from the Planning Commissions in 1947, following the PCF’s withdrawal from government, and, along with FO, virtually boycotted the process until 1981. In any case, the planning process was ‘essentially technocratic and state-driven’.9 State direction of economic modernisation was facilitated by extensive state control of investment: the nationalisation, in 1946, of the Bank of France and the four main deposit banks as well as of a large part of the insurance sector gave the state direct influence over 47 per cent of investment by 1949.10 The First and Second Plans (1947–53 and 1954–7) provided the coordination necessary for post-war reconstruction, concentrating resources on the vital areas of energy supply, transport and agricultural equipment, while the Third (1958–61) and Fourth (1962–5) Plans placed more emphasis on the housing and public services necessary for the developing urban economy. After this, planning became more concerned with the opening up of the French economy to the rest of the world following the creation of the European Economic Community by the 1957 Treaty of Rome. However, the Fourth Plan, which also aimed to shift resources into the modern chemicals, telecommunications and electronics sectors of the economy, represented the golden age of French planning. Thereafter, planning steadily declined in importance as the internationalisation of the economy placed events outside of the control of French planners and made forecasting more hazardous and targets more difficult to achieve. In addition, the centralisation of political administration and power under the Fifth Republic reduced the influence of the Economic and Social Council. Here, as in the Planning Commissions, consultation remained underdeveloped and limited to the state testing the strength of opposition

The role of the state 29 to its policies,11 rather than a means of seeking genuine consensus, with the input of ‘revolutionary’ unions confined to the denunciation of government policy. Thus, despite the existence of extensive institutional forms for national-level consultation and cooperation, this remained limited and was unable to change the direction of government policy when concerns were expressed, particularly by the trade unions. Rather than a neo-corporatist framework, tripartism developed into a mechanism of state domination with trade unions firmly on the outside. Even where the labour movement appeared more integrated into the mechanisms of economic and social regulation – the social security system – increasing state control also served to deprive the peak employers’ and union organisations of the exercise of any real power. Indeed, the national intersectoral agreement of 1958, which established the unemployment insurance system, was signed as a reaction to what was seen as the increasing ‘statisation’ of the social security system, and under the threat of legislation on the issue from the government.12 Within the social security system, the state had progressively exercised greater control over the administrators of the funds, in terms of their nomination and activities, and had ‘always taken the decision to raise contributions or lower payments’ as it sought to control taxation and expenditure levels.13 As far as collective bargaining was concerned, the state’s attempts to reinforce the system met with only very limited success as this remained a marginal activity for trade unions and employers, who saw their relationship in terms of class antagonism rather than cooperation to achieve national economic goals. Howell notes that real wage growth fluctuated wildly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, progressing from 9.9 per cent in 1957 to minus 1.8 per cent in 1958 and from 2.7 per cent in 1960 to 6.6 per cent in 1961.14 These fluctuations reflect variations in strike rates, suggesting that wage gains were the result of militancy rather than regularised bargaining. Thus, in 1957, 4.12 million working days were lost, but this fell to 1.13 million in 1958, whereas in 1960, 1.07 million days were lost compared with 2.6 million the following year.15 Significantly, the only real innovation in the area of collective bargaining between 1950 and 1968 came in the nationalised sector of the economy, with the 1955 Renault agreement that gave workers benefits such as a third week’s paid holiday and a supplementary pension scheme. This company-level deal broke with the tradition of adapting branch-level agreements to the local situation, and, perhaps most importantly, tied wage levels to the cost of living and anticipated productivity gains for a period of two years. This ‘Fordist’16 agreement was not widely copied, however, with only about 50 such agreements signed in large, modern companies in the metalworking, electrical and chemical sectors.17 In the absence of widespread bargaining over workplace issues, state intervention replaced the collective agreement as the main means of determining the minutiae of employment relations. Article 34 of the French Constitution gives the legislator the right to determine the fundamental

30

The role of the state

principles of labour, trade union and social security law in its guise of guarantor of the general interest. Confronted by a weak trade union movement, this duty has been taken extremely seriously. As a result, France has developed one of the most highly regulated employment systems in the world, with the Labour Code covering every aspect of work, from discipline procedures to coffee breaks, and running into some 4000 articles.18 As well as its legislative role, the state also developed a highly interventionist role in the collective bargaining system in order to overcome the deficiencies of this in determining terms and conditions of employment. As part of the system of collective bargaining, the tripartite Higher National Commission on Collective Agreements was established in 1946, to give advice on the extension of collective agreements and rises in the minimum wage. Again, political, economic and administrative centralisation meant that its role was modest. In relation to the minimum wage, this was also due to the refusal of employers to negotiate nationally for fear that the trade unions would use it as a basis for national wage bargaining. Nevertheless, major reform has been achieved through the extension procedure as it has been used by the state to introduce widespread reform in employment matters. For example, the state was able to extend the legal holiday entitlements of French workers. First, in 1955, the Renault agreement was extended economy-wide to give workers a third week’s holiday; then, in 1963, workers gained a fourth week’s holiday through the same procedure. In effect, the extension procedure enabled the state to impose a uniformity of basic conditions within and between industrial sectors by extending the benefits of a collective agreement to those employees that would not otherwise be covered (see Chapter 6). In addition, the state was able to play an important role in labour regulation as it took on a major role as an employer. The wave of nationalisations in the financial, transport and energy sectors following the Liberation meant that the state directly employed one out of every ten workers in France.19 This figure had increased to 27.3 per cent in 1975,20 and remained at nearly a quarter of the French workforce at the end of the 1980s,21 as the nationalisations of 1981–2, following the electoral victories of the Left, compensated for redundancies in state-owned industries in the 1970s and 1980s (see below). As a major employer, the state could influence wage levels across the economy, and could encourage ‘best practice’ and innovation in management. Thus, as mentioned above, Renault was the first company to sign company agreements in the 1950s, and these were socially progressive. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the public sector was used to promote productivity agreements: Delors’ contrats de progrès, which linked pay to productivity and national wealth, as well as to prices, for a period of two years, attempted to bring about some stability in wage rises (see below). As well as through the lead given by the public sector, wage levels in the private sector are directly influenced by the state through the national minimum wage, which was first introduced in 1950, and then reformed in

The role of the state 31 1970. In its original guise, it was indexed to the price level. This led to it falling behind average wage growth across the economy – one of the reasons for its 35 per cent increase following the May 1968 strike wave. The reform established a formula to index the minimum wage not only to prices but also to wage growth across the economy, and allowed for discretionary increases to be applied by the government. Thus, it became a social and economic policy tool, enabling the government to ensure that lower-paid workers shared in the growing economic prosperity.22

Attempts at reform 1: the failure of the ‘New Society’ reforms In the post-war period, the failure to integrate a divided labour movement dominated by the communist CGT into the capitalist economy resulted in a conflictual industrial relations system characterised by a lack of dialogue between capital and labour. Both sides looked to the state for reform, politicising the system of employment regulation and dragging the state into the resolution of differences of interest between two antagonistic social forces. As a consequence, reform was slow and often a response to heightened social tension. The shortcomings of such a system were made starkly evident in May–June 1968, as not only employer, but also state, power was seriously challenged in a strike wave in which 150,000,000 working days were lost. The response of the state was to attempt to disengage itself from the conduct of industrial relations and to create an autonomous sphere of bargaining for unions and employers as a means of regulating labour. Following his appointment as Pompidou’s Prime Minister after the 1969 presidential elections, Jacques Chaban-Delmas’ ‘New Society’ project of 1969–72 built upon the legislation permitting the establishment of workplace trade union branches, and aimed to promote decentralised wage bargaining. This was seen as necessary, particularly after the events of May 1968, in order to respond to the needs for industrial peace and predictability in productivity and wage growth in the increasing number of larger, more capital intensive firms in the modern sectors of the economy.23 Within this perspective, Jacques Delors’ (Chaban Delmas’ social adviser) contrats de progrès in the public sector aimed to stimulate similar agreements in the private sector so that real wages could be determined at company level. The intention was that these would involve multi-year agreements, tying wages to expected productivity growth, and would be signed between unions and public sector managers rather than state officials. Thus, wage determination would be depoliticised and linked to company performance, with the private sector following suit. This would permit state withdrawal from the industrial relations arena as more sectors and firms came under the coverage of negotiated agreements. However, despite some increase in company-level bargaining, these reforms quickly ran into trouble. In the public sector, Delors’ contrats de

32

The role of the state

progrès failed to take hold as they contained clauses for guaranteed real wage rises above inflation (contrary to Delors’ intention) at a time when inflation was rising. They also came up against a reluctance on the part of the unions to sign agreements that would commit them to industrial peace for a set period of time. In a context of inter-union rivalry and weak union control over the base, any such commitment would be meaningless. More generally, the state failed in its attempts to substitute bargaining for conflict although there was a rise in the former at company level after 1968, due largely to the outside influences of higher level agreements or legislation.24 Multi-industry bargaining was stimulated in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Chapter 6), but the effect of this was modest. First, it was limited to social welfare issues, requiring no compromise, in terms of wage restraint for example, on the part of unions. Second, these agreements came about under state pressure, with threats of legislation if the social partners failed to reach an agreement. As Howell comments, ‘This was not a growth in autonomous bargaining that would indicate a change in the mode of labour regulation.’25 Regulationists generally divide the post-war period until the late 1970s into two separate periods. Broadly speaking, the first covers the period from the Liberation until 1967/8. During these years, government legislation created ‘an institutional framework [. . .] under the overall financial supervision of the state’.26 This, plus the planning system – heavily dependent upon a dynamic public sector – and the refusal of direct contact between employers and trade unions meant that the state played a major role in industrial relations. From the 1960s onwards, however, several problems were becoming apparent in this statist regulation. A high level of pay disputes put a brake on industrial growth, and industry-level bargaining meant that the minima at these levels bore little resemblance to real wages implemented at company level. In short, wage drift was becoming a problem both for small firms operating on tight profit margins, and in the growing number of large firms that required greater predictability owing to the increasingly capital intensive nature of their production and the greater international competition to which they were becoming exposed. As they also became increasingly reliant upon a rapidly developing domestic market for their products, such firms increasingly had a vested interest in regularised and predictable wage increases in exchange for industrial peace.27 From 1967/8 onwards, the state attempted to modernise the system of industrial relations, notably through encouraging collective bargaining as a means of overcoming these problems, although as we have seen, these reforms had a limited impact, with negotiated wages still bearing little relation to actual wage levels. Although the differences between these two periods are pertinent, particularly with regards to the emphasis on collective bargaining from the late 1960s onwards, compared with developments that were to occur from the late 1970s onwards, the failure to institutionalise regular bargaining means that the differences are relatively minor. In effect, what evolved over the post-war period was a conflictual, state-centred

The role of the state 33 system of industrial relations. One reason for this is the traditional hostility of the state in France towards interest groups. In the Jacobin conception of the state, dating back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), there should be no intermediary bodies between the state and the people; the government is the expression of the ‘general will’, and strong interest groups deform this relationship. The training of state elites in the French grandes écoles also encourages a belief in their own superiority, ability, and their public service mission. Under such conditions, the state jealously guards its law-making prerogatives, and consultative bodies often become mere talking shops rather than bodies that can effectively change the course of state policy.28 These attitudes are not a sufficient explanation of the failure to institutionalise French industrial relations in the post-war period, however, as the development of corporatist practices in the agricultural and educational sectors shows.29 The problem that frustrated all governments in their attempts to stimulate collective bargaining as a means of regulating employment relations was essentially the same. The weakness and division of the labour movement made them unreliable partners. Tripartism could not be developed in any corporatist manner as organisational division meant that unions had a weak hold over their members and could not guarantee industrial peace or wage restraint in exchange for favourable macro-economic or social policies. Conversely, the weakness of trade unions meant that they could not pressure the state or employers into any corporatist style arrangements whereby wage restraint would be exchanged for labour-friendly reforms or economic policies. In any case, such arrangements were refused by the unions and, in particular, by the CGT. When, in 1969, President de Gaulle proposed a reform of the Senate to include members of professional organisations, including trade unions, this was met with a refusal on the part of organised labour. Although it would have given the unions greater access to power, it would also have compromised their independence from the state, damaging their role as an opposition to government and defender of the working classes. They would, in this line of thinking, have had joint responsibility for ensuring the conditions of growth for a capitalist economy, and become an arm of the state, suppressing rather than promoting working-class interests. The CGT’s view in particular, was that conflict, rather than bargaining, compromise and integration was the most effective way of bringing pressure for reform to bear upon the state and employers. The same went for the workplace. Unions could not, and were unwilling to, enter into agreements that bound them for any definite period to industrial peace or productivity-based wage agreements.30 The state had unwittingly contributed to such a state of affairs. First, union division was institutionalised by the notion of representative unions, particularly as membership numbers were largely irrelevant to this status.31 Second, electoral competition exacerbated these divisions, resulting in a reluctance to make concessions, particularly on the part of the CGT and CFDT, in order

34

The role of the state

to be seen to be defending the interests of workers. This only reinforced the hostility of employers to trade unions, the former perceiving that they had little to gain from integrating unions into regularised bargaining arrangements. Likewise, works committees failed to fulfil their role of promoting consensus and the integration of workers. Employer hostility to any perceived encroachment on their prerogatives – reinforced by the union monopoly over candidates in the first round of elections – ensured that they were confined to social functions such as running the works’ canteen or organising holidays for workers and their families. Generally speaking, throughout the post-war period then, sporadic sectoral bargaining set wage guidelines but did not determine real wages. Bargaining did occur in large companies and in the public sector, but many employees in small- and medium-sized companies were left exposed to unilateral employer regulation and the implementation of branch-level minima. In these circumstances, the minimum wage was used to set a floor below which wages should not fall, and the extension procedure for collective agreements was used to generalise conditions established at the branch level or in larger firms to the rest of the economy. In these manners, state intervention acted as a substitute for a system of regulation based on collective bargaining. In the absence of regular bargaining, conflict became a major means of resolving differences between capital and labour, and the state developed a major role in conflict arbitration and conciliation (see Chapter 8). Wage formation was a political as much as an economic activity due to the state’s role in determining the minimum wage for large sectors of the working population. This, combined with the absence of local bargaining arrangements and the CGT’s strategy of generalising local disputes, meant that conflict was inevitably shifted from the industrial to the political sphere, and from the local to the national level. At the local level, this would often mean the involvement of the prefect, and his local state services in conflict arbitration. National strikes, and those in large companies, could also lead to the intervention of the Minister of Labour and even of the Prime Minister. The most poignant example of this remains the Grenelle Accords, brokered by the Prime Minister of the time, Georges Pompidou, and which formed the basis of the return to work following the strike wave of May–June 1968. During the post-war period, up until the 1980s, the effect of such a role was to reinforce a situation it was supposed to overcome. Instead of bringing the two sides together as a neutral, state intervention exacerbated the tendency of both unions and employers to avoid face-to-face dialogue and collective bargaining, as both turned to the state to exercise pressure for reform in line with their interests. Industrial relations, therefore, became highly politicised and centralised as the state was thus drawn into conflicts between the two sides and needed to provide responses to resolve them. In this respect one can talk of trade union weakness being state-created, as trade unions concentrated their activity on the national level, and neglected

The role of the state 35 shopfloor issues and action. The result could be seen in the cycles of growing shopfloor frustration and spontaneous social explosion, followed by state arbitration and regulation. Hence, wage growth followed outbursts of militancy, and major periods of reform in favour of labour occurred when capital was on the defensive: 1936, 1946, 1968 and 1981–2. For trade unionists, particularly in the CGT, reforms appeared to be won through confrontation with capital and the state, rather than through institutionalised compromise. This perpetuated the notion that reforms were won through class struggle – a struggle that needed to be aimed not only at employers but also, perhaps primarily, against a state seen as controlled by an exploitative bourgeois class. Although such a situation may have been a nuisance for employers, it avoided the legitimisation of unions in the workplace through face-to-face dialogue, and was acceptable while the costs of wage rises could be recouped through price rises, and competitiveness could be maintained by devaluing the franc – as occurred in the years following the 1968 settlement. However, changing economic circumstances from the 1970s onwards were to make such solutions inappropriate.

Attempts at reform 2: the withdrawal of the state in the 1980s and 1990s? Macro-economic policy The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 brought in their wake a slowdown in economic growth and high levels of inflation and unemployment, putting pressure on the financing of welfare schemes and other state expenditures. By the mid-1970s, it was realised that the slowdown in growth and subsequent recession were not purely cyclical but were due to structural changes in the international economy. Product markets were fragmenting and competition was global and intensified by the arrival of new technologies. In this changed environment, industrial relations could no longer be based on the French version of the Fordist compromise. As profits were squeezed and unemployment rose, a strategy of high wages fuelling mass consumption and mass production in stable markets in order to ensure continuous growth and finance welfare expenditure was no longer seen as appropriate by decision-makers. The temptation to turn to the state for global solutions when conflict arose would be replaced by the negotiation of the companyspecific solutions to problems that were needed for survival in the globalised economy. In macro-economic policy-making, the essential break with the Fordist model of growth occurred with the replacement of Jacques Chirac as Prime Minister by Raymond Barre in 1976. The problem of poor growth was seen as a product of inflation – fuelled by high, index-linked wage rises and state borrowing – reducing the returns on capital. The ‘Barre Plan’, announced on 22 September 1976, therefore aimed to improve the situation of firms and of

36

The role of the state

international economic competitiveness by tackling inflation, reducing consumption and limiting budget deficits. First, previous government controls over prices, which had been used to limit inflation, were abolished, and public service tariffs were raised. This allowed the public sector to reduce its deficits and aimed to rehabilitate the share of profits in GDP, which had fallen over the 1974–5 period. Second, rather than relying on devaluing the franc to maintain the competitiveness of exports, as previous governments had done, the Barre government aimed to maintain the value of the currency in order to reduce imported inflation and to push French exporters into specialising in higher valued-added areas. This strategy resulted in an active French role in the establishment of the European Monetary System, which came into being on 1 January 1979.32 The last main pillar of the Barre Plan was to force the restructuring of French industry by a refusal to bail out ‘lame duck’ industries. This aspect of the Plan, however, was never fully implemented. In a situation of record post-war levels of unemployment, and electoral fever, the textile industry, for example, was saved from closure for political reasons. The election of François Mitterrand to the Presidency in 1981 signalled a short-lived break from deflationary policies aimed at improving the international competitiveness of French industry. State control over the economy was increased through a wave of nationalisations of industrial enterprises and credit institutions, while a return to demand-led growth was attempted through classic Keynesian measures. The minimum wage was raised, as were social security payments and public expenditure, while working hours were cut through the reduction of the working week from 40 to 39 hours and legislation for a fifth week’s paid holiday for all French workers. Within a year, the folly of such a strategy was apparent. Consumption increased, but this only fuelled inflation without improving the unemployment situation in France. In a context where the world economy was going through a slump, and France’s main competitors were following deflationary policies, reflation in France meant sucking in imports from abroad as they became comparatively cheaper. At the same time, exports fell, resulting in balance of payments crises to add to the continuing problems of inflation and unemployment. The lesson appeared to be that in an internationalised economy, competitiveness was crucial to economic survival. Keynesian reflation could work in relatively isolated national economies; in an increasingly interdependent international economy it was suicidal. Increasingly, French policy-makers and economists referred to the la contrainte extérieure (the external constraint) when talking about economic policy. From 1982 onwards, macro-economic policy aimed at improving firms’ competitiveness in order to stimulate export-led growth. The resulting policy of ‘austerity’ was intended to be temporary, to fight what were seen as cyclical problems, but it gave way to a policy of economic ‘rigour’ as the realisation dawned that the country was faced with deep structural economic change, and not just a downturn in the business cycle. From 1983,

The role of the state 37 economic policy was based around four main pillars. First, the strength of the franc was defended by anchoring it to the deutschmark to re-establish confidence in the currency and to reduce imported inflation. Currency stability also aimed to encourage managers to contain costs and attract foreign investment.33 Second, policy aimed to restrict levels of pay settlements and to force efficiency savings. A six-month price and wage freeze was announced in June 1982 to break the wages–prices inflationary cycle. More importantly, the indexing of public sector wages to prices was abandoned by the Mauroy government in 1983. With price controls remaining in force, this was widely copied by the private sector. This ‘clear break with the past’34 effectively undid one of the essential pillars of Fordist post-war economic growth by actually reducing purchasing power in order to dampen internal demand. Although the government could not act directly to fix private sector wages, the lead given by the public sector and high unemployment ensured that these also rose less quickly than productivity, thus helping to restore profit levels and the international competitiveness of French industry.35 Third, attempts were made to control public spending, by, for example, restricting the payments of unemployment benefit.36 Deficits, however, rose due to continually high rates of unemployment and low growth in the early 1990s, and to policies of selective exoneration from payroll taxes to fund the system, which were intended to encourage employers to recruit more, particularly low-paid, labour. Nevertheless, reductions in public spending, helped by the Juppé Plan to reform social security in 1995, meant that France was able to meet the criterion of a budget deficit not exceeding 3 per cent of GDP in the Maastricht Treaty on European Monetary Union. Finally, economic liberalisation became a cornerstone of policy-making. Financial liberalisation, with the abolition of exchange controls, the removal of state control of the credit system and the modernisation of the stock exchange, made it easier for companies to raise investment capital, including on international markets. In line with neo-liberal economic thinking, a massive privatisation programme was begun by Chirac’s right-wing government of 1986–8 to force the modernisation of nationalised industries and to reduce their burden on the state, and was taken up again by Balladur from 1993–5. Although not pursued with the same ideological zeal, the policy was even continued by the Left in 1988–93. The 1997–2002 Jospin government privatised more than any other since 1986, raising C31 billion (£20 billion, out of the £47 billion raised since 1986) through the sale of state assets as a pragmatic means of raising finance and reducing budget deficits.37 With a brief hiatus in 1981–2, then, state macro-economic policy broke with that which had prevailed during the post-war period of Fordist growth. Despite numerous schemes to reduce the number of unemployed, targeted primarily at older workers through early retirement schemes and the young and long-term unemployed through labour market insertion schemes, the aim of macro-economic policy was no longer to ensure high demand

38

The role of the state

through full employment and generous social welfare payments. Rather, it was to restore the international competitiveness of French industry through an emphasis on price stability. This meant restricting internal demand through a restrictive wages policy in the public sector in the expectation that the private sector would follow suit, particularly in a time of high unemployment. It also meant controlling public expenditure, particularly social security, for political reasons to do with European construction certainly, but also in order to reduce the tax burden on French households and industry, something that was not always achieved owing to high unemployment. In addition, economic restructuring was facilitated by the government’s refusal to bail out what were seen as ‘lame duck’ industries that could not stand up to intense international competition. Thus, in the course of the 1980s, thousands of jobs were lost in the French coal, steel and shipbuilding as well as textile industries as, threatened by cheaper foreign production, nationalised companies took the lead in shedding labour. Overall then, the period since the late 1970s has seen a new reliance on the market as state economic intervention has been curtailed, necessitating economic restructuring, a reduction in production costs and economic deregulation to restore competitiveness, investment and profit levels. The result was a return to a balance of payments surplus from 1992, and increased profit levels for French companies, a factor seen as vital in attracting foreign investment.38 Industrial relations policy Restoring the international competitiveness of French industry did not only require a macro-economic policy mix favourable to business and to the restoration of profit margins. Following the failure of the ‘New Society’ reforms, attempts to deal with the economic crisis did not attempt reform of the industrial relations system until the late 1970s. Then, in 1978, Barre attempted to stimulate collective bargaining by writing to trade union and employer organisations, inviting them to negotiate on a range of issues including sector-specific minimum wages, the reduction and flexibilisation of working time, and unemployment compensation. The importance of these issues clearly indicates an attempt by the state to withdraw from labour regulation and to devolve it to the social partners through collective bargaining. In the event, a combination of trade union weakness, patchy coverage where agreements were reached (for example in sectoral minimum wages), stalemate in others (working time, employee expression) and the continued necessity of state intervention in a time of high unemployment ensured the failure of the strategy.39 However, it was realised, in the 1980s, that structural economic change necessitated a more flexible and decentralised system of industrial relations in order that companies could react more quickly to changes in their product markets. In 1982, the socialist government therefore introduced the Auroux Laws, a series of acts designed to overhaul the French system of

The role of the state 39 industrial relations. The various provisions of these laws will be looked at more closely in subsequent chapters, and for now we will limit ourselves to some general comments on these laws insofar as they relate to state strategies towards industrial relations in France. The powers of works councils were increased, especially over manpower policy and the introduction of new technology in order to articulate their work with a new decentralised system of collective bargaining. In the same vein, workers were given the right to meet to discuss working conditions during company time through the establishment of self-expression groups, the workings of which were to be the subject of a local agreement, in the hope that employee concerns would be dealt with through company-level bargaining. The most significant reform, however, was the obligation for employers to bargain annually with trade unions at local level over wages and working time, and every five years at branch level over job classifications. Again, the public sector was seen as the key to the implementation of the Auroux Laws, with worker representation on the boards of nationalised industries, and in the encouragement of consultation with works committees, decentralised bargaining and the implementation of self-expression groups. For reasons that will be examined later, the Auroux Laws fell far short of their ambitions. However, since the 1980s, reform has followed the same strategy of increasing flexibility through the decentralisation of collective bargaining. Furthermore, in conjunction with this decentralisation, the state’s role in regulating working conditions has been loosened with a view to encouraging job creation and company profitability by lowering labour costs. The 1982 decree that first allowed companies to derogate from the law on the question of working time and to calculate this on an annual basis was explicit in this respect, stating that its aim was to ‘provide companies with the flexibility necessary for the development of their competitiveness’.40 Following this, the Auroux Law of 13 November 1982 made working time the subject of mandatory annual company-level bargaining. The resultant increase in flexible working time prompted the Loi Delebarre (named after the then Minister of Labour, Michel Delebarre) of February 1986. This sought to link flexibility to a reduction in working time, and required branch-level agreements. However, this legislation was soon undone when the Right won the March 1986 parliamentary elections and the Séguin Law of 16 June 1987 abolished the link and removed the need for a branch-level agreement. Although Edouard Balladur’s 1993 Five Year Employment Plan re-established the link between the annualisation of working time and its reduction in an effort to encourage agreements where few were forthcoming, it also made it possible for ‘dispensatory’ agreements (see Chapter 6) on working time to be signed in companies without trade union representation, following agreement with elected workplace representatives. Furthermore, in 1996, in order to facilitate local agreements over the reduction of working time, legislation was passed following a 1995 intersectoral agreement on mandatement. This allows for collective bargaining to take place in

40

The role of the state

companies without a trade union presence, through the designation of employee representatives as being ‘mandated’ by one of the representative trade unions to conclude an agreement in the company (see Chapter 6). This was followed up in 1996 with a law enabling employers in companies without trade union representatives to bargain and conclude agreements with works committees, provided these are approved by a joint union–employer committee at sectoral level. The 1998 and 2000 Aubry Laws on the reduction of working time took up the idea of a system of ‘mandated’ employee representatives in the absence of trade union representatives, but abolished the necessity of any branch level surveillance of agreements concluded within this framework. The second Aubry Law merely replaced this requirement with that of ‘majority consent’, as expressed in a referendum, at the workplace level The 1993 Five Year Employment Plan also made recourse to short-time work easier by raising the threshold from four weeks to 1200 hours, or seven months, over an 18-month period. It also eased the restrictions for part-time work by allowing it to be calculated on an annual, rather than weekly, basis so that employers could vary a worker’s hours over the year according to fluctuations in demand, as long as they did not exceed an average of 32 hours per week. Labour costs are thus reduced by the impact of such calculations on overtime as the notion of the ‘working week’ is undermined. Reduced employer social charges on part-time labour provided a further strong incentive for expanding this type of employment. Finally, under Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in 1986, the requirement for administrative authorisation for collective redundancies – introduced by the same Chirac in 1974 to forestall the wave of redundancies hitting France during the economic crisis – was abolished, and replaced by the need for employers and trade unions to negotiate a ‘social plan’ covering redundancy payments and the possible re-deployment and/or retraining rather than laying off of labour. Thus, the main thrust of government action from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s was to decentralise the conduct of industrial relations in order to devolve the determination of the main contours of the employment contract to the social partners.41 Successive legislative enactments have decentralised and introduced greater flexibility into the system of collective bargaining, thereby aiming to favour both economic restructuring and employment. This has been achieved in two major ways. First, the contents of local agreements are no longer constrained by higher level agreements, and second, the absence of trade union representation is no longer a barrier to negotiation. The consequences of this for trade unions and collective bargaining will be examined in later chapters. As far as the state is concerned, it was hoped that the above reforms would enable it to withdraw from the regulation of working conditions and wages. New concerns about flexibility and the quality of working life that emerged in the wake of May 1968 required regulation at the company rather

The role of the state 41 than the national level, implying as they did a need for the reorganisation of work and greater employee involvement and consultation. Such social pressures for reform were reinforced by economic ones from the mid-1970s onwards as product markets globalised and fragmented. In response, the decentralisation of bargaining and the encouragement of face-to-face dialogue between the representatives of labour, and employees themselves, on the one hand, and employers on the other, aimed at a decentralisation of the whole system of industrial relations. Face-to-face dialogue at the local level would reflect the needs of the company and introduce the flexibility and capacity for rapid reaction needed in the new environment of intense international competition while integrating employees into that process of change by giving them a voice within the company. Trade union renewal would also be facilitated through local negotiation over wages and consultation with works committees and employees themselves over new technologies, redundancies and manpower policies. In this way, they too would be integrated into the process of change. Dialogue, consultation and bargaining, it was hoped, would also bring about a transformation in the culture of French industrial relations. Employers would be confronted with their social responsibilities, while workers and their representatives would appreciate the economic constraints bearing down upon the firm; bargaining rather than conflict and state intervention would become the accepted means of resolving disputes and conflicts of interest. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, while conflict has diminished, it could be argued that the objective of integrating unions into the process of change remains unfulfilled. However, that the legislation facilitated a decentralisation of employment regulation to the company level is undeniable (see, in particular, Chapter 6). Whether this is synonymous with a withdrawal of the state, though, is more open to question.

A continuing role for the state Several recent disputes have thrown into stark relief the state’s decreasing capacity to influence the employment and investment decisions of French multinational companies and foreign-owned companies operating in France. In March and April 2001, a series of announcements was made by companies to the effect that they would be laying off employees.42 The most publicised of these were Marks and Spencer and Danone. In the former, the plans had to be postponed, but could not be prevented, as the company had not complied with French law on informing works committees of collective redundancies.43 In the case of Danone, the government was powerless to prevent the closure of factories in France despite the fact that they were highly profitable.44 Its response was to legislate on stricter conditions for collective redundancies in its ‘Law on Social Modernisation’, which was adopted by the National Assembly on 13 June 2001.45 However, it shied away from outlawing redundancies by profitable companies, called for by the

42

The role of the state

PCF and the CGT amongst others.46 Neither did it seriously consider reinstating the administrative authorisation for collective redundancies abolished in 1986. Even then, reservations were expressed about the legislation, despite the fact that the socialist government effectively accepted that it could do little in the face of multinational companies restructuring in order to increase profit margins, no matter how detrimental the effect on working populations. Laurent Fabius, the Finance Minister, for example, admitted to having ‘serious reservations’ about the new legislation, which he saw as a disincentive for investment and recruitment in a modern economy.47 In addition, the state has encouraged capitalisation as a form of pension provision through the 19 February 2001 law on employee share ownership. The major innovation of this law allows employers to set up a ‘voluntary employee savings partnership plan’ (PPESV) through a collective agreement at company or sectoral level. Up to C4600 per year can be paid into a savings fund that can invest the money on the financial markets. As the money is blocked for at least ten years, these are effectively long-term savings plans that are seen as a means of financing retirement through individual savings, thereby undermining the present pensions system, particularly through provisions for a staggered withdrawal of money from funds.48 Indeed, in one study, one in four companies saw the PPESV in these terms.49 The above, then, would seem to indicate an evolution away from state intervention towards a system of regulation based upon market competition and individualised risk in a more flexible labour market and production system. However, despite the pressures in this direction from European integration and economic globalisation, the role of the state in French industrial relations remains central to the regulation of labour and the mediation of capital–labour conflict in France. Although the state can no longer intervene to block decisions such as those taken by Danone and Marks and Spencer, as it may have done in the past, it has reinforced its intervention in the social sphere to regulate relations between employers and their workforces. Legislation from the Auroux Laws in 1982 through to the Aubry Laws of 1998 and 2000 has certainly attempted to decentralise the conduct of industrial relations and introduce greater flexibility into the employment relationship in order to enable companies to be more reactive to their economic environment. However, attempts have also been made to soften the blow of these liberalising trends through the protection and advancement of workers’ interests. This can not only be seen in the attempts in the Law on Social Modernisation to make recourse to redundancy more expensive. The state also still intervenes in industrial relations through employment policies, as active labour market policies have been used to cushion the effects of industrial restructuring. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s all governments attempted to lower unemployment through targeted training programmes, exemptions from payroll taxes for employers, which are supposed to give them an incentive to employ the young and long-term unemployed – especially as trainees

The role of the state 43 – youth employment schemes and public sector job creation.50 Daley estimates that including those employed by central and local government, nationalised companies and the armed forces, nearly half of all jobs in France in the early 1990s depended on state policy in one way or another.51 According to Milner, ‘This helps to explain why welfare spending increased from 23.5 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 30.1 per cent in 1995 [. . .] an active employment policy became both a consequence and an instrument of economic adjustment.’52 Furthermore, one consequence of the use of the welfare state to cushion the impact of economic liberalisation is that state control over the welfare system has gradually increased due to difficulties encountered in its administration. From the early 1970s, mass unemployment put all social welfare funds under strain, resulting in state intervention to ensure their financial solvency, including that of the bipartite unemployment benefit funds in 1982 and 1993. Employers, faced with the highest social charges in Europe53 protested that the level of their contributions militated against job creation, so the financial burden of balancing the social security books increasingly fell on households as contributions rose and benefits fell. Government intervention to bail out bankrupt social security institutions also led to a consensus among both socialists and the Right that funding from universal taxation was necessary, resulting in reform from the state. Thus, in 1991, Prime Minister Rocard introduced the Generalised Social Contribution – a tax on all revenue not just wages – to bring extra finance into the system. In his 1995 reform plan, Juppé introduced the CRDS tax – the Contribution to the Reimbursement of the Social Debt – in the same logic. Control over welfare spending was also increased in 1996 following the Juppé reform package, as parliamentary agreement was henceforth required for the spending plans of the various social security regimes. More recently, as the debate over unemployment insurance has shown, the state cannot easily be marginalised from the process of social regulation, but retains a central place in it. Indeed, two versions of an agreement signed between the MEDEF and CFDT over unemployment benefit funds were rejected by the state before the 19 October 2000 agreement was ratified (see also Chapter 4). The rejected agreements contained plans to link the payment of benefits to the signing of an individual ‘return to work action plan’ (PARE, Plan d’aide au retour à l’emploi). The state imposed its view of the general interest by rejecting such a link, on the grounds that the state, through legal regulation and not the social partners through the UNEDIC, should decide who was and was not eligible for unemployment benefit.54 Likewise, a February 2001 agreement over supplementary pensions required further negotiations with the state in order to bring about a wholesale reform of the pensions system despite MEDEF aims to sideline the state in the determination of pension rights.55 Indeed, the increasing state management of the social security system has progressively deprived the social partners of one of their major roles in social regulation. The tensions thus

44

The role of the state

created came to a head when Martine Aubry suggested using the surplus in the unemployment benefit funds, created by the reduction in unemployment, to finance the 35-hour week reforms. In response, employers argued that the government was becoming increasingly interventionist in the social sphere as it was losing control of the economy due to the processes of economic globalisation and European integration, and withdrew from the management of the social security funds in protest in 2001.56 Moreover, the major issue in French industrial relations at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century points to a continued major involvement of the state in the regulation of labour. The reduction of working time had long been on the trade union agenda, particularly that of the CFDT. Raymond Barre’s government invited employers and unions to negotiate on the issue as far back as March 1978. As negotiations broke down over the question of flexibility, Mitterrand promised a gradual reduction to a 35-hour week in his ‘110 propositions’ for his 1981 presidential election campaign. In the face of strong employer opposition, and a stalled negotiating process, the legal working week was reduced by decree from 40 to 39 hours in 1981. While the CFDT argued, along with employers, that the question of wage compensation for the reduction in working time should be a question for trade union–employer negotiation, Mitterrand imposed the 39-hour week with no loss of salary, i.e. paid 40 hours. This decision had the effect of blocking any further negotiation on the question of working time and further progress had to wait until the mid-1990s, despite legislative attempts to promote negotiation on the issue.57 Finally, the 1996 Robien Law increased the incentives for companies to negotiate a reduction in working time to 35 hours per week in order to save or create jobs at the local level. Despite some successes, the impact of the law was weak, prompting the newly elected Jospin government to announce legislation on the issue at the end of a tripartite summit on 10 October 1997.58 Although this announcement was made following a tripartite summit, it was not the result of any agreement between peak level organisations. The reaction of employers was predictably hostile and was marked by the resignation of Jean Gandois from the employers’ organisation, the CNPF. Under his successor, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the CNPF became the MEDEF, and on 2 November 1999, announced plans for a wholesale reform of social relations through a refondation sociale (new social constitution) to be negotiated with the unions. The aim of this was explicitly to sideline a state that was seen as too interventionist in the area of social policy (see Chapter 4). The saga of the 35-hour week suggests that the state still has a major role to play in the reform of working conditions in France. Indeed, state intervention was seen to be necessary following the repeated failure of the social partners to come to agreement over the reduction of working time. In effect, the state still needs to legislate on reform before it can delegate it to the social partners as bargained reform still does not appear to take place spontaneously. The number of collective agreements signed between employers

The role of the state 45 and trade unions may be rising, particularly at local level (see Chapter 6). This cannot, however, be seen as evidence of a decentralised system of social regulation in which voluntaristic compromise bargaining has replaced conflict and state intervention. The most recent rise in local agreements is a consequence of the Aubry Laws on the reduction of working time.59 While the trade unions’ propensity to sign such agreements may be evidence of more reformist orientations, even within the CGT, the employers’ reactions, and subsequent attempts to sabotage the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, suggest that collective bargaining is taking place under legal compulsion.60 More generally, despite the development of company-level collective bargaining, the relationship between the state as legislator and the collective bargaining system remains tight and complex. In the area of wages, for example, many branch level agreements contain clauses where the minimum wage for the profession covered is below the SMIC. If, in these cases, salary scales are not revised, the state can be seen as playing the role of arbitrator by ensuring a minimum wage above that set by collective agreement. The state will then urge the social partners to update their agreement. Alternatively, the roles may be reversed, with the state urging the social partners to renegotiate the bottom end of their salary scales in order to raise the minimum wage rather than acting directly to raise the SMIC. In other areas, the state also has a role to play in promoting collective bargaining. Indeed, Morin observes ‘a certain correspondence between the themes suggested or assigned to negotiators at different levels by the legislator and the effective development of negotiation at these levels’.61 Paradoxically, then, more than 20 years after the Auroux Laws, the decentralisation of collective bargaining in many areas still depends upon state intervention in the process. Indeed, the state’s attempts to stimulate collective bargaining while protecting employee interests has resulted in a highly complex regulation of such bargaining. As we have seen, at national level, this resulted in the refusal to ratify agreements reached between MEDEF and the CFDT over the reform of the unemployment benefit system on two occasions. At company level, in the case of the reduction of working time, agreements had to be validated by the Ministry of Employment to qualify for state aid, something that was not automatic. The second Aubry Law on the reduction of working time went into the most minute detail over the exchanges that could take place at workplace level, in 37 articles and 44 pages, and was backed up by 13 decrees and seven circulars concerning implementation, totalling 165 pages.62 Elsewhere, the state has not managed to extricate itself from industrial conflict, which therefore remains highly politicised in France. Work inspectors, prefects and ministers are still drawn into industrial conflicts. There are many such examples, even up to the present day, such as the intervention of the Prime Minister in the Air France strikes of the 1990s, or the involvement of the Minister for Labour in the lorry driver strikes of the mid-1990s. Indeed, with strikes and trade unionism increasingly a public sector

46

The role of the state

phenomenon in France, the state is more and more at the centre of industrial tension, as witnessed by a series of strikes at the turn of the millennium in the railway and hospital sectors, not to mention the November–December 1995 strike wave (see Chapter 8). In 1976, this arbitrating role of the state was given legislative recognition, when the then Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, determined that companies wanting to carry out collective redundancies would have to seek administrative authorisation from the Labour Inspectorate. Ten years later, in an attempt to deregulate the labour market, this measure was abolished, but replaced with the need to produce a social plan when carrying out such redundancies. Again, the plan needs to be approved by the Labour Inspectorate, giving the state an arbitration role in one of the most conflictual decisions a company can make.

Conclusion Following the Second World War, the perception that laissez-faire capitalism had failed the nation meant that attempts were made to bring labour into the policy-making process, albeit on a largely consultative basis. Reforms were passed in their favour in order to gain cooperation in the postwar reconstruction project, and then to improve the position of France as a capitalist economy. The general weakness of labour, however, resulted in the state playing a central role in labour regulation through social and economic policy-making in what could be termed a ‘state Fordist’ framework. From the 1960s onwards, however, state planning policies lost their centrality to economic policy-making as the internationalisation of the economy led to difficulties in forecasting and achieving targets. In the early 1970s, moreover, the perception that economic crisis was cyclical led to a concentration on what were seen as the cyclical problems of inflation and unemployment. The turning point came with the nomination of Raymond Barre as Prime Minister in 1976. With the brief parenthesis of 1981–2, the dominant view has been that labour market rigidities have been dysfunctional to French capitalism, and measures have therefore been taken to overcome them. The Keynesian commitment to full employment has been abandoned, labour markets and the economy have been deregulated and industrial relations decentralised in order that market forces bring about the modernisation of French industry. The above reforms were not deliberately aimed at weakening the strength of labour in the way Thatcherism did in the UK. Indeed, in the early 1980s, socialist governments attempted to shore up the position of organised labour in order that protections would be guaranteed to workers while the state withdrew from the regulation of employment relations. Nevertheless, economic and social change has tilted the balance of power firmly in the direction of employers, and the French state has been powerless to halt such a trend. Even under such conditions, however, the state still has a central role to play. That role, though, is no longer one of centralised economic manage-

The role of the state 47 ment. Macro-economic policy has bowed to the pressure of global product and financial markets and, with the exception of the 1997–2002 Jospin government, is no longer based upon the stimulation of economic activity by ensuring a high level of internal demand, particularly through full employment. While social progress was being pushed via legislation, such as that on the 35-hour week, the logic of state intervention, from the Auroux Laws onwards, has been to set a framework within which the social partners negotiate the exact contours of that progress according to the precise requirements of their industry, and, increasingly, of their company. Elsewhere, through the minimum wage, and the surveillance of collective agreements, the state ensures a safety net below which wages and conditions can not, or should not, fall. The general thrust of policy, however, has been to improve the economic climate for business by reducing the intervention of the state and deregulating the economy, the labour market and employment relations in order to introduce greater flexibility and reduce costs for business so that it can compete in a globalised economy. The problem for the French state is that such deregulation and decentralisation is reliant upon bargained compromises between employers and weak unions. The resulting paradox is that economic deregulation is accompanied by increasing intervention in the social sphere, including in the conduct of decentralised collective bargaining, in order to ensure that the introduction of a greater role for market forces in the employment relationship does not harm the ‘general interest’ by removing too much social protection from wage earners. In the absence of spontaneous bargaining over the reform of employment relations, the state also has to take the lead in pushing for bargaining over flexibility in order to overcome stalemate. Such is the logic of the laws on the reduction of working time, and its articulation with greater flexibility, in 1998 and 2000. As in the past, state intervention acts as a substitute for the complete autonomy of the bargaining sphere. The result, however, is what is perceived by some as an overly interventionist state imposing its views and restricting the field within which the social partners can operate, thereby contributing to the weakness of bargaining as a mechanism for social regulation in France. Political leaders on the left and right may, in their own way, argue for a democratisation of society through the development of collective bargaining.63 However, far from effecting a radical change in its role in French industrial relations in response to new economic imperatives, the state seems to have been constrained in its attempts at withdrawal by the pre-existing configuration and weaknesses of the French industrial relations system.

3

Trade unions

Introduction: trade unions and industrial relations before the 1970s Trade unions were legalised in France in 1884. This followed years of repression after the Chapelier Law of 1791 outlawed all associations of employers and employees, in the name of individualism and economic liberalism, in the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution. The development of trade unions was, however, slow even after legality, for a combination of reasons. First, the slow industrialisation of France resulted in a weak and scattered working class – more often than not working in small rural industries – that was difficult to organise collectively. Where trade unions were established, they met with the hostility of the state and employers, reinforcing a tendency to see society in terms of a class struggle. Weakness and radicalism were mutually reinforcing, and divisions over ideology, strategies and tactics soon surfaced in the face of an intransigent employer class backed up by the state. Of these divisions, the most basic and durable have been those around religion, with the CFTC being established in 1919 as a Catholic alternative to the CGT, and those separating communists from non-communists. Thus, again, FO was established in 1948 in reaction to increasing PCF influence in the CGT. Added to this, the CFDT emerged from the CFTC to provide a ‘third way’ between the bureaucratic state socialism of the PCF-CGT tandem and the welfare statism of reformist unions and political parties. As the main organisations recruiting members across the economy, these unions have been in competition amongst themselves, and with occupation-based unions, resulting in a divided and numerically weak trade union movement. In many ways, the state’s attempts to integrate trade unions into the capitalist economy in the post-war period ensured their continuing weakness. The designation of representative organisations – legally entitled to represent workers at a national level by signing agreements – institutionalised political pluralism amongst trade unions. It also ensured that workplace branches could survive even when they were numerically weak, reinforcing multi-unionism and therefore division among the workforce. Such division is given concrete expression and exacerbated by regular work-

Trade unions

49

place elections for employee delegates and works committees. Labour market weakness led to trade unions, particularly the CGT, looking outside of the industrial relations system to the state for reform. This concentration on political goals only served to exacerbate division, apart from a few brief periods of unity, such as that between the CFDT and CGT from 1966 to 1978 – a period of unity that was nevertheless marked by inter-confederational conflict.1 It also resulted in the neglect of workplace issues as the centrally imposed aims of class mobilisation predominated. Within this context, the dominant confederation for much of the postwar period was the CGT. In 1945, it could claim 93.4 per cent of trade union members in France, and still over half in 1960. Although this figure fell to 46.8 per cent in 1970, it was still the largest trade union by far.2 This hegemony among the working classes until the 1970s enabled it to put its stamp on the conduct of industrial relations. The result was a system characterised by conflict and opposition, in which class-based action aimed at putting pressure on the state for reform and at raising wage levels across the economy predominated over workplace action aimed at improving working conditions. The CGT’s strategy was well suited to the context of the Fordist compromise. First, the concentration on political goals at the national level reinforced the notion of a homogeneous working class resulting from, and exploited by, industrialisation in a capitalist society. Class interests could therefore be put to the fore in an attempt to build up class consciousness, solidarity and mobilisation through a strategy of wage maximisation, conflict with employers and the integration of concrete demands within wider societal demands directed at the state. Second, ceding control in the workplace to concentrate on the national level enabled the CGT to deny any responsibility in the co-management of the capitalist enterprise and to avoid any direct dialogue with a class enemy whose very legitimacy was refuted. Third, Fordist growth meant that such a strategy was tenable as employers were able to accommodate increased wage costs via the productivity gains afforded by increasingly efficient assembly lines and via price rises in a situation of high demand and relatively low international competition. Trade union division paradoxically aided such a strategy as it enabled a division of labour among organisations. As agreements only need to be signed by one representative union, a reformist trade union, usually FO or the CFTC, could sign them at this time. The CGT, meanwhile, could maintain its ideological purity and reject agreements as class collaboration in the knowledge that their members would also benefit. Ultimately, the weakness of the CGT and the existence of other organisations meant that it did not have to choose between profound social, economic and political change on the one hand, and a more pragmatic approach on the other. It could never pose a serious threat to French capitalism, but its oppositional stance ensured a solid core of working-class support that made such a stance strategically attractive.

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Change since the 1970s – a terminal decline? Accurate figures for trade union membership in France are notoriously difficult to ascertain due to a system whereby members buy monthly stamps from local delegates.3 Furthermore, all levels of trade union organisation have an incentive to exaggerate membership levels to gain power within the organisation and legitimacy in the outside world. In addition, unionisation rates have always fluctuated somewhat, with influxes of members at times of heightened social tension, such as in 1936 and 1968, being followed by equally impressive membership losses.4 Nevertheless, a long-term decline from the high point of the Liberation is perceptible. Membership density peaked at 35 per cent in the post-war period, but had fallen to 20 per cent by the 1970s.5 Since the 1980s, talk of trade union crisis has become commonplace in France as estimations of trade union membership rates hover around the 8–9 per cent mark. According to the International Labour Office, 9 per cent of French workers were unionised in 1995, while INSEE, the government statistical service, estimated the level at 8 per cent in 1997.6 From the mid-1970s onwards trade unions have, in effect, suffered the loss of two-thirds of their membership.7 The CGT is by far the worst affected, suffering a loss of nearly two-thirds of its membership between 1975 and 1993. The CFDT lost 36 per cent over the same period, before its numbers started to rise again to the point where it now claims more members than in 1975. FO’s membership declined by 19 per cent between 1975 and 1993.8 Membership figures are not the only indicator of this decline. Indeed, they may not even be the best measure. French unions have always relied upon a small activist base rather than a mass membership, and trade union activity has often resulted in sanctions from employers in terms of career progression and even continued employment, while the benefits of union activity in terms of pay etc, are not confined to union members. For these reasons, support for trade unions is not always translated into membership. However, further evidence of decline can be seen in the results of works committee elections which take place in companies of 50 or more employees, in France (Table 3.1). Over the long term, these figures concur with membership figures that show the most serious decline suffered by the CGT. Although the percentage of votes for other unions appears to have held up well, this is against a background of falling participation rates. In 1969, 72 per cent of those eligible voted in works committee elections, a figure that steadily declined to hover around the 65 per cent mark throughout the 1990s.9 In 2000, participation rates fell to an all-time low of 63.7 per cent. There were, however, some encouraging signs for unions. Votes for non-union candidates fell by 2.2 per cent from their 1998 score, to 21.9 per cent as the negotiation of company level agreements, particularly over the reduction of working time, led to an increase in trade union presence in French workplaces (see Chapter 7). The CFDT was the main beneficiary with 22.9 per cent of the votes, a

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Table 3.1 Works committee election results, 1968–99 (% of votes cast*)

1968–9 1977–8 1982–3 1983–4 1984–5 1985–6 1986–7 1987–8 1988–9 1989–90 1990–1 1991–2 1992–3 1993–4 1994–5 1995–6 1996–7 1997–8 1998–9

CGT

CFDT

FO

CFTC

CFECGC

Other union

Nonunion

45.0 38.5 31.7 30.2 28.6 27.4 27.0 26.8 25.9 25.0 22.7 22.6 22.2 22.1 22.0 21.7 22.1 22.4 23.0

19.0 20.5 22.6 21.7 21.1 21.2 21.3 21.0 20.9 20.5 20.2 20.4 20.5 20.8 20.7 21.1 21.2 21.3 22.3

7.5 10.0 11.3 12.4 13.3 13.5 12.7 12.4 12.4 12.0 12.2 11.9 11.9 11.9 12.2 12.2 12.1 12.1 12.1

3.0 2.5 3.6 4.1 4.4 4.4 4.3 4.3 4.2 4.1 4.0 4.4 4.5 4.5 4.7 4.8 4.8 5.0 5.3

5.0 6.0 6.5 6.5 6.7 6.8 6.7 6.4 6.1 6.0 6.5 6.1 6.2 6.0 6.0 6.1 6.1 6.1 6.0

5.0 5.5 5.1 5.3 5.4 5.4 5.5 5.4 5.6 5.9 5.6 6.2 6.5 6.6 6.5 6.8 6.7 6.5 6.3

15.0 17.5 19.2 19.9 20.6 21.3 22.5 23.7 24.9 26.5 28.7 28.4 28.2 28.1 27.9 27.4 27.1 26.6 24.9

Source: 1968–9 and 1977–8: Landier and Labbé (1998), op. cit., p. 40. Figures here are approximate. All other years: Liaisons sociales. Documents No. 94/2001: Les eléctions aux comités d’entreprise en 1999, 18 December 2001, p. 1. Note *Elections take place every two years. Figures given are by two-year electoral cycle.

rise of 1.2 per cent on 1998, while the CGT remained the largest trade union in terms of votes with 24.4 per cent.10 Nevertheless, a growing apathy towards trade unions is even more apparent in national ballots for industrial tribunals (prud’homales). In the 1997 and 2002 elections, two-thirds of those wage earners eligible to vote abstained. In both elections the CGT won a third of the vote and the CFDT a quarter.11 Finally, strike rates also provide a measure of trade unions’ capacity to mobilise workers. In this respect, the figures are once again eloquent, and will be considered further in Chapter 8. For now, it is sufficient to note that strike rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s: 1971–80 saw an average of 3.5 million days lost per annum; 1981–90, 1.9 million; and 1991–8, 1.5 million.12 Also, strikes have tended to become a public sector phenomenon as civil servants or workers in nationalised industries are more protected as far as employment is concerned than their private sector counterparts. Over the last 25 years, then, unions have suffered a serious decline, to the point where their legitimacy as representatives of wage earners is frequently called into question by employers, and where Dominique Labbé and

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Maurice Croisat could ask, in the early 1990s, whether we were witnessing ‘The end of unions?’13 Several factors can explain this decline. First, the OPEC oil price rise of 1973 signalled the start of a structural economic crisis in advanced industrial nations, culminating in the break up of Fordist patterns of growth and capital accumulation. The trends that resulted in the break up of Fordism were already present from the 1960s onwards, but were brought into stark relief by economic recession and crisis in the 1970s. They hit, not only western economic systems, but also the trade union movements that grew up within these systems, and nowhere more so than in France, partly because of the pre-existing weakness of the trade union movement. The CGT was particularly hard hit as its appeal had been directed primarily at the traditional emblem of the working class, the male manual worker in heavy industries. Unemployment was fuelled in precisely these industries as high inflation and intense international competition cut profit margins and led to losses of market shares, prompting a restructuring of industry. A shift occurred in employment patterns towards the service sector, which trade unions, especially the CGT, found difficult to penetrate due to their image of ‘blue-collar’ organisations. An associated problem for ‘male’ trade unions was the feminisation of the labour market, which was given an added spur by tertiarisation.14 Second, the saturation of the market for standardised products and increased international competition on the basis of quality, variety and innovation brought with them the requirement of more flexible workplaces able to react quickly to changing product market conditions. Not only did the growing automation of industrial workplaces fuel unemployment, but the need for more flexible production also changed the nature of industrial relations in many respects. Employer demands for numerical flexibility resulted in the growth of subcontracted, part-time, fixed-term and temporary labour, thus dividing the working class, or what was left of it, into core and peripheral labour forces (see Chapter 5). Worse still for trade unions, many of the jobs created in the tertiary sector were also of a temporary or part-time nature, hindering still further trade union recruitment in the only expanding part of the economy. Under Fordist conditions of production and growth, it was a relatively easy matter for the CGT to build up and disseminate an image of class exploitation due to the worker’s subservience to the machine and the close supervision to which he or she was subjected. Interest aggregation was therefore relatively straightforward, and once control of the production process had been ceded, could concentrate on purely quantitative issues such as wages. However, the aggregation of interests between those in secure full-time employment, those in a precarious labour market position and those without work at all was to become increasingly difficult as the myth of a homogeneous working class was finally shattered under the pressure of profound economic change. Unions found themselves accused of protecting the ever-diminishing band of workers on secure permanent contracts at the expense of wider social solidarities, as unionisation rates among those

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under 24 years old, who are disproportionately represented among insecure workers, plummeted from 9 per cent in 1981 to just 1 per cent in 1990.15 Furthermore, a trade union strategy based largely upon quantitative wage demands and national level mobilisation was also looking increasingly vulnerable. Employers – hit by recession, falling demand and rising prices for primary materials, especially energy – were no longer willing to pay for industrial peace with high wage rises. In the context of an increasingly slack labour market, they could use the threat of company bankruptcy and/or layoffs to resist trade union pressure in this area. In any case, while wages remained an important issue for employees, the emergence of issues based around the quality of working life, in the wake of the May 1968 strike wave, rendered nationally-focused strategies based on quantitative demands less attractive to them, neglecting as they did workplace issues. The decentralisation of industrial relations as a response to economic change further served to render such strategies untenable. Issues such as the introduction of new technology, training, work organisation, job security and conditions increasingly required regulation at the local level but had hitherto been neglected by unions as they concentrated on national political reform. Such problems have been compounded by management responses to qualitative demands. Company-level social policies attempted to integrate workers into the company through direct communication and participation techniques, such as quality circles and the like, that undermined their attachment to, and the legitimacy of, trade unions in the workplace (see Chapter 5). In addition, employers began to introduce individualised pay schemes that aimed to undermine worker solidarity and reinforce identification with the company. When the Auroux Laws institutionalised the decentralisation of industrial relations in the early 1980s, it only seemed to confirm that trade union strategies aimed at class mobilisation at the national level were out of date and did not correspond to new economic realities. The locus of labour regulation was increasingly being shifted to the local level, while the traditional working class to which trade union mobilisation was designed to appeal had shrunk and been definitively fragmented. Even the election of a labour-friendly socialist government in 1981 could not halt the decline of organised labour; in fact it only served to compound it. The 1982 Auroux Laws were designed to strengthen the workplace role of trade unions by increasing the rights of works committees, making local wage bargaining obligatory, giving a right of veto over higher-level agreements to any union obtaining more than half of the votes in workplace elections and instituting a right of expression for employees that would depend upon local collective agreements. Employers, however, were able to make better use of the new legislative provisions than trade unions, despite their initial hostility to the laws, and have been able to use them to increase flexibility and individualise relations in the workplace through local bargaining and new communications strategies. Unions, on the other hand, found themselves overloaded by their new responsibilities at a time when their

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numbers were decreasing and they were having difficulty finding enough volunteers to fill all their elective functions.16 The institutionalisation of a decentralised system of industrial relations thus occurred at a time when unions were weak, and growing weaker, at the local level, due to changes in the wider economy and to a new employer offensive aimed at undermining the unions further by integrating workers into the company. This institutionalisation has posed major problems to unions as it questions their very raison d’être. In the past, they existed as social movements, mobilising workers as members of a class according to a project for social transformation that would result in the emancipation of that class from bourgeois exploitation. Now, however, the emphasis is on consultation, negotiation and bargaining rather than mobilisation, opposition and conflict. Local trade union officials, overloaded by their new functions and responsibilities, are increasingly quasi-permanent trade union representatives rather than full-time workers with a few hours off for representative duties. As such, they effectively become trade union professionals, or bureaucrats, engaged in policing collective agreements and in the social regulation of the workplace. No longer needing to mobilise their base to force negotiations upon reluctant employers, they lose touch with it, particularly as employers has been engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of their employees from the late 1970s onwards. At the national level, national confederations are increasingly para-public agencies staffed by full-time professional experts.17 Their role, so the argument goes, has become one of social regulation rather than worker representation. Their relationship with wage earners has become electoral rather than based on membership, and they have become dependent upon public finance, resulting in union officials becoming ‘social civil servants’ cut off from their base.18 Furthermore, the Auroux Laws represented an attempt to institute a system of industrial relations within which labour would accept the economic constraints bearing down upon the firm, and within which employers would realise the social responsibility they had towards their workforce. Dialogue, negotiation and pragmatic compromise bargaining would therefore replace ideology and conflict as the driving forces behind the conduct of industrial relations. This, however, necessitated a change in attitude on the part of the unions, a change that the CGT, in particular, would find hard to make (see below). Such a change, however, was increasingly necessary. The socialist government’s political U-turn in 1982, when Keynesian reflation and nationalisation were abandoned in favour of austerity policies, only served to discredit further the ‘opposition force’ unionism of the CGT, as the working classes were reconciled to capitalism and the profit motive under a left-wing government.19 In effect, the failure of the 1981–2 socialist experiment, and the later break up of the Soviet bloc, discredited the left-wing solutions to the crisis being proposed by the CGT and its political ally, the PCF. The electorate deserted the PCF in droves, and the knock-on effect was disastrous for the CGT.

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Generally speaking, the French model of trade union organisation and action owes much to its anarcho-syndicalist origins. Rather than mass memberships for collective bargaining purposes, unions relied upon small numbers of activist militants to foster discontent in the workplace in order to force employers into unilateral concessions and to train workers in the use of the strike weapon. Even with the attempted integration of unions into the capitalist economy in the post-war period, membership remained a function of ideological belief rather occupational identity, and the role of militants, particularly in the CGT, remained one of fostering discontent rather than seeking compromises with employers. Although central confederal control has always been weak over local unions and workplace branches, confederations did exercise a moral authority over their constituent organisations, as ideology bound the organisation together and gave sense and justification to local actions. Such a model, we have argued, was rational under the French variant of Fordism. The relative homogeneity of working conditions meant that demands could be aggregated to a national or sectoral level, while the rigid social division of labour, and tight employer control and harsh discipline in the workplace meant that society could be easily and convincingly portrayed in terms of a class struggle. At the same time, high and sustained economic growth meant that unions could claim to deliver real benefits to their constituencies through struggle as gains were made in welfare provision and wages. As the French economy restructured in the face of international competition, however, the bastion of this model of unionism, the male manual worker, constituted a diminishing minority. Meanwhile, class has lost its centrality to identity, especially for the young. Along with a blurring between working and middle classes, a function, particularly, of the rise in white-collar workers, there has been a division into a number of sub-groups based on, for example, racial and gender identities, and a division according to labour market position (core, peripheral, excluded, public/private sector). ‘Opposition force’ unionism appeared ineffective in the face of mass redundancies and rising unemployment, while left-wing ideological supports for it were being eroded within and outside of France. The decentralisation and individualisation of employment relations, along with employer strategies for integrating employees into the workplace, meant that workers increasingly saw their interests as tied to that of the company, in sectional or individual terms, rather than to that of their class (see, in particular, Chapter 8).

Reactions Thus, the macro- and micro-economic as well as sociological bases of an ideological, class-based model of trade unionism have been undermined. French trade unions have been severely weakened by industrial, labour market, social, political and economic change. As the economy moved into a post-Fordist phase, the commitment to full employment that was a pillar of

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Fordism was abandoned, the rigid social division of labour associated with Taylorism was being unravelled, and collective bargaining was decentralised to respond to individual companies’ needs. An ‘opposition force’ trade unionism based on an ideological appeal to a homogeneous, exploited (male) manual working class and on pressuring the State for political and legal reform appeared increasingly untenable in the new economic environment. In addition, economic globalisation challenged the national focus of trade union action. Reactions to this have been varied, but none have been able to mask the underlying decline in trade union strength, or the fact that the balance of power has shifted decisively to employers. In a climate where employees were increasingly being integrated into the company, bargaining was being decentralised and anything that smacked of socialism, especially in its centralised state incarnation, was discredited, the CGT’s ‘mass and class’-based unionism appeared increasingly outdated. Struck by the correlation between the electoral decline of the PCF and its own decline, the CGT has gradually distanced itself from the Party and jettisoned its calls for social transformation. The confederation did not call for its members to vote for communist candidates in any national elections from the 1990s on, and the then General Secretary, Louis Viannet, resigned from the Party’s Political Bureau in 1997. At the CGT’s 1995 Congress, division appeared over the future direction of the union between those faithful to the orthodox class-based conception of the confederation and ‘modernists’ arguing that ideological and political references should be dropped, and greater attention paid to the demands of the rank and file.20 In 1999, the modernists seemed to have won the day when the CGT became a member of the social-democratic ETUC. Although much of the Marxist rhetoric has been jettisoned, the CGT has not been able to break completely with its past as an ‘opposition force’ trade union. Indeed, doubts still linger, and opinions are divided, over this change. For Dominique Andolfatto, ‘These decisions nevertheless remain ambiguous and, at times, hypocritical.’21 Thus, the greater number than ever of communists in confederal organs, particularly in key posts, ‘leads one to wonder whether the CGT has not become the last bastion of communism’.22 Economic change not withstanding, constructing the necessary balance of power in order to force concessions from employers remains central to the confederation’s view of the conduct of industrial relations. Thus, Joel Decaillon, of the CGT’s Executive Committee, has argued that: Globalization is profoundly transforming relations between capital and labour, but I would say that this evolution is no different from that which occurred during the first industrial revolution. The notion of the balance of power between groups or countries, but also between employers and wage earners, remains central.23 Despite distancing itself from its political partner, it has, at least to some

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extent, continued with its ‘opposition force’ strategy. This, however, became couched in terms of concrete interests rather than ideological pronouncements about the nature of capitalist exploitation. Agreements that bargain away ‘guaranteed rights’, the fruit of past, often bloody, struggles, were rejected, as were any agreements concerning layoffs. This ‘combative’ strategy did not prevent the loss of many supporters in the 1980s and 1990s. The 1995 strike wave (see Chapter 8), however, appears to have halted, at least for the time being, the haemorrhage of members as the confederation tapped into fears of the future of the French welfare state under plans for European economic integration. Furthermore, the perception that concessions by other unions, particularly over the flexible deployment of labour, have not been reciprocated by employers in terms of job creation and security, may favour this line in the future. Indeed, for this very reason, after a history of ‘apoliticism’ and the encouragement of collective bargaining, FO began to move closer to the CGT from 1988 onwards, when Marc Blondel took over from André Bergeron as General Secretary. Under its new leader the confederation refused CFDT overtures to create a reformist centre of non-communist unions out of suspicion for an overtly political manoeuvre aimed at weakening the CGT, and a traditional wariness of collaborating with a union with clerical roots. Thus, in contrast to the CFDT, FO increasingly refused to sign agreements that were seen as bargaining away employees’ rights in exchange for little, if anything, in the face of rising unemployment and declining purchasing power. Such a shift in position was confirmed during the 1995 strike wave, when a handshake between Marc Blondel and Louis Viannet, his then counterpart in the CGT, symbolised a reconciliation between the two organisations. Following this, however, FO’s traditional anti-communism has prevented any further development in this direction. While it benefited from its apoliticism until the mid-1980s, the confederation’s change of tack has not halted its decline. On the other hand, its refusal to enter into unified action with ‘political unions’, except on rare occasions, has left it isolated and the poor relation of the ‘big three’. The CFDT is, perhaps, the confederation that has carried out the most sustained and intense reflection over the social, political and economic changes of the past three decades. For Donnadieu, its evolution is ‘the only truly new element in [French] trade unionism’.24 In 1976, it abandoned aims for autogestion as utopian, arguing that trade unions should concentrate upon workplace issues of concern to workers. It thus went through a period of recentrage or resyndicalisation, refocusing its activities on ‘trade union’ issues. In the 1980s, in the face of mass unemployment it attempted to create links with other social movements, such as unemployed workers, antiracist and women’s movements. This was an attempt to redefine the worker as a multi-faceted member of society rather than as a one-dimensional member of a working class that was seen to be fast disappearing, and with which the young, in particular, did not seem to identify. Such attempts

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failed, however, in their aim of revitalising trade unionism through attracting the unemployed, women and immigrants. After dropping its references to socialism in 1988, the CFDT, in line with its social Catholic heritage, now accepts the legitimacy of capitalism as a social and economic system. Compromise bargaining and cooperation between capital and labour are seen as the means of modernising the economy and society in order that France can adapt to the new economic environment. Thus, ‘guaranteed rights’ are not sacrosanct and can be placed on the bargaining table in exchange for job creation – through job sharing if necessary. The CFDT has now become the confederation that is most willing to sign agreements, and the only one that was willing to accept pay restraint, even cuts, in return for the 35-hour week because of its perceived employment creation potential. Other areas of concern are training – particularly to prevent job losses with the introduction of new technologies – and equal rights, especially pay, for women. Within this overtly reformist stance, mass action has been largely abandoned in favour of a role in social regulation. The market economy is accepted, but the aim is to negotiate change and adaptation in order to promote social progress and to democratise relationships in the workplace and wider society. At the workplace level, this translated, even before the Robien and Aubry Laws, into the search for agreements over a reduction of working time in exchange for greater flexibility as a means of tackling unemployment. At the national level, it means an acceptance of the need for welfare state reform in order to reduce the burden on companies and state budgets. Hence the support for the Juppé Plan of 1995, and the willingness to sign an agreement with the MEDEF on reform of the UNEDIC unemployment benefit system in 2000. The problem for the CFDT in its attempt to promote concession bargaining and economic and social realism, however, is that it has created splits within its own ranks as it has come up against an attachment in some quarters to the ‘combative’ model of trade unionism. This culminated in the creation of SUD unions (see below) in the public sector by former CFDT activists in reaction to what was seen as the abandonment of the strike weapon and too great a willingness to make concessions to employers. Nevertheless, for Donnadieu, due to its implantation amongst white- and blue-collar workers, technicians and cadres in a wide variety of economic sectors, particularly those with good future prospects, such as services, retail distribution and medium-sized companies, the CFDT alone is capable of constituting a focal point for a ‘cooperative’ type of trade unionism.25 The erosion of the traditional model of union organisation primarily concerns the CGT, which was the historical incarnation of that model, but concerns all other major confederations to the extent that they were, to greater or lesser degrees, influenced by this ‘archetype’.26 This is not to say that all trade unions in France have undergone, or will undergo, the same evolution due to the changes brought about by the shift away from Fordist patterns of economic growth. The changes that unions have been through, and will con-

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tinue to go through in the future, are influenced, not only by the external economic, political and social environment, but also by their own histories, identities, values systems and the strategic choices that they make in function of these. Furthermore, such change and the strategic orientations, identities and values that evolve out of it may be more difficult to control and coordinate at the central confederal level than in the past as labour regulation increasingly takes place at the local level. Thus, Donnadieu raises the prospect of ‘a patchwork’ of different forms of trade unionism that would coexist according to the specific situations of different companies, sectors and local labour markets, and in which these different forms could coexist under the same confederal banner.27 Certainly, the decentralisation of collective bargaining has led to some union sections adopting bargaining stances in contradiction to the confederal line, for example CGT sections signing agreements on working time flexibility. Whatever their confederations may say, unions usually sign local agreements where they are present, even where these downgrade higher level agreements signed by their parent organisation.28 There is nothing new in local union branches acting in a fairly autonomous manner from their central confederations. As we stated at the start of this chapter, central control over local unions has always been weak. As long ago as 1984, Rand Smith argued the confederation’s ‘ideology provides at most only a general guide to action, not a detailed plan [. . .] the translation of ideology into practice is never direct or automatic [. . .] the immediate context, especially at plant level, affects the strategic choices open to local unions’.29 The difference between the 1970s and the present, however, is one of extent. Before 1968, and the legalisation of workplace branches, company bargaining was extremely rare, confined to a few large companies, and local autonomy was centred upon the use of the strike weapon and choices over whether to engage in joint action with rival organisations. The decentralisation of collective bargaining throughout the 1980s and 1990s gives local union branches a far greater legal base upon which to exercise their autonomy. Furthermore, the greater range of issues to be bargained over at local level, and the consequent increasing complexity of the bargaining process, gives them a greater need to exercise autonomy as bargaining processes and packages become more company specific (see Chapter 6).

Sectional interests and trade union fragmentation In such a context of the break-up of social solidarities based on class identification and the increasing autonomy of the local level of industrial relations from the national, sectional interests are brought to the fore and take on greater importance. The major signs of this in the last few years are not only the difficulties faced by the major confederations in coming to terms with the changes in their social and economic environment and the growing

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autonomy of local bargaining stances from national confederal orientations. The growth of new trade union movements, based upon occupational category rather than class allegiance, is another manifestation of a trend that poses a significant challenge to the established representative unions. The 1980s and 1990s saw the appearance of three new major federations of autonomous unions operating mainly in the public sector: the FSU, UNSA and the Groupe des dix. These developments can be partly explained by political division within the pre-existing confederations, and partly by the rise in importance of sectional demands. A feeling amongst employees, particularly in the public sector, that their unions were unwilling or unable to negotiate effectively on their behalf and were granting concessions to their employers too readily, led to the emergence of coordination movements in the 1980s (see Chapter 8), and to the growth of autonomous organisations in the 1990s. The trade union that has moved furthest to embrace the market and to adopt a social-liberal outlook, the CFDT, has suffered most in this respect. As it has moved towards the political centre and accepted the market economy and the need for economic and social modernisation, the CFDT has seen internal division, culminating in some of its activists in the public sector setting up a rival organisation, Solidaires, Unitaires Démocratiques (SUD). The first SUD union appeared in the post and telecommunications sector in 1988, following a split between local Parisian CFDT activists and the national confederation over a strike by postal workers.30 The position of SUD was reinforced when the socialist government decided to split the PTT, the French post and telecommunications giant into La Poste and France Télécom, in 1990 – a move that the CFDT did not oppose even though it was seen as paving the way for privatisation in the sector. Further growth occurred after SUD’s involvement in the 1995 strikes, and the organisation came second in professional elections in La Poste and France Télécom in October 2000, losing out to the CGT by only 0.23 per cent of the votes cast.31 In the 1995 strikes, the CFDT was once again divided over the leadership’s support for Prime Minister Alain Juppé’s proposals for the reform of the social security system, resulting in a minority of activists leaving to create SUD branches in various public and private sector organisations, including in the education and health systems, Treasury and SNCF.32 The latest notable split occurred at Michelin, where activists left the CFDT to set up SUD Michelin in January 2001 following disagreement over the holding of a referendum on the 35-hour week.33 As a member of the Groupe des dix (G10) autonomous unions – which claims 65,000 members, mainly in the public sector – SUD has been influential in giving this group an ‘oppositional’ identity.34 G10 has its origins in the split in the CGT in 1947, when several unions, including the FEN, refused the choice between the CGT and FO and opted for an autonomy based upon occupational category. In 1981, ten of these grouped together in a loose, informal structure in an attempt to overcome

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the disadvantages of their narrow base.35 The group remained largely anonymous, with an audience restricted to civil servants and a few specific occupational categories, such as building society employees and journalists, until the 1995 strikes and the emergence of SUD unions. Following this, it adopted federal statutes based upon the notion of internal democracy – each member has one vote whatever the union’s size, and has a right of veto in national decision-making structures. In general terms, G10, like SUD, expresses the current fears of certain sections of the working population, particularly in the public sector. The defence of public services, pensions and the welfare state therefore constitute central rallying cries. These essentially conservative themes, however, are articulated with those of European integration and economic globalisation to give the organisation its radical edge. Its anti-globalisation and pro-Third World stance, and involvement in a myriad of social movements, from those of the unemployed to the homeless in France, reinforce its image as an anti-capitalist organisation in favour of ‘an alternative economic logic’.36 Ideological division was also at the root of the break-up of the teachers’ union confederation, the FEN, leading to the establishment of rival umbrella groups of autonomous unions in 1993: the social-democratic UNSA, of which the FEN became a member, and the left-wing FSU. The former now claims 360,000 members, with 60,000 of them in the private sector. Although it won 5 per cent of the votes in the national prud’homal elections in 2002, UNSA still does not benefit from nationally representative status.37 The FSU has become the largest education trade union organisation in France, claiming 190,000 members and displacing the FEN (UNSA-Education since December 2000) in elections to the Joint Administration Commissions with 42 per cent of the votes in the primary education structures and 55 per cent in the secondary, in 1999.38 These autonomous organisations are challenging the supremacy of the ‘representative’ organisations in the public sector, particularly in the fonction publique d’Etat, where the FSU and UNSA arrive in first and second place respectively in professional elections.39 There is a possibility that UNSA may in future constitute a reformist pole with the CFDT (and possibly the CGT). However, other trade unions in the FSU and G10, particularly SUD, generally base their actions on very sectional interests, and adopt hard-line positions in strike movements. Such was the case in the March–April 2001 railway strike, when SUD-Rail was at the forefront of the movement, along with the autonomous train drivers’ union, the FGAAC. Both continued with the strike movement long after the CGT had called for a return to work on 7 April following ten days of strike action.40 The restriction of this strike action to long-distance train drivers also testifies to another major paradox of these movements. While they adopt a hard-left rhetoric, their defence of sectional interests makes it difficult for them to extend their appeal beyond a narrow base through calls to class solidarity. French trade unions therefore now appear more divided along ideological, professional and strategic lines

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than ever, just at a time when some form of rapprochement between the CFDT and CGT around a reformist orientation appears possible. Thus, despite the CGT’s abandonment of the aim of social transformation, radicalism persists and feeds another enduring trait of French specificity: that of the ideological and strategic division of French trade unions. The legitimacy of trade unions to speak for the workforce as a whole is undermined and a continual source of trade union weakness in France perpetuated. It is barely an exaggeration to say that trade unionism in France has now become an almost exclusively public sector phenomenon.41 In the private sector, union presence is concentrated in large companies and is almost totally absent from small- and medium-sized companies (see Chapter 7). In effect, public sector workers are far more protected than their private sector counterparts. Although temporary and part-time work are increasingly common in public sector administrations, the health and education sectors, and in nationalised industries,42 most workers benefit from the protections against lay-offs and arbitrary management discipline afforded by the Statut de la fonction publique. At times, such as in November–December 1995, this division between a unionised public sector and an ‘individualised’ private sector can be overcome. In this example, fears over public sector pension rights and reform of the health care system were articulated with issues of European integration and its effects on the future of the welfare state (see Chapter 8). Nevertheless, despite such examples, strong public sector unions and a weakness in the private sector are bound to lead to accusations of the defence of sectional interests along a public–private sector schism. Evidence of this could be seen in January 2001, when two days of action took place within a few days of each other. The first, on 25 January, was in opposition to the MEDEF’s calls for a change in the private sector pensions system, while a few days later, the same unions called for a demonstration over the government’s pay offer for civil servants. Rather than amalgamate the issues to bring as many people onto the streets as possible in a ‘national day of action’, as may have happened in the past, the organisers were keen to separate the issues, making it clear that one concerned the private sector and the other the public sector. In other words, there was no class orientation to this action, but merely the defence of certain sectional interests.

French unions and the international political economy The growth of autonomous unions can be seen as a consequence of what Jacques Capdevielle argues is a resurgence of professionally- and occupationally-based identities.43 On the one hand, as economic and social change has destroyed class solidarities, industrial action has become more localised and isolated and, therefore, based upon the defence of certain sectional interests, often linked to professional status (see Chapter 8). On the other hand, the neo-liberal direction of economic globalisation and European integration threatens the status of certain occupational groups, particularly in the public

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sector, and leads to an articulation between the defence of sectional interests and a wider rejection of the global hegemony of economic liberalism. As in 1995, local particularisms such as the ‘French public service model’, are defended against the diktats of an economy at the service of global financial markets. The apparently paradoxical orientations towards defensive sectionalism and international anti-capitalist solidarities of the new oppositional unions, such as SUD, thus find an echo amongst certain categories of worker. Such developments are not without influence on the traditional unions either. While FO has become increasingly disillusioned with European integration, both the CGT and CFDT have become more favourable, albeit for different reasons and to different extents. In the immediate post-war period, FO supported European construction, seeing in this a rampart against the spread of communism from the East, and was a founder member of the ETUC in 1973. By the end of the 1980s, however, FO’s main political reason for supporting European integration had disappeared with the collapse of communism. Economically, the neo-liberal overtones of the Maastricht Treaty were denounced. Finally, the entry of the CGT into the ETUC served to justify an increasingly difficult relationship with the European trade union movement that has left FO isolated at a European level.44 The CGT’s trajectory as far as Europe is concerned presents a mirror image of that of FO. European construction was seen, first, as a tool of American dominance in the heightened Cold War climate, then as permitting the domination of monopoly capital, and especially that of American multinational firms, following the creation of the Common Market in 1957. This position did not fundamentally alter until the 1980s, when the CGT’s economic nationalism was challenged by economic realities. The decline of traditional industries in areas such as Longwy in north-eastern France rendered European job creation initiatives vital for economic survival and led to their ‘critical acceptance’ among activists at the end of the 1980s.45 At the national level, after supporting the PCF in the 1989 European elections, constant failure on this score and the fall of the Berlin Wall persuaded the CGT to save itself by distancing itself from its political ally. From 1992, after having opposed the Maastricht Treaty because of the deflationary thrust of the convergence criteria, it attempted a rapprochement with the European trade union movement – a process completed in 1999 when it was accepted into the ETUC. For the CFDT, the major turning point in its attitudes towards Europe came in the mid-1980s. Before this date, the CFTC and then CFDT supported European construction but opposed the economically liberal slant of the Treaty of Rome with the notion of a Europe turned towards the interests of workers through an extension of its national policy of democratic planning. This habit of extending national orientations onto the international arena continued with the subsequent policies of democratic socialism

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followed by recentrage. In 1983, however, the CFDT came out strongly in favour of European construction when it supported the socialist government’s decision to implement deflationary economic policies in order to stay in the European Monetary System. French moves for greater European integration were then supported, especially after the arrival of Jacques Delors as the President of the Commission. Delors’ attempts to promote a ‘social Europe’ were seen as a means of opposing the forward march of neoliberalism, but the Maastricht Treaty was supported as favouring employment creation in the absence of national solutions to unemployment.46 While the CFDT now accepts ‘the need for European social regulation, judged utopian twenty years ago’,47 labour movement victories at the European level have been slim. European Works Council legislation and the Charter of Fundamental Rights constitute the main gains, but provide little in the way of social advances in the face of liberalising economic trends on a European level. Thus, the existence of a European Works Council in Renault could not stop the closure of the company’s Vilvorde site in Belgium, in 1997, as production was moved to other European companies in a costcutting exercise (see Chapter 7). Likewise, in March 1996, Danone signed an agreement to establish a joint information and consultation committee, the role of which was to negotiate ‘joint statements and measures, notably on employment, training, information, safety and working conditions; and the exercise of trade union rights’.48 Neither this, nor its reputation as an exemplary employer, however, were sufficient to prevent it from closing its biscuit-making operation in France, in 2001, making 570 employees redundant in the process, despite the existence of strong and united trade union opposition and political condemnation.49 In the same way, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, adopted at the Nice summit of December 2000, appears toothless when compared with the increasing mobility of investment capital. As the title suggests, the rights accorded to workers are basic ones such as the right to belong to a trade union, to negotiation and to withdraw one’s labour. In other words, it provides for no improvement upon the rights already accorded to workers in France. Furthermore, not being integrated into any European treaty, it has no clear legal status. These weaknesses divide French trade unions. Although the CGT took part in ‘Euro-demonstrations’ in favour of the Charter under the ETUC banner in Nice on 6 December 2000, it argued that, ‘The conclusions of the Nice summit were minimal: an insufficient and purely declaratory charter.’50 At the same time, CGT dissidents, G10 and the FSU denounced the Charter as ‘an instrument of social regression’ in the same demonstrations.51 Furthermore, the ambiguity of the GCT position was a further factor of division. Trying to reconcile its reservations over the Charter with its recent integration into the ETUC, Bernard Thibault, the CGT’s General Secretary, opposed the ‘irresponsibility’ of an ‘all or nothing attitude’ with respect to the Charter on the one hand, and it being one that ‘confuses a step with an advance or progress’ on the other, thereby attacking

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not only the opponents of the Charter, but also supporters such as the CFDT.52 Over and above such divisions amongst French unions, other major obstacles confront any action on a European level, let alone a global one, to protect the interests of wage earners. The need for international solidarity and action, given the European and global context within which economic activity takes place, has certainly been recognised by the main French unions, particularly the CFDT and CGT. This can be seen in the now seemingly obligatory presence of all major trade union confederations at European summits and at global events such as the World Social Forum – held in Porto Allegre in opposition to the Davos World Economic Forum – or the meetings of the WTO. However, divisions over aims and strategies are still apparent, between those that believe in some sort of negotiated regulation of international economic activity and those that refuse the very notion of global capitalism. Furthermore, while the need for international solidarity and action in the face of the forward march of global capitalism is recognised at the level of generality and principle, it has been much harder to put such laudable ideas into practice. In the Vilvorde case cited above, local level trade union branches in Spain and France negotiated agreements over a reorganisation of work to enable them to assume the higher levels of production that would be generated, only a few weeks after the announcement of the closure of the Belgian plant, while simultaneously expressing solidarity with their Belgian counterparts.53 Likewise, the Marks and Spencer employees who came from Holland, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal to protest against their forced redundancies in London in May 2001 were largely met with incomprehension on the part of their British counterparts, unaffected by store closures, despite support from the TUC.54 Even Alain Dorbais, the CFDT secretary of the Aventis European Group Committee, was forced to admit that, ‘As far as employee representation at a European level is concerned, I must say that we are completely out of touch. It appears unrealistic to mobilise workers on this subject.’55 Institutions for social and economic regulation are gradually being established at the European level through initiatives such as the encouragement of EWCs, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and social dialogue between employers and unions.56 Until now, however, these appear to have given little extra power or influence to French trade unions in their dealings with multinational companies seeking the optimum conditions for capital accumulation from among a range of different national settings. ‘Euro-strikes’ and ‘Euro-demonstrations’ may be growing phenomena, particularly as the impact on the lives of working people of European integration and legislation is becoming more and more apparent (see Chapter 8). However, such events are still in their infancy, and international coordination and solidarity appears far more achievable around matters of principle than when concrete issues of employment are at stake. While capital has internationalised over the last half a century, trade union movements still have a largely national

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focus, and the local regional and national dimensions look set to continue to play a determining role in their strategies and actions for the foreseeable future. This is hardly surprising given that they recruit on a national basis and therefore need to respond to the demands of national memberships and, in the French case, electorates. In France, the difficult articulation between local interests and the need for international solidarity may well become more problematic in the future. First, as industrial relations and the regulation of the employment relationship are increasingly decentralised, trade unions will come under ever greater pressure to respond to the specific demands of their base within the workplace, unless they are to suffer from a lack of local legitimacy. Second, numerical weakness calls into question this legitimacy of trade unions to act as the representative organisations of wage earners. Both the CFDT and CGT have produced proposals aimed at increasing this legitimacy by basing it on single-ballot professional elections held across the country in all companies in a given sector on the same day and open to union and non-union candidates.57 The validity of agreements would then depend upon them being signed by unions gaining a majority of votes at workplace, and eventually sectoral and multi-industry, level.58 Although this would undoubtedly increase the legitimacy of unions, and the agreements that they sign, from local branches in the workplace up to the national confederations, it runs the risk of changing the relationship of the union to its base even further. As the notion of representative unions is effectively abolished, without solid membership bases they would become even more dependent upon voters for their place in social institutions at all levels of society, and therefore for the financial resources that accompany such roles. This electoral relationship with their base would make it very difficult for unions to take the path of international solidarity when this may involve some compromise of the interests of the French workforce.

Conclusion: what future for unions? Despite their varied reactions and an increase in CFDT membership numbers, the trade union movement as a whole in France has suffered longterm decline in terms of both membership and votes in workplace elections. The paradox is that this decline has occurred at a moment when their institutional position, following the Auroux Laws, has never been stronger. Although the Auroux Laws have not helped organised labour, it is difficult to say that the unions’ position would have been any different today had they not been passed. The collapse of Fordism and the globalisation of the economy have more to do with labour’s weakness than the Auroux Laws. In many ways, these merely attempted to shore up the place of labour in what was fast becoming an inevitable trend. Employers were already using direct communications techniques on a large scale before self-expression groups were legislated for. Given the structural weakness of French trade unions,

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the need for rapid reaction to market changes would have probably led to the decentralisation of pay bargaining anyway, as it did in Sweden in spite of the presence of one of the most centralised and powerful trade union movements in the world. Certainly, political and social changes have not helped trade unions either, with the discrediting of left-wing solutions to economic crisis and the numerical decline and fragmentation of the bluecollar working class. Underlying all of these, however, are changes in the global economy, and the failure of trade unions to adapt to them. In effect, trade unions in France are struggling to adapt to a new regime of capital accumulation. Globalisation and ‘financialisation’ have provoked the withdrawal of the state from economic regulation and decentralised labour regulation to the level of the firm. The old model of trade unionism, based on a class appeal and pressure for reform at the national political level is out of step with the current realities of the emerging mode of labour regulation, which has as its focal point the enterprise. That there is a trend towards the defence of sectional interests at the local level is therefore not surprising. What is open to question, however, is the form that this defence will take. On the one hand, local unions could opt for a cooperative stance and engage in concession bargaining. This is the tack taken by the CFDT with its notion of donnant-donnant. In this scenario, trade-offs are made that result in compromises acceptable to both sides. The problem here is that this requires a balance of forces and trust relations in the workplace for it to be successful, unless it is merely to mask unilateral employer regulation. Recent economic trends, however – the internationalisation of finance and trade, along with labour market flexibility in particular – have tipped the balance of power decisively in the favour of employers, who can rely more on markets to regulate labour than they could during the 30 glorious years. In this respect, the CFDT has risked much with its donnant-donnant strategy. If this succeeds in promoting full employment through an acceptance of greater flexibility, or if this can be achieved through sustained economic growth over the next few decades, then a new balance of power may emerge that will make enterprise-based unionism a viable alternative for the protection of employees. If not, this alternative risks being undermined as employees perceive the trade-offs engaged in as being advantageous only to employers. At the national level, this does not exclude unions from cooperating with employers and the state in the management of welfare schemes, but again, their legitimacy and success will depend upon the sorts of compromise that emerge. In a context where the notion of ‘solidarity’ remains imbued with historical and ideological meaning, moves towards a minimalist welfare state will again only risk undermining the legitimacy of cooperative unionism amongst large sections of the workforce. The recent success of the CFDT in terms of membership does suggest that this is a viable option for French trade unions, particularly if a united ‘reformist front’ involving the CFDT, UNSA and possibly the CGT can be established. The failure of a

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viable form of cooperative unionism – based on a balance of power that would enable it to defend employee interests in the workplace and in the wider society – however, could have dire consequences for French trade unionism in the new economy. The alternative is not a return to the ‘mass and class’ unionism that was a feature of the post-war period in France. As we have argued, the change in the regime of capital accumulation, and in the productive system accompanying it, militate against such a return to the past. ‘Combative’ unionism may be able to survive in the new economic environment, but it risks being increasingly marginalised. First, it will have to continue to adapt to the rise of sectional interests if it is not to be seen as an irrelevance in an age when class solidarities have been broken down by the growing individualisation, not only of work relationships, but of society as a whole. The articulation of local and global concerns cannot mask this essential problem: if ever such compromises have to be made, it will be difficult to persuade the national workforce to make sacrifices for their foreign counterparts. In this respect, European enlargement in 2004 may present some of the ‘new’ radical trade unions with difficult choices. Second, at the local level, a form of trade unionism based upon protest and overt opposition to employers could make the enterprise ungovernable. Rather than hastening in the transformation of capitalism, this will only provoke a backlash from employers, who could well fall back on their paternalist and authoritarian instincts in order to circumvent and marginalise such unions. The risk for employers in such a scenario is to see the rise of uncontrolled and uncontrollable movements reminiscent of the coordinations of the 1980s. Nevertheless, with the balance of power firmly in favour of employers, such a possibility cannot be discounted through means such as the promotion of collective bargaining via non-union works committees, direct forms of employee communication and participation, the increasing individualisation of the employment relationship, and an even greater use of external flexibility to discipline workforces. As we shall see, this has already happened to a great extent in the private sector, where unions are present mainly in only large companies. Even in these, however, the future of oppositional unionism is problematic given economic, and particularly financial, globalisation. If the presence of such unionism has the potential to make the enterprise ungovernable, this will have an impact on investment decisions and, by extension, upon employment. In this respect, global finance can be expected to exercise an iron discipline, and oppositional unionism will be able to survive only in those sectors of the economy protected from international competition, primarily in the (shrinking) public sector. This suggests that international solidarity will be increasingly important for the protection of employee interests. This, however, is only in an embryonic phase and appears difficult to achieve despite attempts to promote ‘social dialogue’ at the EU level and the recent development of ‘Euro-strikes’ and ‘Euro-demonstrations’. Within the French labour movement, divisions

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over ideology and strategy vis-à-vis European integration and the global economy extend and transpose national divisions and weakness onto the international scene. French unions are, in effect, undermined by a dual movement towards greater localism on the one hand and increased internationalism on the other. Both movements deprive them of one of the major sources of influence open to them in the post-war era – the ability to mobilise nationally in order to pressure the state into reform in their favour – as industrial relations are decentralised in response to changes in global capitalism. While new radical unions have managed to tap into the fears such changes generate through defensive and essentially conservative actions, ‘cooperative’ unionism has not developed an adequate response. The CFDT’s donnant-donnant strategy may provide the outlines for such a response, but in the present climate it is not without risk. Trade unions remain chronically weak at precisely the levels that are becoming increasingly important. As argued before, in a system of decentralised regulation, different forms of trade unionism, including its total absence, can coexist depending on the specific circumstances of the individual company and the strategic choices of the actors within them. What they have in common, however, is that – whether it is cooperative or conflictual – the form of trade unionism is likely to become increasingly based on the defence of sectional interests at the local level and less on ideological orientations as the particular circumstances of the individual company become more important in influencing the strategic choices of the workplace actors. Although, in some cases, it may be correct to talk of ‘enforced cooperation’59 in the private sector, this may not necessarily be the case in the public sector. In this sense, future years may see an increasing division between public and private sectors, unless a determined neo-liberal government manages to emasculate public sector unions, as Mrs. Thatcher managed to do in Britain in the course of the 1980s. For the moment, the most likely scenario is a fragmentation of situations, driven by the rise of sectional, enterprise-based interests. In such a scenario, the primacy of the local situation in the strategic choices and bargaining stances of the local union, where it exists, will lead to the greater autonomy of this level from other union structures and, particularly, from the national confederation. This is not, however, to argue that the inevitable result is micro-corporatism. Despite the decentralisation of industrial relations to the company level, the role of the sectoral and national union structures will still be important in fixing the rules of the game, as has been shown recently in the negotiations on pension reform as part of MEDEF’s refondation sociale (see Chapter 4). Furthermore, as in the past, the state, in its guise as guarantor of the general interest, will be called upon to overcome the dysfunctions of trade union division and weakness. With irregular trade union presence to negotiate the contours of the employment relationship, the state will increasingly be called upon to provide a safety net through legislation, the extension procedure, the

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minimum wage and greater control over the social security system. With MEDEF’s call for a ‘new social constitution’ – based upon the primacy of the contract over the law – floundering, continuity appears as strong as change. Where unions are present, diversity in the concrete situations of companies will allow for the possibility of different forms of unionism, but the state – albeit, as we have seen, in new ways – looks set to continue to provide at least some antidote to the structural weakness of trade unions in France through the provision of a framework within which local activity takes place. The alternative – unilateral employer regulation and uncontrolled decentralisation and deregulation – risks calling into question its very legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of weak unions to represent wage earners. In the new economic climate, French unions appear more reliant upon state support than ever before.

4

Employer organisations From the CNPF to MEDEF

Introduction Companies are essentially individualistic organisations, in competition with other companies for market shares. Nevertheless, they do have certain interests in common, especially concerning the macro-economic environment – for example low tax regimes and a loose system of regulation to enable ‘entrepreneurial freedom’ to flourish. Employers therefore usually form collective organisations to promote their own interests through lobbying governments, negotiating nationally with trade unions to regulate the labour market, and disseminating information to their own members and other interested parties. The principal, though far from only, such organisation in France today is the Movement of French Companies (MEDEF, Mouvement des entreprises de France), which was formed in November 1998 when the former CNPF was renamed at an annual general meeting. Although the CNPF and MEDEF, as incarnations of the largest and most visible employer organisation, will provide the focus of this chapter, it would be wrong to imply that French employers represent a social monolith, with no divisions among them. Indeed, the size or market position of their companies can lead employers to have very different outlooks as far as social and economic policies are concerned. Views may differ according to the company’s exposure to international competition; exporters may have a very different view of exchange rates than companies that import materials in order to transform them and sell finished products to the domestic market; borrowers and lenders of money will differ over interest rates; subcontractors and subcontractees may disagree about the necessity of external regulation of their relationships, and so on. The size of the company may also have great implications for division among employers. Larger companies, for example, are generally better able to afford to finance representative institutions or training schemes for employees in the workplace. They may therefore accept a regulation of such issues more readily than smaller companies would, seeing it as a way of ensuring industrial peace, stability and predictability, and as a way of planning for the future manpower needs of the firm. For smaller companies, however, the financing of such institutions and schemes

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could prove difficult, especially where they are operating on the margins of profitability. Divisions along the lines of size have led to the existence of separate organisations for smaller companies. As the CNPF was seen to be too dominated by large-scale industry to represent the specific interests of smalland medium-sized companies, the CGPME was established to represent such companies, and the UPA represents companies of less than ten employees. Both are recognised by the state as representative organisations and can therefore sit on tripartite and social security fund bodies. As well as these three official bodies for employer representation, there is a multitude of clubs and societies that attract like-minded employers based upon their ideological affinity rather than economic position. Among the most important of these, the Centre des jeunes dirigeants d’entreprise (CJD) represents the more progressive wing of employers and aims to act as a management think tank and thereby influence other employer organisations. It has a socialCatholic orientation, arguing for the integration of employees into the company through social dialogue and negotiation.1 The French Association of Private Sector Companies (AFEP) represents the largest French companies quoted on the stock market, once again testifying to distinct and differing interests and divisions along the lines of company size and exposure to the international economy. While such organisational pluralism is a reflection of divergent interests, these organisations should be seen as complementary rather than being in competition with each other. Indeed, there is much overlapping membership between the various clubs and official organisations, reflecting the desire of heads of industry to meet ‘outside of the CNPF which many of them do not hold in great esteem’.2

The CNPF in the post-war period: social and economic conservatism The CNPF was created in June 1946 at a time when employers were on the defensive. Their image was seriously tarnished by their support of French fascism following the Popular Front government of 1936, and their subsequent accommodation to the Vichy regime in France, as well as their collaboration and profiteering during the Second World War. Before this, early employer organisations had developed in France from the 1840s onwards, in sectors such as construction, textiles, iron and coal mining, with the main aim of ensuring protectionist measures to safeguard their industry from foreign competition. In 1919, these industry-based federations were pushed into unification by Etienne Clemental, the then Minister for Commerce and Industry, in order that the state would have a single interlocutor with whom it could discuss the problems of returning to peace-time production. The government of the time also wished to use the unified employers’ organisation to push for national collective bargaining over the terms and conditions

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of employment. The new organisation, the Confédération générale de la production française, however, worked for just the opposite. Seeing the trade unions as too politicised and revolutionary, it argued for their continued absence from the workplace and national political decision-making processes. Further major change occurred in 1936, when the CGPF became the Confédération générale du patronat français. This reflected the entry into the organisation of commerce as well as industry, as small employers felt betrayed by the concessions made in the Matignon Agreement that ended the Popular Front strike wave and which gave workers wage rises, two weeks’ paid holidays and rights to representation in the workplace. The new organisation maintained traditional employer demands of a mixture of protectionism from external economic challenge and free market policies at home. After the Second World War and its dissolution by the Vichy regime, the employers’ organisation was not automatically re-established in law, as were the trade unions, due to its failure to engage in active resistance against the German occupiers. The constitution of a new organisation was to prove difficult, particularly due to tensions surrounding its authority. Divisions surfaced between those who wished for a powerful centre exercising authority over its members and those, including the larger professional federations, who wanted it merely to play a coordinating role. The latter won out – hence the name of conseil, indicating an advisory body rather than a structure wielding any authority – leaving the CNPF with no power over individual companies or industries, or the geographically based structures through which these belonged to the central organisation.3 Other divisions were also evident. The presence of the CGPME as a pressure group within the CNPF testified to the divergent attitudes of small- and medium-sized companies, usually run by owner-employers, on the one hand, and large companies run by salaried managers acting for shareholders on the other. Finally, the Centre des jeunes patrons (later CJD) challenged the traditional authoritarian and paternalist orientations of French employers from within their umbrella organisation. The role of the CNPF was seen as one of providing services to members such as information, training and advice on legal, management and economic matters etc, and representing their interests in tripartite consultative bodies, negotiations with the state and trade unions and through lobbying. Due to state economic control and the divisions within its midst, however, the early CNPF could only adopt a minimalist programme, and originally had the diplomatic role of improving the image of employers through representing them, rather than establishing a coherent strategy for member companies.4 The difficulties in the establishment of the CNPF and the poor public image of employers explain the fact that they were unable to oppose the structural reforms undertaken just after the Liberation of France, including the nationalisation of key sectors of the economy and the introduction of works committees into companies employing 50 or more people, despite vociferous opposition. Objections were also raised at the impact of the

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creation of a generalised social security system on company costs, and at the implications of Keynesianism for state intervention in the name of individualism and free enterprise. In effect, through the post-war period, up until the late 1960s, the CNPF was characterised by a social and economic conservatism that at least ensured some common purpose amongst members, whatever their size. Its main aim appeared to be to maintain the authority, even sovereignty, of employers within the workplace, and economic liberalism within the wider economy. Such liberalism was to be restricted to the domestic and colonial markets, however; protectionism was demanded and European construction rejected. Thus, the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950 was unsuccessfully opposed, and, later, traditionalists within the CNPF argued that trade barriers within the newly formed EEC should be reduced as slowly as possible, even though more and more employers, including Georges Villiers, the then President of the CNPF, were becoming more favourable towards a European free trade zone.5 This also meant that the CNPF remained hostile to trade unions and state intervention. Such a defensive orientation had some important implications as far as Fordist social relations were concerned. A virulent anti-trade unionism meant an avoidance of bargaining, even with non- and anti-communist unions. The refusal of dialogue was also to push the CGT ever further into its anti-capitalist ghetto, rendering impractical any social compromise based upon the peaceful redistribution of the fruits of Fordist growth. Between 1947 and 1957, the CNPF signed no collective agreements and fought hard against the introduction of the minimum wage, seeing both as an attack on entrepreneurial freedom. Thus, the state’s attempts to promote collective bargaining, notably through the 1955 Renault agreement, were not replicated in the private sector. On the other hand, if dialogue and bargaining with unions was rejected, the defence of employer interests could only be pursued through the political channel of lobbying the state. During the golden age of state planning and the establishment of the welfare state, however, such a strategy proved to be a double-edged sword. The CNPF may have obtained a fiscal amnesty for expatriated capital, a reduction in inheritance tax or inflationary policies that eased the repayment of debts associated with industrial expansion,6 but it had to sign an agreement with the trade unions to establish the UNEDIC unemployment benefit fund on 31 December 1958 under the threat of legislation on the question from the state. The arrival of de Gaulle in power was to challenge the dominant attitudes of the CNPF, and the balance of power within it, which was favourable to smaller, traditional firms, through his emphasis on industrial modernisation and the opening up of the French economy. Change, though, was not to be felt until after the May 1968 strike wave. In 1963, François Bloch-Lainé, a senior civil servant, proposed a reform of companies in order that consultation and the conciliation of divergent interests could occur in the absence of

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continual conflict. Bloch-Lainé’s proposals went to the heart of employer conceptions of private property and the relations of dominance and subordination that these gave rise to, suggesting that representatives of capital, employees and the state should all have a role in the management of the workplace and that trade unions should have a legal right to recognition within it. The response of the CNPF was to publish its Liberal Charter in January 1965, a document that owes much to the determining influence of small- and medium-sized companies within the organisation at the time. The basic gist of the charter was to reinforce the conservative nature of the CNPF against those, such as the CJP, who were arguing for more proactive social policies. In particular, the intervention of the state, both within the private company and the wider economy was rejected in the name of the free market and competition, while ‘As far as the management of companies is concerned, authority cannot be shared.’7 It was, in the words of Oppenheim, ‘an eminently political text, a truly liberal credo, opposed to the state and workers’ unions, which aimed to re-forge a unity amongst employers based upon such simple common denominators as the celebration of the virtues of profit or free enterprise’.8 The May 1968 strike wave, with its demands for qualitative change in the workplace being heard alongside the more traditional quantitative demands for a reduction in working time and a rise in wages, presented a serious challenge to such attitudes. While, in a context of high and sustained growth, the wage gains of 1968 could be absorbed through the traditional mechanisms of price rises or currency devaluation, the strike wave had shown employers that the company is a social as well as an economic institution. With trade unions winning the right to legal representation within the workplace, attitudes and strategies towards the ‘social partners’ would have to be rethought. Such rethinking was facilitated by structural change within the French economy. The loss of protected colonial markets and the establishment of the European Economic Community by the Treaty of Rome meant that French firms would now have to compete on international markets. De Gaulle’s response was a modernisation drive to create a modern, independent French economy spearheaded by large, modern companies. In the 1960s, legal and tax incentives were given for company mergers in order to create ‘national champion’ firms able to compete with American giants in world markets, while planning targeted modern sectors such as telecommunications, chemicals and consumer electronics. The result of the economic transformations under de Gaulle’s presidency was, first, to strengthen the place of large modern firms in the French economy. Second, it resulted in a decline in the influence of small firms and their owners and a shift in the balance of power towards industrialists from the larger, more modern firms, both within the CNPF and government. Such capital-intensive and interdependent firms required greater predictability for future planning than that afforded by a rejection of dialogue and a reliance on the use of the labour

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market, conflict and state intervention to regulate labour. Crucially, it required cooperation from the workforce, or, in other words, dialogue between the social partners, and regularised wage increases, rather than a low-wage economy, to fuel domestic consumption of their products. In addition, the priority of these firms was not controlling wage costs, but ensuring continuity in production, and they could bear the costs of creating workplace union sections and increased wage costs far more easily than could smaller firms.9 Following the shock of 1968, then, employers collaborated with the New Society reforms of Jacques Chaban-Delmas, signing some important collective agreements at national level in the early 1970s, generally on social welfare issues. Thus, agreements were signed on job security (1969), maternity leave, salaried status for workers, industrial training (all 1970), early retirement for those unemployed and over 60 years old (1972), unemployment benefits (1974) and working conditions (1975). Although this represents a change from the conservatism and retrenchment of previous years, it should not be over-emphasised as agreements were concluded under the threat of legislation from the state. On the other hand, new employer think tanks were emerging in the wake of 1968, populated by industrialists such as Amboise Roux of the Compagnie Générale d’Eléctricité, Renaud Gillet of Rhône-Poulenc, François Gautier of Peugeot and so on.10 Under the impetus of these groups, the CNPF began to play a more proactive social role, engaging in a series of initiatives aimed at improving the image of employers within French economic and social relations. The first national conference of the CNPF, in Lyon in October 1970, took place under the theme of ‘training in modern society’, while the following years saw debates on lowering the retirement age and working conditions.11

The 1970s onwards: a return to neo-liberalism This enthusiasm for a mode of labour regulation based upon collective bargaining was to be short-lived, however, first because it failed to reduce the level of conflict.12 Second, following the 1970s’ oil crises, the rigidity of regularised wage bargaining – especially when wage rises were calculated on macro-economic indicators such as projected levels of inflation – did not seem appropriate to employers who were now seeing their profit margins squeezed by rising costs and international competition. Indeed, the 1974 conference of the CNPF testified to a change in orientation, the theme being the place of the company in an open economy. Initially, the CNPF believed that the slowdown in growth was a temporary phenomenon and argued for compromise bargaining with the unions, demanding flexibility and restraint in exchange for employer concessions. From the mid-1970s, however, François Ceyrac, the President of the employers’ organisation, was arguing that the crisis was ‘above all structural. It therefore requires a fundamental change, a complete break with the practices of the previous period.’13

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Change came in the form of a hardening of attitudes towards the state and trade unions as employers reacted to the publication of the Sudreau Report on the reform of the firm, in February 1975. Upon his election to the presidency in 1974, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had announced his intention of company reform as part of his strategy to modernise economic and social relations in France. The result, the Sudreau Report, proposed, amongst other things, a right of worker expression over the content of work; increased financial and economic information for works councils to enable them to play a greater consultative role; and joint supervisory boards for companies, with one-third of the seats going to employee representatives. The reaction of the CNPF was, first, to challenge the role of unions within institutions for employee representation, and within the firm more generally. Whereas the Sudreau Report had recognised their role in channelling conflict and aimed to integrate them into the company through the provision of economic and financial information, the CNPF argued for an end to the rule that gave unions a monopoly over candidatures in the first round of workplace elections. Similarly, the CNPF would only agree to employee expression if unions were not involved, something that was unacceptable to the latter. Second, the CNPF argued that any change should not be imposed but be introduced by experimentation within individual firms in order that it could respond to particular local needs. In the event, what little legislation followed the Sudreau Report made change voluntary and had little impact before the growing economic crisis became the focus of government attention.14 The Sudreau Report may have come to little, but it marked an evolution in the attitudes and strategies of employers. The new strategy to replace the failed attempt by large employers to promote collective bargaining effectively built upon the critique of the Sudreau Report and was made clear in 1977 with the announcement of an ‘active social policy’ at the CNPF conference of that year. This argued that flexibility, the decentralisation of industrial relations and the individualisation of the employment relationship were necessary for the survival of firms in an open, competitive economy. Thus, state intervention was seen as harmful, particularly Chirac’s introduction of the need for administrative authorisation to engage in collective redundancies. The other traditional enemy of the CNPF – trade unions – was also once again targeted. The active social policy ‘meant nothing less than an effort to wrest control of the work force from trade unions and give it to management’.15 Rather than trade union or elected representatives, the management hierarchy was to be mobilised to enable employees to express themselves concerning their work. In other words, direct forms of individualised expression were to challenge the collective, trade union route. Collective bargaining was not to be altogether abandoned, but the emphasis was to be shifted away from the national confederal level to the branch and even firm level. This would enable greater flexibility than allowed by national agreements in order that deals struck reflected more accurately the individual

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needs of the firm. This also meant a decentralisation of bargaining to the level at which unions were weakest. Furthermore, the individualisation of career progression, pay, working time and training would not only respond to employee wishes for greater responsibility, but also weaken the hold of trade unions within the workplace. In sum, decentralisation, flexibility and a reassertion of management authority through the marginalisation of trade unions were the order of the day. Although undoubtedly neo-liberal, anti-state and anti-trade union, the active social policy was not simply a return to the conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s. New forms of worker expression effectively tapped into the disenchantment with Taylorism displayed by unskilled workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and appeared to respond to their demands for greater autonomy and responsibility. It promised workers a voice in the company, a say over their work and the way in which it was carried out, while enabling the company to use employee knowledge to react rapidly to changing conditions and to improve the quality and consistency of production. Rather than controlling employees through a mixture of authoritarian management discipline and paternalism, as had happened in the past, the idea was to integrate employees into the logic and values of the company – and therefore lead them to reject trade unions – through the individualisation of relations and the promotion of employee involvement (see Chapter 5). While the CNPF broadly accepted Raymond Barre’s anti-inflationary policies, the above orientations led to stalemate when the Prime Minister attempted to reinvigorate collective bargaining as a means of disengaging the state from industrial relations. Thus, in July 1980, talks broke down over the reduction and flexibilisation of working time and over worker selfexpression. In both cases negotiations failed as the CNPF wanted agreements to be signed at the company level, and even to permit the individualisation of working time. For unions, fearing the effects of their workplace weakness on such agreements, this was unacceptable.16 In the case of employee expression, the CNPF could afford to sit back and refuse to come to any agreement as nothing was preventing managers of firms to set up their own channels of expression, such as quality circles, in the absence of any trade union input. Hence the CNPF’s opposition to the Auroux Laws and other attempts by the 1981–6 socialist governments to decentralise the conduct of industrial relations. Company-level bargaining over wages and provisions for employee self-expression groups were pilloried precisely because they depended upon the trade union route of employee representation, and therefore had the potential to reinforce the strength of unions at the local level. In the end, employers adapted to the provisions of the new laws far better than the unions did. The annual obligation to bargain locally over wages did not mean an obligation to reach an agreement, while middle management control of the self-expression groups reinforced the company hierarchy rather than workplace union sections (see Chapter 7). Significantly, the return of a right-wing government in 1986 was not accompanied

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by CNPF demands for a dismantling of the Auroux reforms. Nevertheless, despite the greater freedom and flexibility afforded employers by government loosening of the constraints of the collective bargaining system, the CNPF still complained about the high costs imposed on French business by the rigidity of the French labour market and high social charges associated with the welfare state. While the socialists did not want to give a free hand to employers to introduce their own brand of flexibility in the workplace, and therefore tried to ensure a role for trade unions in the workplace, the Right, upon its return to government in 1986, had no such qualms. As we have seen, the late 1980s and 1990s were marked by a series of legislative enactments that effectively decentralised the conduct of industrial relations to the company level, notably through their effects on the collective bargaining system. Such legislation has given employers greater flexibility in the fields of working time and the use of atypical contracts in particular, for example through the 1993 Five Year Employment Plan. In addition, the suppression, in 1986, of the need for administrative authorisation in the event of collective redundancies also constituted a welcome dismantling of some of the rigidities in the labour market for employers. Throughout this period, the strategy of the CNPF was to make the state the main target of its demands rather than the national union confederations. This strategy made perfect sense in the French context. What the CNPF wanted was greater flexibility in the workplace in order to enable the company to react more rapidly to changes in its product market. With national union confederations unlikely to agree to such flexibility, at least not in the way the CNPF wanted – which would have been suicidal for the unions – the only option was to pressure the state for a loosening of the legislative restrictions governing certain aspects of the employment relationship. Such pressure was made all the more effective following the Left’s failure to deal with economic crisis through a Keynesian reflationary strategy in 1981–2, and the consequent ‘rehabilitation of the firm, and of profit’17 in the 1980s. The socialist government’s policy U-turn in 1983, and its acceptance of entrepreneurialism and the market economy, reduced the ideological gap between employers and the state, heralding a period of relative consensus between the two.18 Nevertheless, while the firm was increasingly seen as a source of profit and wealth, the state was portrayed as responsible for economic problems, particularly unemployment, due to the remaining rigidities in the labour market and the high social charges and taxes paid by French employers. Although employers benefited from a gradual reduction in company tax from 1985 onwards and considerable economic liberalisation measures under the 1986–8 right-wing government of Jacques Chirac, further reductions in tax and social security contributions as well as further measures to liberalise the economy remained a constant rallying call for the CNPF.19 At this stage, however, the CNPF was not arguing for a minimum state and ultra-liberal social and economic policies. Such a scenario of

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complete labour market deregulation would place the CNPF and French companies centre-stage, emphasising the share of responsibility they bore for the country’s economic problems.20 From the mid-1990s, however, events were to unravel in this direction.

The 1990s: moving the company to the centre of social relations The weight of taxes and social charges on the company, fuelled by constantly high levels of unemployment, was, by the 1990s, a constant refrain from the CNPF, which argued that such charges created a block on employment by pushing up costs, particularly for lower-paid, unskilled workers. With the advent of the single European market in 1992 on the horizon, tax reductions and a greater freedom for management were presented, not only as beneficial to employers and as a means of ensuring growth and reduced unemployment, but also as a ‘patriotic necessity which would help France defeat the foreigners’.21 Until the early 1990s, employers refused all coresponsibility for the economic situation or for unemployment, seeing these as the result of state labour market and social welfare policies. As a fall in unemployment did not accompany reductions in employer social contributions and increasing profit levels for firms from the mid-1980s onwards,22 however, it was becoming difficult to avoid a debate about the role of the company, and the entrepreneur, in society. The first response of the CNPF was to accept that the entrepreneur had some social responsibility. In 1994, with the election of Jean Gandois as President of the organisation, this responsibility was conceptualised in the notion of the entreprise citoyenne (citizen-company). The central element of the idea was that companies had a responsibility to those excluded from the labour market by the technological and economic transformations that had permitted a return to profitability following the collapse of Fordism. Some large companies thus played a role in financing schemes to get people back into work after they had been excluded from the labour market, but such measures had little impact on unemployment, being insufficient to counteract the effect of continuing redundancies in the economy.23 Such actions were not totally denuded of self-interest, however, as was admitted by Gandois himself: ‘What good does it do a company to be individually competitive if it is crushed by the cost of those who are inactive or excluded?’24 But even this self-interest received no echo among some employers. For Pierre Bellon, the Managing Director of Sodexho, the world’s largest catering firm, for example, the entreprise citoyenne is merely ‘one that creates more wealth than it consumes’.25 In other words, a contribution to national wealth through making a profit is the only social contribution one can expect from a company. As part of this attempt to promote a greater social role for the company, Gandois aimed to reinvigorate collective bargaining, and got agreement on

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this at a summit meeting with all five representative trade unions on 28 February 1995. Following this, the CNPF signed a framework agreement with the CFDT, CFE-CGC and CFTC on 31 October 1995. This agreement aimed at developing collective bargaining at all levels, but was particularly innovative as far as company-level bargaining was concerned. The terms of the agreement accepted that the branch and interprofessional levels still had a role to play, particularly as many companies were not covered by collective agreements due to their size or a lack of trade union interlocutors. However, it was argued that the appearance of a host of new factors since the 1980s – including economic crisis and unemployment and increasingly rapid changes in products and technology – meant a great disparity of situations between firms, even within the same sector, and therefore required initiative and adaptation at the company level. While collective bargaining was developing apace in larger companies under the effects of the Auroux Laws (see Chapter 6), this posed a problem for small- and medium-sized companies where, more often than not, trade union representation was lacking. The agreement therefore suggested that elected representatives or employees ‘mandated’ by representative trade unions could sign agreements in the absence of trade union officials in the workplace. The branch level was to play an essential coordinating and normative role, fixing a framework for local bargaining and ensuring the coherence of deals signed in firms in order to avoid socially unacceptable disparities or unfair competition between one firm and another. In addition, the branch was to be the privileged level for the discussion of all matters relating to working time. Although it gave a major role to branch-level bargaining, the industry associations that belong to the CNPF feared that collective bargaining policy was being taken out of their hands, to be controlled by the interprofessional body. Their opposition was discreet, but effective. Branch-level negotiations were essential to the success of the strategy contained in the 1995 agreement, but few agreements at this level were forthcoming; by July 1996 only 12 out of 128 main branches had signed agreements.26 At the same time, Gandois wanted to reform the employers’ organisation, notably by withdrawing from some of its functions in the management of the social security system and by allowing companies to adhere directly to the CNPF instead of going through geographically or industry-based intermediary structures. The aim was to combat a growing disaffection for the CNPF among large industrial groups and small- and medium-sized companies, as well as to weaken the strength of powerful trade associations, such as the Union of Metalworking and Mining Industries (UIMM), which were seen as dominating the organisation. In the end, the inevitable opposition of the latter led to the reforms being sidelined. However, the feelings that smalland medium-sized companies were not well represented and that the CNPF should withdraw from some of its social security management functions, were to be fully exploited by Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the successor to Gandois.27

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Seillière arrived at the head of the CNPF following the failure of Gandois’ strategy of discussing the move from a 39- to a 35-hour working week. Upon winning the 1997 parliamentary elections, Lionel Jospin had called for a social summit to discuss the reduction of working time as a means of combating unemployment. While Gandois believed any law would be sufficiently vague to be acceptable, others – and notably Denis Kessler who was to become Seillière’s right-hand man and the ideologue of the CNPF – argued for a boycott of the conference, fearing the imposition of a reduced working week by the government. Jospin’s announcement, at the end of the conference, of legislation on the issue and the implementation of the 35hour week in 2000, sealed Gandois’ fate. Following his resignation, the election of Seillière signalled a change in CNPF strategy. As soon as he was elected president of the CNPF, on 16 December 1997, Seillière announced a break with past practices. The state was accused of being too authoritarian, intervening too much in both national-level collective bargaining and social security management. Jospin’s announcement of legislation on the 35-hour week was taken as evidence that national-level bargaining was pointless due to the excessive interference of the state in social dialogue, and Seillière therefore proclaimed that the employers’ organisation would no longer participate in it. Resistance to the 35-hour week was led at the branch level, and in particular by the UIMM, which signed an agreement that was heralded as a point of reference by the executive of the CNPF.28 Signed by FO, the CFTC and CGC, this deal effectively emptied the first law on the 35-hour week of its content by maintaining the 39-hour week through increased overtime, thereby deliberately eschewing any possibility of job creation through a reduction in working time. The legal imposition of the 35-hour week left a bitter taste in the mouths of employers. The grass roots of the CNPF was critical of the organisation, claiming that it was too distant and had failed to listen attentively enough to the concerns of employers.29 Seillière’s first major act, therefore, was to reform the structures of the CNPF, and to transform it into the MEDEF at its Strasbourg conference on 27 October 1998. The reforms aimed to make the organisation more representative of grass-roots French employers and to give greater prominence to company bosses rather than to officials of the organisation or to trade associations. Thus, local structures were revamped, with individual firms given direct membership through them, and the individual firms’ presence in the executive council increased in order to reduce the influence of industry associations. In addition, three-quarters of executive council members must now be active entrepreneurs.30 The resultant improved representation of grass roots employers, especially from small- and medium-sized companies, would also reinforce the neo-liberal orientation that Seillière and his right-hand man, Kessler, wanted to give to the employers’ organisation. The first article of the statutes of the new organisation stated its political, social and ideological aim clearly: to place the firm ‘at the centre of French society’ by ‘encouraging entrepreneurial freedom’

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and ‘promoting and diffusing the spirit of [free] enterprise in all areas of society’.31 For at least one employer at the Strasbourg meeting, however, this was just a means to an end: ‘What matters above all is the reduction of the cost of labour.’32 The neo-liberal doctrine of the MEDEF was given precise shape with the November 1999 announcement that the organisation wished to negotiate a ‘new social constitution’ (refondation sociale) with the trade unions. For Henri Jacot, this represents a global and coherent strategy from a MEDEF attempting to win back the initiative after its failure to prevent legislation on the 35-hour week.33 This involves a reform of employment relations and the role of the contract and the law in these, as well as a profound reform of social protection, and therefore of the role of the state and the social partners in the establishment of social norms. The architect of the refondation sociale, Denis Kessler, set out the new model of society in the MEDEF’s magazine, La revue des entreprises, at the end of 1999.34 Kessler argues that the greater economic competition stimulated by European construction and globalisation means that social policy can no longer be seen as distinct from economic policy as continually increasing social charges would lead to a ‘breakdown in competitiveness. The French production site would no longer be competitive and companies would choose to set up in more attractive countries where the cost/productivity ratio is lower.’35 Thus, economic interdependence leads to regime competition and the need to seek comparative advantages in order to stimulate employment – what is good for the company is good for employment and therefore for France. Next, Kessler argues that the welfare state leads to a disincentive to work or to save. Rights to benefits should therefore depend upon reciprocal duties, so that, for example, unemployment benefit should be stopped if claimants refuse jobs or training programmes, as in workfare programmes. This emphasis on individual responsibility does not stop there as social protection is to be taken out of the monopoly of the state to be individualised and marketised through the introduction of competition. In particular, for Kessler, pension funds could provide the link between company performance and individual welfare in retirement. In essence, the MEDEF argued that as the state was losing its capacity for economic intervention, it was increasing its intervention in the social sphere, thereby stifling social dialogue between employer organisations and trade unions. Furthermore, entrepreneurial activity was undermined through the excessive regulation and high social charges and taxes associated with state intervention. For the employers’ organisation, in order for companies to be able to survive and prosper in a globalised economy, the regulation of social relations, including of the social insurance system, should be a matter for the social partners. The role of the state should be limited to providing a safety net of ‘public assistance’ – with lower levels of benefits – for those who have not contributed enough to the social insurance system. In addition, local collective bargaining should take precedence over centralised agreements or

84 Employer organisations the law.36 The main aim was therefore to sideline the intervention of the state, seen as the source of rigidity in social relations. To achieve this, the company was henceforth to be the privileged arena for social dialogue, with the branch playing a secondary role, while bipartite negotiations were to lead to a renovation of the bipartite management of social security institutions. In a profoundly neo-liberal project, the state would be marginalised in a decentralised and flexible system, with the company at the heart of social relations. Negotiations were proposed to the five representative trade unions around eight themes on 2 November 1999, with MEDEF threatening to withdraw from the management of social welfare funds if agreements were not forthcoming by the end of 2000. In the event, enough progress had been made by then for MEDEF not to proceed with this threat – although it did withdraw from the management of social security funds, in October 2001, when Martine Aubry, the Minister for Employment, announced that surpluses in the unemployment benefit fund would be used to finance the passage to the 35-hour week. Relations with the unions, however, appeared far more harmonious than with the state as three agreements had been signed by early 2001. The first, signed on 14 June 2000, reformed the unemployment insurance system, notably by introducing the plan d’aide au retour à l’emploi (PARE) – a sort of workfare-style arrangement whereby claimants receive benefit in exchange for actively seeking work – in exchange for an end to the gradual reduction of benefits paid over time. The second, on workplace health, was signed on 19 December 2000, while an agreement on supplementary pensions was signed on 10 February 2001, but this essentially pushed any reform back, requiring the government to reform the basic pensions regime by the end of 2000. This, however, was never a likely scenario given the delicate nature of the issue and the occurrence of presidential elections in mid-2002. As well as these agreements, discussions over collective bargaining resulted in a ‘common position’, to be used as a basis for negotiation with the government, being signed on 16 July 2001.37 This proposes the autonomy of the various levels of collective bargaining as well as the principle of subsidiarity. In other words, agreements at higher levels (national intersectoral or branch) would only come into force in the absence of agreements at a lower (i.e. company or workplace) level. The hierarchy for the creation of social norms (see Chapter 6) is thus reversed, giving precedence to the company over higher levels of negotiation. The ‘common position’ also takes up the provisions of the 1995 collective agreement, enabling agreements to be signed by elected or ‘mandated representatives’ in companies lacking a trade union presence. Finally, it also proposes a principle of majority agreements at local level, although minority agreements are acceptable if not opposed by trade unions representing a majority of employees or if majority agreements are not required by branch-level agreements. Finally, the other themes, which had not led to any agreement by mid-2003, are equality at work, the role of managers, and social security.

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A break with the past? The MEDEF portrayed its proposals to the trade unions as a complete break with previous practice. The state was no longer seen as the legitimate guarantor of the general, or even national, interest. Rather, this function is seen as being provided by the firm, which was to become the basic unit of society. Social norms would be established at the company level where possible, and then only at branch or national level, in order that they reflect company needs, as the company is seen as the source of wealth in the economy. The primacy of market forces would be ensured by the marginalisation of the state from social regulation. As the ‘social partners’ ran the system of social insurance in complete autonomy, the state would be reduced to its ‘nightwatchman’ functions and to the provision of a safety net for those who had not contributed enough to the social insurance system or who had exhausted their rights to social insurance. In addition, employees would be integrated into the company through profit-sharing schemes, which would overcome the traditional ‘them and us’ divisions within capitalist society while fostering individual responsibility for the performance of the company. All of this was deemed necessary in order to permit French companies to face up to the economic challenges posed by stiff competition within a global economy. On a strategic level, such a social project can be seen to break radically with previous practices and policies of employers. Under Fordist relations of production, no attempt was made to integrate employees into the company – indeed the 1965 Liberal Charter expressly refused any notion of powersharing within the company. Instead, steady wage rises were intended to compensate employees for their work. Conversely, entrepreneurs took risks and were rewarded accordingly through profits and dividends on shares. Conflict would occur over the relative amounts to be distributed between wages on the one hand and profits and dividends on the other, but the basic rationale of divergent and competing interests went unchallenged. The refondation sociale, however, challenges the very foundations of this logic. By placing the company and its needs at the heart of social relations, the entrepreneur’s economic project is elevated to the level of the national interest – what is good for employers is good for the whole of society. This has two important consequences. First, employees need to be integrated into the company. The marketisation and individualisation of social protection plays a role in this, particularly through pension funds and share ownership schemes. Future individual prosperity no longer depends upon mechanisms of social solidarity, but upon the company’s financial performance and individual responsibility in terms of both social protection and a contribution to company success. The division between owners and those who sell their labour is thus overcome in this logic. Second, social policy must be subordinate to company needs within a neo-liberal economic logic. Kessler explicitly argues that, ‘In future, any social measure must be

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examined in the light of economic reason: what are the costs? What are the advantages? Any differences and particularities must be justified by comparative advantages.’38 The rupture with a Fordist logic is profound. The redistributive logic of the Keynesian welfare state gives way to a different view of social welfare. Its role is no longer one of stimulating demand, or maintaining it in economic downturns, within a national economy, but becomes one of reducing costs for employers, who are confronted by international competition. As it is increasingly privatised and decentralised, it is less and less an object for state intervention but more and more a subject for autonomous collective bargaining between unions and employers. The same logic prevails in the area of the employment contract. The diversity of situations faced by companies in an internationally open economy requires that decentralised bargaining takes precedence over the law in order that local terms and conditions of employment reflect the concrete needs of the company. Once again, the role of the state in establishing social norms – one of the hallmarks of French Fordism – is marginalised in favour of an autonomous sphere of social dialogue. Finally, the combined result of the above is to shift risk from the entrepreneur to the employee as future pensions, and even a proportion of present wages, are tied to company performance through indirect and direct share ownership schemes. At the same time, local adaptations in wages, working time and even manpower levels will be made easier through the primacy of the local agreement over centrally-determined norms, allowing employers to adjust their costs to fluctuations in their market. The new social contract implied by this is clear. In times of economic difficulty, profit margins and shareholder value take precedence and economic adjustment takes place through cost reduction. Unless employees accept socially regressive adjustments at such times, unemployment will result. On the other hand, in order to protect their future pensions, employees have an interest in maximising the returns on company shares and therefore in accepting such flexibility. In Howell’s terms, the project is certainly one of replacing a Fordist social compromise with microcorporatism as flexibility is traded for employment and an integration into the capitalist enterprise via the implication of the employee in the financial results of the company. To date, however, the refondation sociale has fallen far short of such lofty ambitions. Indeed, rather than the break with the past that it was intended to be, the process of negotiating this ‘new social constitution’ has revealed several continuities. First, the agreements have been signed by unions that cannot claim to represent a majority of employees (by the end of 2001, the CGT or FO had not signed any), as the employers’ organisation has been able to play divided unions off against each other in its traditional manner. Second, the negotiations were accompanied by ultimatums and threats, particularly from the MEDEF, which continually threatened to stop its contributions to social welfare institutions unless agreement was forthcoming. For example, it constantly threatened to stop its contributions to the funds

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for supplementary pensions unless the unions agreed to proposals that would have increased contributions and threatened retirement at 60 for private sector workers. In the end, the employers’ organisation was forced to back down in the face of a united trade union opposition that managed to mobilise hundreds of thousands of workers across France in demonstrations against its proposals. Agreements still, therefore, appear to be the result of a trial of strength between two antagonistic forces, rather than the reconciliation of divergent interests through compromise. Next, although it has undoubtedly achieved some of its objectives, such as reducing employer social contributions, the results of negotiations so far have fallen far short of the MEDEF’s ambitions. As the debate over unemployment insurance has shown, the state cannot easily be marginalised from the process of social regulation, but retains a central place in it. Indeed, two versions of the UNEDIC agreement were rejected by the state before the 19 October 2000 agreement was ratified. The state refused to link the payment of benefits to the signing of a PARE, on the grounds that it, through legal regulation, and not the social partners through the UNEDIC, should decide who was and was not eligible for unemployment benefit.39 The subordination of social protection to the needs of the company was thus rejected as the state imposed its view of the general interest. Likewise, the agreement over supplementary pensions merely permitted a continuation of the present system until more wholesale reform of the entire pensions system could be undertaken, something that requires the intervention of the state. The new right-wing administration elected in 2002 is currently examining the issue. Likely orientations are the maintenance of the principle of intergenerational solidarity for basic pensions; budgetary equilibrium by 2020; a harmonisation of different systems, especially as far as annuities are concerned (which could mean longer contributions for civil servants); greater freedom to subscribe to private pension plans; and the ‘sharing of increased life expectancy between work and retirement’ (i.e. the raising of the retirement age in line with increasing life expectancy).40 As Jacot argues, the MEDEF’s proposals threatened full pensions at 60 years old by arguing that increased life expectancy made them financially untenable with the aim of persuading employees that they should rely on individual responsibility – i.e. provision – to ensure a comfortable retirement. In other words, schemes based upon social – in the French case intergenerational – solidarity would decline in relative weight in favour of individual, or privatised schemes – i.e. pension funds.41 Although these proposals are generally in accordance with MEDEF wishes, the whole debate and the fact that reform will be state-managed, nevertheless shows that the employers’ organisation has thus far failed in its attempt to define a sphere of social regulation based upon bargaining autonomous of the state. Finally, the refondation sociale portrays another element of continuity with the past that may prove insurmountable for the success of the project. The MEDEF has portrayed the refondation sociale, quite rightly, as a daring and

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coherent social project. As the political Right was in crisis following the election victory of Lionel Jospin in 1997, the MEDEF appeared the only force on the right capable of articulating a coherent political and social project. In doing so, it claimed to speak for all employers, and in the collective interest of the nation. Such claims, however, appear difficult to justify. Even if the organisation can claim to represent between 700,000 and one million companies, signs of dissent from the MEDEF line could be heard from within the audience that it has made great efforts to woo.42 Thus, the suspension of payments to the fund that finances supplementary pensions was opposed by the CGPME and UPA. Robert Buguet, the President of the UPA, even went so far as to condemn the ‘hegemonic and disdainful methods’ of Seillière’s organisation, while many companies simply did not follow the call to suspend employer contributions to the fund.43 The major employers’ organisation is thus not free of the problems of legitimacy, representativeness and division that plague its trade union counterparts once it clearly articulates its political project.

Conclusion More than any economic circumstances, it was the political voluntarism of the Left in power that pushed the main employers’ organisation in France to change. Until Jospin’s announcement of the 35-hour week legislation, the CNPF appeared to accept the primacy of the law in French industrial relations and attempted through the articulation between bargaining and the law, or through directly lobbying government, to ensure that legislation was passed in its favour. With Jospin’s announcement on 10 October 1997, however, this changed. The state was attacked for its excessive interventionism and the refondation sociale project was born with the express intention of marginalising the state from the establishment of social norms. In both the fields of social protection and employment contracts, this task was to be accomplished by the social partners through bargaining, at the most decentralised level possible. Such a change of strategy is entirely in line with the shift towards a ‘patrimonial’ economy. Individualised pension provision ties employees to the capitalist enterprise and gives them an interest in sound financial performance through the displacement of risk from entrepreneur to wage earner, while providing investment funds for the company. Workfare schemes shift the acceptance of responsibility for unemployment from the collectivity to the individual and tailor compensation and labour market (re)access to company needs. The decentralised regulation of employment relations provides flexibility as the contract is freed from the constraints of law, permitting rapid reaction and cost adjustment to changes in product markets. In exchange, so the argument goes, wage earners receive increased employment opportunities as the comparative advantages gained for French companies will ensure investment and job creation/maintenance.

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What may appear strange is that such a message has only been pushed with any force by the main employers’ organisation since the end of the 1990s, whereas French employers, particularly large employers, have been aware of the reality of international competition for decades – at least since the late 1950s. The explanation for this must be partly economic and partly political. Until the late 1970s, a weak employer class that benefited from Fordist growth and state economic control meant that the latter took the lead in directing investment and forging an internationally competitive economy. While profit levels remained high, the economic imperative for a changing relationship between employers, the state and trade unions remained weak. The changed economic climate from the late 1970s onwards, however, required a concomitant change in social relations. After the socialist government’s U-turn in 1983, the state engaged in economic and labour market liberalisation measures. These may not have always gone far enough for employers, but at least they were going in the right direction, permitting a more flexible use of labour by loosening the legal framework governing the establishment of social norms insofar as the employment contract was concerned. The return of the socialists to power under Jospin, however, was seen as a rupture with this trend and a return to a neoKeynesian interventionism on the part of the state, the symbol of which was the law on the 35-hour week. This, plus the apparent political impotence of the Right, provoked the change in strategy from employers, as it appeared to threaten what was seen as the necessary adaptation of the French economy to the imperatives of international competition. Hence, the lobbying of government was transformed into open warfare and an attempt to sideline the state. The liberal message of the main employers’ organisation has much in common, we have argued, with preoccupations that date from at least 1965 and the publication of the Liberal Charter. The difference, however, between the two orientations is not just one of strategy, with the state in the earlier period and a weakened union movement in the later period being seen as the privileged interlocutor. Certainly the rehabilitation of private enterprise and of profit in the 1980s has enabled employers to be more assertive than in the past. The main difference, however, is one of economic context. The Liberal Charter was produced in the context of Fordist growth. In this, economic liberalism was seen as essential to maintaining employer control within the workplace through its emphasis on property and management rights. The role of the state was to provide a liberal economic framework – or more accurately, social framework, since price controls and sectoral agreements reduced competition between firms – as the basis of national economic activity. With increasing international competition and the growth of crossnational shareholdings, the shift of orientation was towards one that saw economic liberalism as essential in facilitating international competitiveness. In this, the state no longer had a central role to play, but only a subsidiary one as only decentralised social and labour market regulation would grant

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companies the capacity to react rapidly in quickly changing product markets. The problem for the MEDEF, until now, is that it has proved impossible to shift the state from centre stage. Part of the reason for this is that the state has had to intervene in the face of trade union division and weakness to ensure that the ‘general interest’ is not sacrificed on the altar of economic expediency (as in the UNEDIC agreement), much as it did throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than a rupture with the past, the refondation sociale therefore appears, in its results if not in its ambitions, to be a more aggressive continuation of the mantra of lower costs and greater freedom for employers, despite its great social, political and economic ambitions and albeit in response to differing economic pressures.

5

The organisation of work From an authoritarian to a democratic workplace?

Introduction This chapter will examine trends in the way in which employers have organised work in France. It will concentrate on the shift from the Taylorist workplace, characteristic of the 30 glorious years of economic growth from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s, to current forms of work organisation, based around the notion of flexibility. Before analysing this development, two remarks are necessary. First, the characterisations here are necessarily general. While it is accepted that not all workplaces will have been, or are, organised in the manners outlined below, these characterisations describe dominant trends in the organisation of work. The precise policy mix and mode of social regulation adopted in any particular firm will depend on the history and culture of the company, the choices and strategies of managers, the nature of the work and characteristics of the employees, and the influence of trade unions in the workplace. Wider economic and social conditions, however, influence such choices and cultures. Trends can therefore be identified, as companies shift from one productive model to another, even if no ‘ideal type’ exists. The shifts in productive systems and work organisation are therefore revealing of changing employer strategies within the workplace in response to the decline of the Fordist regime of capital accumulation. Second, in the capitalist enterprise, the form that work organisation takes is, certainly, to some extent influenced by factors such as the technologies available, the skills base of the workers and the nature of the competition in the market for the goods or services produced by the company. However, within these constraints, employers and their agents in the workplace – managers, production engineers, consultants in ergonomics etc – also have some margin for manoeuvre. They therefore exercise choice as to the precise form of work organisation that is imposed upon workers (I use imposed here as workers rarely, if ever, have any real say on the organisation of their workplace, apart from at the margins1). Thus, work organisation cannot be seen as separate from employer strategies. Indeed, as the aim is to ensure productive efficiency within the given constraints in order to ensure the survival and profitability of the enterprise, it is a central component of them.2

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The organisation of work

Traditional French management style The slow industrialisation of France before the Second World War meant that small- and medium-sized firms have traditionally played an important role in the nation’s economy. Ownership, especially in smaller companies, but also in some larger ones, tended to be dominated by family interests until well into the post-war period. In the early 1980s, half of the top 200 companies in France were still majority owned or dominated by family interests.3 Indeed, in some major companies, such as Danone and Michelin, this is still the case. As a result, a large proportion of companies were headed by owner-managers who developed paternalist and authoritarian attitudes to the management of their workplaces and workforces.4 Paternalism is based on management authority and control and translates the belief that the company is a family and the owner a father figure who knows what is best for his employees. The latter are effectively seen as less capable than their superiors and in need of protection. It is a benevolent attitude emphasising reward for good behaviour and aims to secure the employees’ attachment to the company through the provision of good working conditions and (before the advent of a generalised welfare system) welfare benefits, thereby improving performance. Until well into the twentieth century, large employers provided company housing, schooling for workers’ children, hospitals, churches and clubs.5 Authoritarianism on the other hand, is characterised by the belief that subordinates are lazy and/or uncooperative, and that they are out to do the least work for the most money. They are not seen as intrinsically interested in their work and therefore require close control to maintain the discipline required for productive efficiency. Good relations between the employee and managers are seen as irrelevant to the achievement of company goals.6 Authoritarianism and paternalism are therefore not the same, but they can coexist. Reward systems can be, and were, used to manipulate behaviour due to management discretion in the allocation of rewards and punishment. Thus, in return for the provision of social and welfare benefits, the employer demanded obedience from his workers and imposed strict discipline in the workplace, a discipline reinforced externally by the social control that the provision of welfare and social benefits afforded. Such attitudes were also reinforced by the anti-capitalist ideologies of trade unions, which were seen as a threat to the control and property rights of owners and their management agents. Trade unions were therefore distrusted as a threat to the authority of the employer, and the intimidation and sacking of union activists were common.7 In effect, workers who lost their jobs also lost their houses, access to health care and schooling for their children, where these were provided by their employer.

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Fordism and management control With the post-war development of industry and the increasing size and complexity of companies, family control became increasingly difficult to maintain, except in smaller companies. The period therefore saw the rise of the ‘cadre’, a manager employed to act on behalf of disparate owners, who were often no longer individuals or families, but financial institutions and other companies. Post-war industrial modernisation and the spread of Fordist relations of production had little effect on traditional management style, however. Lane explains this through the tendency of the educational background of top and higher managers to reinforce paternalist and authoritarian attitudes.8 Senior managers in French companies often came from the elite grandes écoles, especially from engineering schools, and therefore saw their authority as based upon technical excellence. As a result, authority was rarely delegated, and top managers constituted a rarefied and remote social as well as managerial elite in the company, maintaining a wide ‘social distance’ between themselves and their subordinates. In such a low trust environment, the cooperation of workers was gained through authoritarian and paternalist practices. Taylorism had first appeared in the automobile industry in the early twentieth century, but became more generalised with the impact of the First World War and the development of heavy industry between the two world wars.9 Although originally seen as benefiting both employers, through efficiency gains and high productivity, and workers, through higher wages, it was grafted onto traditional French management style to reinforce management control of the workplace. Indeed, this rationalisation of production was undertaken ‘without the unions being able to influence organisational choices or to control their effects on the workers [. . .] Work rules imposed on the workers were determined exclusively by management initiative.’10 In addition, Taylorism was integrated with the French management ideas of Fayol, which emphasised the unitary chain of command within the business enterprise. Fayolism required a clear management hierarchy for the transmission of orders, with each level having clearly defined limits to its authority. Thus, supervisors had a narrow span of control, while rigid hierarchies were put in place. Ultimate authority rested with the Managing Director (Président-Directeur Général, PDG) and French companies were traditionally seen, therefore, as characterised by a centralisation of authority. The PDG, even in large companies, often monopolised decision-making authority on a wide range of issues, and exercised a personalised control with unquestioned authority. Strong management authority was favoured at all levels of the hierarchy down to the shopfloor and office, resulting in an unwillingness to involve subordinates in decision-making, an insistence on management prerogative and decision-making rights on all important matters, and a low concern for gaining consent for decisions.11 The emphasis was thus on leadership and control, with the personalised

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The organisation of work

control of the PDG at the strategic level legitimised by a uniformity of impersonal bureaucratic procedures giving rise to centralised decisionmaking and quasi-military command structures. The implementation of Taylorist work practices enabled worker discretion of task performance, characteristic of craft production, to be severely limited by breaking tasks down into easily identifiable elements that would be accomplished according to formally specified methods, procedures and rules, even down to the physical gestures required of an operative. Good behaviour and task performance were rewarded in an individualised manner, and management discretion was seen to be used in this. Thus, performance and obedience were closely monitored, and a discretionary use made of merit bonuses and promotion, thereby reinforcing conformity to management expectations of behaviour. Going on strike, for example, or even standing as a trade union representative in workplace elections, could be harmful to one’s career. Despite the inconveniences it undoubtedly entailed for workers, such an organisation of work was an integral part of the conditions of Fordist growth following the Second World War. The rapid expansion of industry, productivity gains and the development of a consumer society made production for mass markets possible, while economic development and industrialisation made available a low-skilled and cheap labour force as people migrated from newly-mechanised farms. Thus, employment in the primary sector of the economy fell from 29.2 per cent of the active population in 1949 to 10.9 per cent in 1973, and rose from 35.0 per cent to 37.8 per cent in industry and from 35.8 per cent to 51.3 per cent in services.12 These workers were attracted to the newly developing urban industrial centres by higher wages than they could earn in agriculture, and largely accepted tight discipline in the workplace in exchange for this. In addition, workers benefited from the fact that Fordism required high levels of demand in the national economy, a requirement that translated into state policies aimed at insuring against loss of earnings through social protection and maintaining full employment. The predominant mode of employment therefore became the full-time, permanent contract, particularly for male workers, and the importance of labour markets in regulating labour diminished with wages linked to macroeconomic productivity through branch-level collective agreements.13

Challenges to Fordism in the workplace Resistance to Taylorism and the tight discipline imposed in the workplace, however, grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As new generations entered the workplace – better educated and used to high growth and continually improving standards of living but without memory of the scarcity of the war – rebellion increased against the boring, monotonous and meaningless work afforded by Taylorism. Problems of absenteeism, turnover and recruitment increased for employers.14 With a tight labour market, workers could leave poor jobs in search of better ones, but the rejection of

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95

Taylorism culminated in the strike wave of May 1968 and the strikes of unskilled workers at the start of the following decade. In effect, these strikes challenged the notion of authority both within the workplace and in wider society. Outside of the workplace, new generations showed that they would no longer submit to authoritarian structures in the family, Church and government. In the workplace, tight management supervision and subservience to the machine were contested as workers called for the ‘humanisation’ of work. On its own, it is doubtful that such resistance could have had much of an impact on the organisation of work. The implementation of Taylorism in the 1920s had, after all, been opposed vehemently by some sectors of the workforce, particularly craft workers whose autonomy was threatened by the deskilling associated with assembly-line production.15 Although the CNPF was debating the notion of ‘work enrichment’ from 1972,16 real change had to wait until these social challenges to Taylorist work practices were reinforced by changes in the economic environment. Indeed, employers were pushed into considering greater change from the late 1970s onwards by changes in product markets and the general economic environment. First, there was the realisation that the crises of the 1970s were structural, and had serious implications for capital accumulation. The mass production of homogenised goods for mass domestic markets was no longer appropriate, as internationalisation, with the emergence of cheap producers in south-east Asia and Latin America, made competition on the basis of price unsustainable. This was all the more the case as the physical limits of Taylorism were being reached; assembly lines could only be speeded up so far to increase productivity. In the industrialised world, higher aspirations driven by consumerism meant that the demand for standardised, mass-produced goods was saturated.17 The challenge now was to produce high-quality, varied, even customised, goods for smaller niche markets. The new requirements of variety, quality, innovation and flexibility were not conducive to Taylorist assembly-line production. When competition was based primarily on price, employers could recruit unskilled and lowpaid workers, and construct carefully controlled labour processes based upon a rigid division of labour and the separation of conception and execution of tasks. Although worker creativity was sacrificed, this enabled a minimum of homogeneity and quality, and a tight control of production costs.18 With a more highly educated workforce, more sophisticated consumer demand and greater international competition in product markets, and the consequent rise in the importance of innovation and quality, a reliance on authoritarian practices and bureaucratic regulation no longer appeared appropriate. If companies were to engage in more flexible forms of production in order to react rapidly to market demands, they needed to harness the creativity of their workforces, and not rely on their passivity, or at least weak capacity for resistance, as under Fordist relations of production. In addition, the

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The organisation of work

imperative of rapid reaction to market demands made the efficient circulation of information necessary, not only across different departments of the firm, but also across different hierarchical levels. In the French context, the bipolar, antagonistic social division of the workplace was therefore far more of an obstacle to the successful functioning of the capitalist enterprise than it had been with a ‘scientific’ organisation of work. An anti-capitalist workers’ culture needed to be tackled in order to promote a ‘joint interests’ view of the enterprise in order to foster the commitment of workers to the goals of the firm and to tap their knowledge for the good of the company. Furthermore, economic crisis, depressed world markets and high inflation meant falling profit margins, restricting the scope of employers to buy off worker unrest through higher pay. Improvements in the quality of working life therefore became an attractive alternative. Linked to this was the need to increase flexibility in the deployment of labour and to tap employee knowledge of work in order to improve efficiency and raise motivation, thereby maintaining or restoring profits. Such developments were made possible by the emergence of new technologies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with more flexible, numerically and computer-controlled machinery permitting instant conversion and tailoring to market demands at low cost via small batch and individualised production.19

Employer reactions: a more democratic workplace? Exogenous and endogenous pressures upon Taylorist production processes, from wage earners, product markets and developments in the international economy, appeared to promise a way out of alienation and subordination in the workplace for workers. Employee involvement and consultation would become more crucial to the success of the flexible workplace in an increasingly competitive global economy. Innovation, flexibility and the need to use their knowledge more fully suggested that workers would need to be more highly skilled and could reconquer the autonomy that they had lost due to the deskilling endemic to Taylorism. In this respect, greater worker autonomy appeared to presage a trend towards more participative forms of work organisation and to raise the promise of a redistribution of power in the workplace. The de-Taylorised workplace? Employers reacted to the need for productivity gains and to calls, particularly from unskilled and semi-skilled operatives, for an improvement in the quality of working life from the mid-1970s onwards, with suggestions for the reform of work organisation. Aided by the state, experiments took place in job enlargement, job enrichment, job rotation and semi-autonomous work groups to give workers more varied tasks and therefore more interesting work. However, these were often short-lived due to the impact of the second oil crisis in 1979, and even where they did take place, the less radical

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job enlargement and job rotation were more common than job enrichment and semi-autonomous work groups.20 The former merely give workers more of the same level jobs to do and therefore do not alter the basic organisation of work or the way in which it is performed. Job enrichment on the other hand implies some vertical integration of tasks, involving workers in the planning and preparation of their activities, and in basic maintenance and quality control functions. Semi-autonomous work groups go even further, with workers deciding who does what, as well as planning their activities, thereby increasing their autonomy and satisfying some of their social and psychological needs at work through the necessary communication, problem-solving and decision-making involved. These, however, remained marginal with the result that ‘the work reform attempts up to the late 1970s/early 1980s [. . .] remained at the experimental stage and [did] not fundamentally change the old Taylorist forms of work organization’.21 The emergence of new technologies in the 1970s and 1980s enabled companies to move to systems of production based upon ‘flexible specialisation’.22 This involves the flexible deployment of computerised equipment for rapid adjustment to changing market demand through small-batch or even customised production at relatively low cost. For Piore and Sabel, this would require the dismantling of Taylorist strategies based upon a high degree of control over the execution of tasks and a rigid division of labour as workers would have to operate more complex machinery in a flexible manner, and would therefore enjoy greater responsibility and autonomy.23 For this to happen, however, workers would need training in order to be involved in the programming of the machinery. In France, however, flexible specialisation came up against the low skills base of workers deskilled by Taylorism and traditional French management thinking due to the autonomy it potentially gave workers.24 In effect, flexible specialisation was grafted onto traditional attitudes and practices rather than reforming them. A case study of the introduction of computercontrolled machine tools in small- and medium-sized enterprises in the mechanical engineering sector in the south of France, by Maurice et al., found that it did little to break down the existing division of labour or hierarchical structures.25 Indeed, rather than training existing workers to oversee the new machinery, new occupational categories were created, particularly high-level technicians and régleurs. These were recruited externally and combined shopfloor functions with line management. Thus, traditional hierarchical structures remained intact as a selected few were trained to a high level of competence, and given a place on the hierarchy, without increasing the skills of existing workers. In effect, the low trust environment of the French workplace and the narrow skills bases of workers reduced to appendages of the machine under Taylorism constituted a block to the development of a polyvalent, autonomous workforce. Other case studies in various industries around the same time confirmed that the introduction of new technologies was having little impact upon

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The organisation of work

Taylorist–Fayolist practices concerned with the rigid division of conception and execution of tasks and close hierarchical control.26 Even into the 1990s, the situation appears to have changed little, despite the introduction of new technologies. In a study of a gearbox factory, Durand found that the installation of automated production lines only led to limited task enlargement for operatives, who performed modest maintenance tasks as well as the surveillance of machinery.27 More skilled maintenance remained the preserve of a specialist maintenance department, continuing the division of labour characteristic of Taylorism and confining operatives to boring, monotonous work over which they had little control or autonomy. For Durand, such ‘Fordist machining’ is ‘the logical technological development of production lines’28 and ‘fits perfectly into the “scientific” organization of factory work practised since the early part of this century’.29 Durand’s explanation for this is twofold. First, there is management’s ‘search for economies in direct labour’ as trained, genuinely multi-skilled operatives would have to be paid more highly.30 Second, there is the question of control: There is a special rapprochement between Taylorism and the use of IT in the sense that they both objectivize and accumulate knowledge, savoir-faire and information for the benefit of management. And if this has a direct connection to the separation of workers from their means of production, which no social system in the world has yet succeeded in eliminating, it is difficult to see why Taylorism would be abandoned.31 Even at the end of the 1990s, Taylorist work practices had not been eliminated from the automobile industry, despite the presence of robots in the workshop. In the Peugeot factory in Sochaux, minutes are divided into hundredths for the monitoring of tasks, and machines dictate work rhythms.32 And such practices are increasingly common in the tertiary sector of the economy. Supermarket cashiers are subject to time and motion studies to check how many articles they scan per minute.33 In telephone call centres, operators have to follow set scripts, are recorded to check on the conformity of their performance to set guidelines concerning politeness, the time taken to answer the telephone, the number of calls taken per day and successful sales as a percentage of calls taken.34 Such case study evidence is also supported by survey evidence. Indeed, according to the 1998 Conditions of Work Survey carried out by the DARES, far from disappearing, Taylorist practices actually progressed in France between 1984 and 1998, even if new forms of work organisation were appearing.35 First, 15 per cent of skilled workers and 30 per cent of semi- and unskilled workers surveyed reported that they were engaged in assembly-line production in 1998, a rise from 7.5 per cent and 20 per cent respectively in 1984. More than one in five workers in the textiles, automobile and agriculture and foodstuff industries reported working under such constraints. Furthermore, 16 per cent of industrial workers reported that

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their work rhythm was externally imposed by the automated transfer of products or pieces, compared with 6.5 per cent in 1984, and 19 per cent declared that their work rates depended upon the speed of machinery (11 per cent in 1984). Despite the fall in the number of unqualified workers (see below), the total number of workers subject to externally imposed work rhythms rose from 500,000 in 1991 to 650,000 in 1998 due to the more rapid progression of such practices among qualified industrial workers. Among this category, 42 per cent worked according to mechanically imposed rates in 1998, compared with 21 per cent in 1984, and 31 per cent in 1991. Nevertheless, unqualified industrial workers are still more likely to be subject to such constraints: from 36 per cent in 1984, the percentage rose to 43 per cent in 1991, and to just over half in 1998. As well as the imposition of work rhythms by the machine, another major feature associated with Taylorist work organisation was found by the 1998 Conditions of Work Survey to be on the increase – that of repetitive work, the constant repetition of a series of movements to complete a task. This development was found to affect not only industrial workers but also tertiary sector employees, particularly those in the retail sector (Table 5.1). Thus, autonomous work groups remained a minority phenomenon in French companies, which remained marked by a profound ‘neo-fordism’.36 Although their use has risen to the point where they were used in 36.6 per cent of all companies employing 20 people or more in 1998, in nearly a third of these less than 5 per cent of the workforce was concerned, while less than one in five employees were concerned in nearly half of the cases.37 Where multi-skilling occurred it remained essentially limited to basic

Table 5.1 Workers engaged in repetitive work (selected categories, %) Workers continually repeating the same series of movements

All of which: Postal and telecommunications workers Health workers Transport workers Retail workers Hotel and catering employees Qualified industrial workers Unqualified industrial workers

. . . in cycles of less than one minute

■1984

1991

1998

29

5

7

7

62 41 37 67 42 51 70

10 3 9 18 5 10 22

18 3 9 30 10 13 30

24 4 16 40 16 15 31

1984

1991

1998

20

30

36 20 34 44 20 35 58

48 36 30 64 46 46 68

Source: DARES (2000) Résultats des enquêtes Conditions de travail, 1984, 1991 et 1998, p. 12.

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maintenance tasks or to job rotation and enlargement in order to facilitate the replacement of workers in case of necessity. On the other hand, the proportion of workers at all levels and in all sectors who are subject to rigid task prescription has declined over the course of the 1990s (Table 5.2). However, although the number of hierarchical levels in French companies has been reduced,38 and workers given more autonomy in task performance, close hierarchical control has not disappeared, and has even increased in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. For all wage earners, the proportions stating that they are subject to constant hierarchical control rose from 17 per cent in 1984 to 23 per cent in 1991 and 29 per cent in 1998, with retail workers showing the most rapid progression in this domain: from 13 per cent in 1984, the proportion rose to 38 per cent in 1998. For industrial workers, the rise was from 20 per cent in 1984 to 28 per cent in 1998.39 Thus, contradictory phenomena appear to be at work. On the one hand respondents to the survey report an increase in assembly-line and repetitive work, and in close hierarchical control. On the other, a smaller proportion are given strict instructions on how to perform their work, and apply them to the letter, and fewer need to rely on others, such as maintenance workers for example, to solve work-related problems and have no discretion in the time they take to perform their tasks. Even production-line workers are increasingly expected to show initiative in dealing with unforeseen contingencies: those who call on others to resolve low-level maintenance Table 5.2 Task control Proportion of wage-earners who . . . are told how to accomplish task

strictly apply instructions

■1991

1998

call on others to resolve problems

■1991

1998

are unable to vary time to complete task

■1991

1991

1998

1998

All

18

14

42

37

35

28

37

33

of which: Managerial Supervisory Employees Workers

3 8 19 28

3 7 16 23

20 29 47 53

18 29 43 45

10 20 40 48

10 18 32 40

25 27 36 49

24 26 32 44

of which: Agriculture Industry Construction Tertiary

24 24 23 15

22 16 22 13

43 46 42 40

45 39 37 36

41 39 39 33

38 31 33 27

30 43 41 34

28 38 39 31

Source: DARES (2000) Résultats des enquêtes Conditions de travail, 1984, 1991 et 1998, p. 14.

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problems fell to 42 per cent in 1998 from 54 per cent in 1991. Thus, the persistence of Taylorist work organisation, and even its extension to the tertiary sector, has been accompanied by an extension of the initiative workers can deploy in the accomplishment of their tasks. In effect, the control of tasks mainly concerns industrial workers and some tertiary workers in the post and telecommunications, banking and insurance, retail and health sectors. In general, for these workers, shorter work cycles are related to greater external task control, either by the company hierarchy or through the production process.40 In effect, while Taylorism has not vanished, at the same time, companies have integrated the external demands of their markets into their internal functioning, and work has been intensified through the notions of lean and just-in-time production, which reduce costs by eliminating faults and stocks. In the course of the 1990s, the REPONSE 98 survey carried out by the DARES found that the number of establishments implementing just-intime procedures had risen from 28.9 per cent to 35.2 per cent from 1992 to 1998.41 Indeed, the number of employees stating that they have to satisfy immediate demands is rising in all sectors and amongst all categories of workers, with retail workers, unsurprisingly, the most exposed to immediate client demands (86 per cent). In the tertiary sector as a whole, the proportion rose from 35 per cent to 58 per cent between 1984 and 1998, but the trend also affected industrial employees, rising from 16 per cent to 47 per cent over the period.42 As a consequence, growing numbers of workers are subject to formalised temporal constraints, which are growing more and more restrictive. Thus, the 1998 Conditions of Work Survey found an increasing percentage of employees in all socio-professional categories and all sectors subject to norms for task completion that were inferior to one day.43 Although highest in industry, with a rise from 31 per cent to 61 per cent of workers affected between 1984 and 1998, the phenomenon was also found to be widespread in the tertiary sector, where the same period saw a rise from 13 per cent to 37 per cent of workers affected. At the same time, employees subject to short deadlines of less than one hour rose from 6 per cent in 1984, to 23 per cent in 1998. Again, industrial workers are most affected by this phenomenon, 10 per cent being subject to short deadlines in 1984, rising to 35 per cent in 1998. In effect, just-in-time production is associated with shorter work cycles and increased external constraints upon employees, reinforcing or replacing close supervisory control in the workplace and placing limits upon the increased autonomy of employees. The control of the assembly line under Fordism is effectively replaced by new forms of more subtle control. Integrating workers through ‘participative management’? Nevertheless, with the implementation of new technologies, the need for more highly-skilled, or at least multi-skilled, workers has led to a decrease

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in the number of unskilled workers across all sectors of the economy in France. While the number of skilled workers has remained remarkably constant, the decline in unskilled workers has mainly been compensated for by a rise in the number of highly-qualified technicians and managerial staff (Table 5.3). The high skills levels and technical competence of this expanding category of workers, in addition to the traditional autonomy of skilled workers – a function again of specialised skills that escape simplistic codification – potentially gives them a great deal of autonomy in the workplace, rendering authoritarian management styles problematic. New communications techniques were considered to be a means of overcoming such threats to management control in the workplace, by creating the sense of shared objectives and a company culture. Early attempts to respond to worker demands for greater involvement and more interesting work involved the advocation of such communications techniques in the workplace. In 1977, the CNPF called for an ‘active social policy’ in the workplace in order to integrate employees into the company and improve the quality of working life. In theory, this meant shedding the old authoritarian and paternalist attitudes in favour of a shift towards more participative management practices, as the greater worker autonomy and responsibility required for improvements in quality and rapid adjustment to market conditions required greater trust relationships between managers and their subordinates. Such policies, however, really received a boost in the mid-1980s, when western companies studied the success of their Japanese competitors. The predominant response, however, was to borrow only certain elements of the ‘Japanese model’.44 These centred around the notions of flexible production processes, including job enrichment schemes, improved communication between managers and workers and greater employee involvement, or participation, to improve productivity and quality. Company videos and magazines became a popular means of getting management’s message across in an attempt to create a company culture wherein company and worker goals would be harmonised. ‘Open management’ policies were also used to break down barriers and to facilitate, not only topTable 5.3 Changes in employment structure, 1983–98 Number in 1998 (000s) Unskilled workers Skilled workers White-collar workers Intermediary workers Managerial staff

1386 4617 7463 3681 3916

Source: INSEE, Enquêtes Emploi.

Change (%) 1983–98

1983–90

1990–8

–39.6 1.8 13.7 23.2 31.1

19.1 2.4 8.4 8.8 14.5

25.3 0.6 4.9 13.3 14.5

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down, but also bottom-up communication. The most widely discussed importation was that of quality circles, 30,000 of which were operating in French companies by the late 1980s.45 These allowed for the expression of employee views and for employee participation in solving problems encountered in their work in order to improve productive efficiency and quality. They therefore seemed to indicate an acceptance that the company is a place where many divergent interests exist and must be taken into account through negotiation and dialogue rather than suppressed through management authoritarianism. They also implied a breakdown of hierarchical barriers and authoritarian control by involving low-level employees in the discussion of production issues. This greater involvement of employees in solving problems concerning their work was seen as leading to greater satisfaction and therefore increased productivity. After a decline in the early 1990s,46 the REPONSE 98 survey of establishments employing over 20 people shows an increase in the use of quality circles: in 1998 they were found in 54 per cent, compared with 42 per cent in 1992.47 Likewise, the use of other forms of employee participation were also found to have increased in the 1990s: project groups – which bring together employees from across the organisation on a temporary basis to establish a new product or procedure – were present in 63 per cent of companies in 1998, compared with 39 per cent in 1992. Such a development is undoubtedly linked to the quest for ISO certification (see below): 75 per cent of certified establishments ran quality circles in the 1998 REPONSE survey, compared with 38 per cent of uncertified establishments.48 The French company at the turn of the millennium would therefore appear to be a participative one in which employees are fully integrated through a variety of mechanisms that give them a say in their work. However, in the case of quality circles, in 65 per cent of cases where they were present less than one in five employees participated in them, and in over one-third, less than 5 per cent took part.49 These mechanisms appear to arouse the suspicions of many workers.50 Indeed, such measures can be seen as more sophisticated control mechanisms. First, although employee motivation may be improved by involvement in problem solving, it is also a means of securing productivity gains without compensating employees for them. Indeed, any covert resistance on the part of employees that could slow down production is brought into the open through techniques that encourage employees to discuss organisational problems in their work.51 Second, being based on group, or even individual, participation, such techniques undermine collective solidarity in the workplace, especially when, as is sometimes the case, competition over productivity gains between quality circles is encouraged. In general terms, the aim of all these management strategies is to reshape the relationship between the employee and the firm so that trust and cooperation replace conflict and opposition. As part of this, the aim is to weaken workers’ identification with their class and its organisational expression, the

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trade union, and strengthen their identification with the company. Employee expression can enable management to foresee conflict and to resolve it before it becomes overt, thereby reinforcing the management hierarchy and the employee’s sense of ‘belonging’ to the company. Informal discussion on working conditions and work organisation issues can take place between workers and managers through these groups, thereby bypassing trade union and representative structures in the workplace – something made easier in France until recent years by the trade unions’ concentration on quantitative demands at the national level and their traditional lack of concern for issues of work organisation. Thus, problems are resolved by workgroups themselves or by negotiation with management. This challenges trade union hegemony on the shop floor and their legitimacy to speak for employees, as the new communications techniques purport to respond to employee desires for the autonomy, creativity, social interaction, participation and involvement that were previously denied them under Taylorist– Fayolist organisational structures. In more recent years, participative management techniques have been complemented, and to some extent superseded, by quality assurance procedures as a means of tapping workers’ knowledge in order to ensure the quality of a product. In particular, a growing number of firms in France are implementing ISO 9000 norms for the certification of quality in order to respond to demands for guarantees from clients. According to the REPONSE 98 survey, the proportion of companies in possession of ISO certification rose from 12.4 per cent in 1992 to 33.8 per cent in 1998.52 ISO norms describe in detail the nature of the task to be accomplished and the procedures to be followed in order to accomplish it. The emphasis is not on the physical gestures required, as under Taylorism, but on the procedures to be followed in order to ensure a high quality of output through the respect of standardised procedures. In the case of a faulty product or delivery of service, the detailed description of procedures is also designed to ensure that the fault can be traced back to its origin.53 Thus, rather than quality assurance being seen as something outside of the operative’s field, or as something to be discussed and improved by workers in forums away from the point of production, it has become integrated into the work of the production/service worker, who becomes individually responsible for it. While this requires wider skills and greater responsibility on the part of the worker due to the vertical integration of production and quality control, such procedures echo the strict codification of the operative’s task under Taylorist production methods. Regular evaluation of an employee’s work and adherence to such norms (see below), as well as procedures for reporting at all levels of the hierarchy, ensure that quality assurance plays a control function in the workplace. Furthermore, as ISO 9000 norms have become almost obligatory for the small- and medium-sized companies to whom large enterprises subcontract non-core functions, these too are subject to an increased control from large companies.54

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Decentralisation, individualisation and control Nevertheless, where the nature of a company or individual’s work is particularly complex, a reliance on employees’ skills will give them some autonomy. To control this, and to harness it for the goals of the company, emphasis is not placed upon the way in which the work is accomplished, but on results. Thus, employees are given a certain amount of resources and objectives to achieve with them. These are often, though not exclusively, monetary; they can, for example, be to achieve a certain volume of production or services at a given level of quality. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the trend has been to impose monetary targets as companies have been divided into autonomous cost centres, each with its own target. In some cases, this goes as far as the creation of separate subsidiaries. The parent company can then put activities out to tender, with subsidiaries involved in a process of competitive tendering for contracts, often on an international scale. Senior managers, and company headquarters have thus been able to delegate autonomy in work practices while increasing their control of performance, and increasing the pressure on workers to achieve centrally imposed financial targets.55 Within the workplace, such pressure is cascaded down the hierarchy in a system of management by objectives coupled with elements of performancerelated pay, so that employees’ output, rather than their task performance is controlled. A case study in the French gas industry demonstrated that this technique increased management control despite claims that targets were negotiated between managers and their subordinates.56 The individualisation of pay thus became an issue in the 1980s, particularly in large companies. Nine out of ten companies employing more than 500 employees implemented individualised pay schemes in 1998, compared with just over half of companies with less than 100 employees.57 Overall, individualised pay awards affected seven out of ten employees in 1998, compared with six out of ten a year earlier. Although managers are most affected by these (81 per cent), over half of blue- (57 per cent) and white-collar (51 per cent) nonmanagerial staff are also affected. The individualisation of pay, and its tight relationship to performance, are also powerful mechanisms to ensure conformity to company norms of behaviour and performance. In addition, schemes for participation and intéressement also link remuneration to company performance. Participation, or profit sharing, was first introduced in 1967, and is now obligatory, subject to a collective agreement, in all companies employing more than 50 employees. The sums paid are not immediately available, but blocked for up to five years in order to favour company investment. According to the Ministry of Employment, the number of companies covered has steadily risen over the last few decades, from 10,769 in 1975 to 17,908 in 1996. The number of employees covered, however, has remained remarkably stable – 4.73 million in 1975 and 4.69 million in 1996.58 Intéressement is another form of profit sharing, but differs

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from participation in that it is not obligatory, and the sums allocated are immediately available unless invested in a company savings plan (often involving share ownership schemes, into which proceeds from participation can also be paid). Again, recent trends have seen a steady rise in the number of agreements on the subject. Despite a dip between 1989 and 1992, the number of agreements has risen from 3640 in 1987 to 11,597 in 1996, with 2.4 million employees covered.59 Although this is designed to be more flexible than simple profit sharing, allowing for productivity bonuses for example, over three-quarters of such schemes are based on financial results.60 While profit sharing is portrayed as a means of linking rewards to company performance, and therefore of integrating employees into the values of the company, there are fears that they could be used to restrict wage growth. Indeed, at the time of the passage through parliament of the 19 February law establishing PPESVs (see Chapter 2) fears were expressed by trade union leaders and parliamentarians that such schemes would be used as a ‘substitute for wage rises’.61 Qualifications and evaluation In order to ensure the success of strategies to improve the flexibility and quality of production in goods and services, and to face up to increasing uncertainty and competition on product markets, employers need more adaptable employees than those required in the past. Thus, the notion of the qualifications required for employment has undergone an evolution. The introduction of the Parodi classification grids in 1945 based these on objective criteria elaborated at the level of the branch. Under this system, the task rather than the employee was evaluated in order to ascertain the skills needed to perform a particular function and the wage that should be associated with it. This therefore constituted a guarantee for workers as far as their salary was concerned, and also an assurance that qualifications would be recognised in all companies in their particular sector. A 1975 collective agreement in the metalworking sector destabilised this system, however, introducing a list of criteria necessary to occupy a particular post, only one of which was the formal qualification. Others, which have now been taken up by most professional branches, included autonomy, responsibility, goodwill and ‘competence’.62 Such notions are far less objective than formal qualifications or objective skills, and a worker’s or a job applicant’s score on these criteria are therefore a matter for the subjective judgement of the manager and/or employer. The use of such criteria therefore results, de facto, in an increased control of the employer over hiring and promotions. In addition, while qualities such as goodwill (disponibilité) and flexibility are increasingly prerequisites for employment and promotion, they are only rewarded by higher pay in a minority of cases.63 Indeed, as multi-skilling often only means switching between several low-skilled jobs, it is not recognised as a qualification, and is therefore not remunerated. Rather, factors such as good-

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will and competence are subjectively used to reward performance, and therefore control it, as regular evaluations of employee performance – often linked to the individualisation of pay64 – take place. The obstacle to arbitrary employer power of the Parodi grids is thus being dismantled in response to the need for a more flexible workplace. Continuous training policies have the potential to fill the gap left by the dismantling of the Parodi classification system, but they do so very imperfectly as, again, they are used as a means of selection. The most highly trained or educated – managers and technicians – receive more training than workers or office workers. Furthermore, within each category further training will depend upon receiving good reports from superiors. As Coutrot asks: ‘Why would companies invest in less productive workers, whom they wish to get rid of?’65 External flexibility Indeed, one aspect of the Japanese model conspicuously ignored by French employers in their search for a new productive system in a changed economic environment is that of employment security. In response to the difficulties encountered in switching to flexible specialisation described above, French employers opted for external flexibility as a means of reducing wage costs. Thus, large companies may have increased their size on a global scale through mergers and takeovers, but they have also shed labour by concentrating on core activities and subcontracting others such as maintenance operations. Thus, from 1980 to 1991, the number employed by large industrial groups fell by 30 per cent, while those engaged in company services grew by 5 per cent per annum.66 Although this trend appeared to be declining in the 1990s, the REPONSE survey still found that 24 per cent of companies had ‘recently re-concentrated on core activities’ in 1998 (compared with 31 per cent in 1992), while 19 per cent had subcontracted activities (28 per cent in 1992).67 In theory, these subcontractors are independent, but in practice they often have exclusive contracts to supply large ‘partners’, who in their efforts to reduce costs become increasingly demanding towards those who depend upon their custom for their livelihood. The pressures of the global economy are therefore cascaded down to small- and medium-sized companies even if they only operate on a local level, supplying or servicing companies in close proximity to them. The communications revolution reinforces such pressure by making the search for alternative ‘partners’ easier in case of discontent with the service offered. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of this search for external flexibility, however, is the development of a dual labour market, of core and peripheral workers, over the past two decades, with those in a precarious labour market position being hired or fired according to fluctuations in demand. This division has, of course, always existed to some extent, but it received a new boost in the 1980s. Despite the publicity they have received, fixed-term contracts remain fairly marginal in France, representing 6 per cent of jobs in

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the private sector in 1997, although this was triple the percentage of 1982.68 However, they play an important role for labour market entrants. By 1986, 63 per cent of all new employment was on a fixed-term contract, with only 24 per cent on a standard contract.69 By the mid-1990s, temporary contracts were clearly being widely used as a filter for recruitment, with 80 per cent of new entrants into companies being hired on this basis, and only one-third being subsequently offered a permanent contract.70 Meanwhile, the proportion of those in part-time employment had reached 17.2 per cent in 1999, double the level of 1975.71 Part-time work mainly affects women (32 per cent of those in work are on part-time contracts as opposed to 5.8 per cent of men) in the tertiary sector (90 per cent of part-time work), particularly in education, health, social services, personal services and retail.72 Part-time employment, too, appears to act as a point of entry to the labour market: 27.5 per cent of those under 25 in employment – ten points above the average – worked part-time in 1999, a situation that 52.7 per cent found unsatisfactory.73 Nevertheless, although these trends reveal a desire for greater numerical flexibility and more selective recruitment strategies on the part of employers, the vast majority of employment contracts – 86.5 per cent in 199974 – remain of indeterminate length.

Consequences: the degradation of work and high returns On the part of employees, the 1998 Conditions of Work Survey showed a marked increase in the proportion of workers declaring that their work exposes them to a health risk of one form or another, with the figures rising from 62 per cent in 1984 to 72 per cent in 1991 and 74 per cent in 1998.75 Such results may, of course, merely translate an increased perception of risks, rather than a degradation, or even improvement, of the objective situation. In general, manual workers perceive themselves to be at risk more than office workers due to the nature of their work (exposure to dust, noise, lifting of heavy weights, use of dangerous machinery, maintenance of a tiring or uncomfortable posture for long periods of time etc). The change in the relative weight of these categories within the working population would therefore suggest an objective decrease in health risks from work. However, psychological health risks resulting from work are much more difficult to measure than physical risks, and yet would appear to be increasing rapidly due to the change in the nature of the employment relationship. Again, the results of the 1998 Conditions of Work Survey rely on the perceptions of respondents, but again they testify to a considerable degradation in the conditions of work for numerous wage earners in the course of the 1990s.76 The fear of sanctions is the main source of worry for workers, undoubtedly underpinned by the fear of losing one’s job: in 1998, 60 per cent of workers feared an error on their part would affect their employment or their income, compared with 46 per cent in 1991, with temporary workers slightly more concerned than others. Employer communications

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policies and quality procedures are reflected in the increased number of workers feeling that an error on their part could have important financial consequences for the company (44 per cent in 1991, 50 per cent in 1998), and serious consequences in terms of quality (60 per cent in 1991, 65 per cent in 1998). The feeling of financial responsibility is, unsurprisingly, more keenly felt in the competitive sector of the economy, and is linked to hierarchical position, but nevertheless is felt by 57 per cent of unqualified industrial workers (and 72 per cent of qualified industrial workers) and 44 per cent of retail employees. Concern for quality is often linked to professional identities and notions of skills, but again, has been internalised by 66 per cent of unqualified industrial workers (80 per cent for qualified), and 49 per cent of retail employees.77 Work is perceived as being more taxing, not only in terms of responsibility, but also in terms of workloads and rhythms. A classic measure of pressure, the need to interrupt one’s task to deal with another more urgent one, was found to be on the increase by the 1998 Conditions of Work Survey, and now affects over half the workforce. Likewise, one in five wage earners feels that they are ‘always’ rushed in their work, with unqualified industrial workers and those in the retail and wholesale sectors feeling this pressure most, a reflection of moves towards just-in-time production and the increasing importance of satisfying immediate client demands.78 These results cannot be disassociated from the developments described earlier in this chapter which translate into an individualisation of the work relationship. Individual workers are personally responsible for the quality of the product or service offered by their employer; they undergo individual evaluations based upon subjective criteria and measurements; and they are increasingly rewarded on an individual basis. While job enlargement may lead to more interesting work, this individualisation has taken place in harmony with the intensification of work through the application of quality assurance procedures, just-in-time production and the imposition of stringent performance targets. Furthermore, external flexibility places additional pressure on those not on a full-time or permanent contract. As Coutrot points out: ‘Companies have always selected, promoted and rejected a proportion of their workforces. The novelty is in the magnitude of such practices [. . .] Tougher competition and demands for profitability lead to a greater selectivity.’79 The result for those in employment is fear of social exclusion through unemployment. For those on ‘atypical’ contracts, the reason is clear – their future employment is in no way guaranteed. Even if they impress their superiors, achieve production and quality targets, and show proof of ‘competence’ and ‘willing’, temporary contracts may not be converted into permanent, secure ones. Their lot is therefore one of insecurity. Even those on permanent contracts in successful companies, however, are not insured against such a fate. Mergers and acquisitions frequently result in job losses, not to speak of the possibility of the relocation of a company. In the globally competitive

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economy, marked by the need to ensure high rates of return for shareholders, contributing to the financial success of a company is no guarantee of future employment, as the examples of Michelin and Danone have brought home to French workers in the last few years. The result of this intensification of work combined with uncertainty has been the development of work-related stress at all levels of the hierarchy. Workplaces are certainly cleaner and safer than those of 25 years ago, with fewer industrial accidents and deaths at work, and the development of the tertiary sector means that fewer workers are subjected to the exhausting rhythms of the Taylorised assembly line. But the mental boredom and alienation of the Taylorised factory has given way to mental stress as workers are expected to be more responsible and show more initiative in intensified work regimes. Those who cannot meet their targets can expect, at best, stagnation in their jobs, at worst a ticket to redundancy. Thus, ‘in the grip of fear, for example the threat of redundancy hovering over all the employees in a department, workers show themselves to be capable of deploying a wealth of inventiveness to improve their production (in terms of quantity and quality) and at the same time to obstruct their neighbours in order to maintain an advantage over the latter in the face of the process of selection to be carted off to redundancy’.80 And yet, despite what enlightened management theorists say about the desirability of a satisfied workforce for good performance, the health of French companies appears in direct contrast to that of their workforces. Profit levels have now returned to those of before the 1970s crises, and even outstrip the historically high levels of the 1960s.81 After falling from 30 per cent in 1970 to 24 per cent in 1982, the share of gross profits in value added rose to oscillate between 32 per cent and 34 per cent from the mid-1980s onwards,82 and exports are flourishing, with trade balances reaching record levels throughout the 1990s. Wages as a percentage of value added, on the other hand, have constantly fallen over the past two decades, from a high point of nearly 73 per cent in 1982 to 64 per cent in 2000.83 Thus, the fruits of reorganisation and productivity gains are increasingly distributed in favour of shareholders and managing directors while workers pay the costs of such reorganisation in terms of increased stress and insecurity.

Conclusion: plus ça change . . .? Within the workplace, the Fordist compromise was based on the application of Taylorist production processes and an acceptance, by employees, of deskilled work and management control in the workplace. The increases in productivity that this generated meant that workers could be compensated through employment security and continually increasing real wages and standards of living. However, the conjunction of the increased importance of shareholders, particularly institutional ones, and unstable market conditions in a globalised economy has meant that certain central elements of the

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Fordist compromise have broken down. Employers have sought to reorganise the company and the workplace in order to restore profit margins threatened by economic crisis and exacerbated competition. In particular, the link between wages and productivity has been broken due to an increased emphasis on financial returns and cost reduction. This has resulted in a qualitative change in the nature of work, with an individualisation of employment relations through recruitment and evaluation strategies, quality assurance procedures and remuneration schemes. Many employees now operate machinery of a high technological sophistication, and in doing so are expected to be more flexible and responsible for their own performance. In addition, another major pillar of the Fordist compromise has also been shaken – that of employment security and full employment – due to the search for flexibility as employers attempted to adapt to unstable market conditions. As a result, the major change at workplace level has been a shift of entrepreneurial risk onto those who were previously sheltered from it, that is to say onto employees themselves, as their present and future prosperity is more closely tied than ever to the performance of their company. High levels of unemployment from the late 1970s onwards facilitated this shift in entrepreneurial risk. In this respect, labour markets play a far greater role in labour market regulation than in the past, and the fear, or threat, of unemployment has permitted an intensification of work. However, when examining the reorganisation of work, the continuities are just as striking as the changes that have occurred over the last few decades. Since the period of Fordist growth, the fundamental raison d’être of the capitalist enterprise – to generate profits for those who invest their capital in it – has not changed. In order to achieve this objective, concerns for managerial control of the workforce have not diminished. The implementation of new technologies has been adapted to, rather than overcome, the ingrained Taylorist practices and attitudes – especially the rigid separation of conception and execution – in the workplace that were the inheritance of French Fordism. Indeed, Taylorist practices have spread to the tertiary sector of the economy. Likewise, new management styles based upon employee participation, decentralisation and the individualisation of the employment relationship have not weakened management within the workplace. Rather, they have enabled more overtly authoritarian forms of control to be dispensed with by reconciling the need for greater worker autonomy with control. Indeed, the bureaucracy of rigid hierarchies and the task prescription of time and motion studies have been replaced by quality assurance mechanisms that detail the procedures to be followed in task completion and enable a close verification of the performance of individual employees. In general, the changes that have occurred have not changed one of the fundamental supports of the Fordist compromise, and indeed a constant feature of French capitalism – that of strict employer control of work organisation and, by extension, of the worker. Employers were the first to react to changes in the economic environment and set the agenda for the reorganisation of

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employment relationships in the 1970s. At this time, trade unions were still pursuing change at the national political level and largely neglecting the question of work organisation, while the state largely acquiesced to the employers’ agenda in order to encourage the modernisation of French industry in the face of international competition. Employers have certainly managed to assert their power in the workplace through shifting some of the risk involved in entrepreneurial activity onto employees, and in this sense the Fordist compromise has broken down. Intensified labour processes are no longer compensated for by job security and continually improving wages. The demands of international competition and shareholder value can certainly be seen as a factor in these attempts to introduce greater flexibility and reduce costs while retaining control in the workplace. Employer control of the work process is not, and never has been, total, however. Employees may be able to exercise some autonomy and may be recognised as more ‘multi-skilled’ than in the past, but even under assembly-line production, workers could slow down production processes in order to catch their breath. They also were engaged, albeit unofficially, in minor maintenance tasks, or in alterations that increased the comfort of their job and/or were necessary to prevent the breakdown of machinery and production. Again, the real change is that such activities have been brought out into the open and employees are now recognised as responsible for them. Likewise, the individualisation of employment relations is nothing new. Management discretion in the allocation of bonuses and promotions is nothing if not a means of control through an element of individualisation in the allocation of rewards. Lastly, there is nothing new in the intensification of work, which has always been a feature of the capitalist enterprise in its search for greater profitability, from the introduction of the factory system in the eighteenth century to the speed-ups of production lines under Taylorism. Indeed, resistance to externally imposed and increasing work rhythms was common under Fordist relations of production. Changes over the last 25 years, then, can be seen in terms of continuity as well as change, as French workplaces have adapted new forms of work organisation to old concerns for profitability and control rather than changing radically.

6

Collective bargaining

The general framework Collective bargaining in France can take place at three different, often interconnected levels. First, the national, or multi-industry, level brings together employer and trade union organisations that are considered to be nationally representative, to bargain on behalf of the majority of private sector industries. The results of such negotiations, dealing as they do with themes such as pensions and training, are usually extended to cover all employees apart from those in the public administrations (local and central government, hospitals), which have their own bargaining arrangements with their respective ministries. Branch- or industry-level bargaining was, for most of the postwar period, the main level at which bargaining took place in France, and set the ‘laws of the trade’ that were applicable to companies within the branch. The issues dealt with at this level usually concerned job classifications and wages, working time, training, employment issues and pensions. Companylevel bargaining was marginal in France until the 1980s, when the 1982 Auroux Laws made it obligatory over wages and hours in all companies employing more than 200 people (see below). Jacquier1 sets out the relationships that can exist between these different bargaining levels. 1

2

3

A national intersectoral agreement can be applied directly to the company without any intervening negotiations. Such is the case, for example, with agreements that regularly update the level of employer and employee contributions to the UNEDIC unemployment benefit fund. A national multi-industry agreement can set a framework for further negotiation at the industrial branch level. After negotiation at this level, the agreement may be applicable to all companies in the sector concerned. In some cases, further negotiation may be necessary at company level to tailor the branch-level agreement to the particular needs of the company. Training, for example, often follows this scenario. An autonomous branch-level agreement may be applicable to all

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Collective bargaining companies in the sector, with or without further negotiation at company level. This has been the most frequent configuration for most of the post-war period. Company-level agreements can be concluded without a branch-level agreement to act as a framework for negotiation.

As well as this articulation between the various bargaining levels, in some areas, particularly that of social regulation, a close relationship has developed between the law and collective bargaining. Indeed, the state has often provided the impetus for collective bargaining in areas such as social security etc, threatening, at times, to legislate in the event of a failure on the part of unions and employers to reach an agreement. On the other hand, agreements between employers and trade unions are sometimes transposed into law (e.g. the 1955 Renault agreement on a third week of paid holidays), while laws can also be passed that rely upon delegation to collective bargaining between the social partners for their application (e.g. the 35hour week). Thus, a hierarchy in the creation of norms in the field of employment regulation was created.2 At the most general level was the law, and at the most concrete the employment contract, with the various bargaining levels between them. In effect, a lower-level agreement could only improve upon, and not downgrade, the provisions of a higher-level agreement or the law.

Collective bargaining before the 1980s Despite what would appear to be a coherent, logical and comprehensive bargaining framework, France has, in the past, been described as a country without a bargaining culture, and as one that ‘does not like to negotiate’.3 Sellier explains this by the conditions under which French trade unions were established in the late nineteenth century: being too weak to confront employers in the industrial sphere, they looked outside, to the political sphere and state action, as a substitute for collective bargaining.4 Trade union radicalism found its counterpoint in an employer authoritarianism that jealously guarded its control of the workplace and refused dialogue with unions. As a result, early collective bargaining legislation was short-lived and ineffective. The first Collective Bargaining Act was passed in 1919 in an attempt to unify practices across industrial sectors in order to facilitate the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Although it was followed by sectoral agreements on an eight-hour day, the act came up against the hostility of a revolutionary CGT, the general weakness of trade unions and employer resistance. This was followed by a law passed by the Popular Front government in 1936, which, although short-lived before being overturned by the Vichy government, set the tone for future legislation. Indeed, the 1950 Collective Bargaining Act replaced the 1946 Act – which proved ineffectual as wages were centrally determined by the state and excluded

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from collective bargaining due to the post-war reconstruction effort – and took up many of the provisions of the 1936 Act. The 1950 Act provided the main legal framework for collective bargaining until the Auroux Laws of 1982. Essentially the Act confirmed the industry level as the main level for collective bargaining,5 although there was some scope for local and regional branch agreements to be signed without national framework agreements. Little scope, however, was given to multiindustry bargaining, while both employers and unions remained keen to avoid plant-level bargaining. Thus, the function of collective bargaining was seen as being one of regulating the ‘rules of the trade’ on a sectoral basis. For this, some important principles were established. First, some unions were given nationally representative status and therefore empowered to sign agreements regulating the ‘laws of the trade’ on behalf of whole social groups. This representativeness was a function of certain characteristics of the organisations rather than being dependent on any mandate given by the groups they are presumed to represent, or on their membership numbers.6 Only unions not attached to one of the major confederations have to prove their representativeness in the field of application of an agreement.7 Second, as the unions were intrinsically representative of the whole workforce, an agreement was valid if it was signed by one representative union, however large or small its membership. Third, as a consequence, all employees, whether unionised or not, benefited from a collective agreement if they were in the company, region or sector covered. Fourth, the Act took up the idea of an extension procedure from the 1936 Act. This allowed the state to make an agreement binding on all companies in a given sector, region, or even in the whole country after consultation with the Conseil supérieur des conventions collectives (now the Conseil national de la négociation collective – CNNC). As union representativeness did not depend upon membership, this, again, was not problematic, but logical. Fifth, the notion of a hierarchy of norms was retained. Collective agreements could therefore only be signed by organisations deemed to be representative of workers, and could only improve upon any legal dispositions in force. In this, French republican traditions of liberty and equality were respected. All employees benefited from minimum legal guarantees, and any freely negotiated improvements upon these could be extended to all employees of a branch irrespective of their employer, the precise circumstances of their company, or whether they chose to be members of the signatory union(s) or not. Hence, the collective bargaining system operated only in a very relative autonomy from the state.8 In effect, the notion of a hierarchy of norms in which the law is supreme institutionalised the role of the state as an arbitrator between the social partners. Thus, despite trade union pluralism, the ‘laws of the trade’ could be elaborated by the bargaining activities of trade unions and employers, activities that were institutionalised and delimited by the state. From 1950 onwards, then, collective bargaining largely took place at the

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national industry level to establish framework agreements that were then adapted to regions, departments and the needs of particular companies by amendment and additional clauses. In the 1950s, 420 industry-level agreements were signed per year, with 143 at plant level, rising respectively to 990 and 356 in the 1960–7 period.9 A few multi-industry agreements were also signed on unemployment (in 1958) and retirement benefits (in 1957 and 1961), while some important developments took place at company level under the encouragement of the state. Thus, for example, productivity deals were introduced in state enterprises in the 1950s, while in 1955 Renault workers gained an extra week’s holiday, a 4 per cent pay rise and a company top-up pension in a landmark deal. Although this attempt to stimulate dialogue and negotiation at company level was followed in subsequent years by some large companies in the automobile, aviation, engineering, chemicals and food processing industries, such developments were thwarted by trade union and employer attitudes and strategies. In consequence, collective bargaining remained a marginal activity in the French industrial relations system and mainly concerned wages. In this field, industry agreements set minima rather than real wages, and often merely caught up with reality, serving as the basis for regional and local top-ups. Such a situation was well suited to the conditions of the time. Wages were ultimately implemented at company level, often unilaterally by employers, with higher-level agreements serving as a base. Employers could be influenced by pressure from their workforces, particularly by strikes and the threat of strikes, but profitable companies could afford to buy industrial peace in return for relatively high wage rises, forcing others to follow. Although this institutionalised wage drift and meant that real wages bore little resemblance to agreements, particularly in profitable companies, these problems could be accommodated in a time of high growth and increasing productivity. Furthermore, this underdevelopment of collective bargaining suited both trade union and employer strategies under Fordist relations of production. For employers, the branch agreement only set minimal rules for the profession and therefore allowed for great autonomy at the company level.10 Although wage levels at the company level were often the result of a trial of strength, it meant that trade unions did not have a recognised and institutionalised bargaining role in the company, leaving managerial authority intact at the local level. Furthermore, a concentration on wages left the terms of the Fordist compromise intact. Being confined to the distribution of the fruits of production outside of the workplace, collective bargaining did not impede upon management control of the company and the production process within it. As only one union had to sign an agreement, the system also meant that employers could deal with reformist unions, leaving the CGT to denounce or accept the deal. It also reduced competition between firms over wages at the national level, something that could have been more damaging for profitability than the risk of local wage drift,

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especially for those firms unable to pay high wage rates in a time of full employment. In effect, weak union presence in the smaller firms operating on the margins of profitability meant that such risk could be contained, while in larger firms with a greater union presence, higher levels of profitability meant that it could be accommodated. Finally, being removed from the shopfloor, industry-level bargaining did not act as a stimulant to trade union organisation within the company. For the trade unions, and especially the CGT, which dominated the labour movement at the time, spontaneous strikes and guerrilla campaigns were more effective than long drawn-out negotiations in putting pressure on employers opposed to bargaining at the local level. Branch-level bargaining also avoided the fear of the manipulation of inexperienced local activists, and avoided the necessity of policing local agreements. Thus, integration into, and the joint regulation of, the capitalist enterprise was avoided, and the oppositional role of the union could remain intact. So too could the possibility of spontaneous action and continual harassment of employers in the workplace if agreements were reached through a trial of strength rather than through an institutionalised bargaining round. In effect, the CGT saw such harassment as testing the balance of power between labour and capital. Within this outlook, rather than representing contractual engagements and obligations, agreements were seen as imposed in the context of an ongoing class struggle, reflecting the balance of power at a particular time. As truces in an ongoing war, they were therefore easy to reject when a change in the balance of power made further unrest appear beneficial to the working classes. Furthermore, a concentration on national industry bargaining was not only practical given the relative homogeneity in working conditions imposed by Fordist production. It also served to ensure a certain uniformity of treatment for wage earners and emphasised the idea that all workers belonged to the same class, with the same interests, and avoided the threat of a fragmentation of demands along company lines. In this context, the CGT could maintain a confrontational strategy, based upon class struggle, in the knowledge that the confederation could denounce agreements signed by reformist unions as class collaboration while its members gained the benefits of those deals. In this sense, the 1950 Act was an attempt to overcome the organisational weakness and fragmentation of French trade unions, enabling agreements to be brokered through isolating the CGT. However, it has also reinforced smaller unions by giving them an institutional status and a power over and above that which their membership size would permit them to exercise. As van Ruysseveldt and Visser have observed, ‘it implies that a union’s stake in negotiations does not depend upon the size of its membership. Unions are not encouraged to recruit more members to bring greater pressure to bear during negotiations.’11 Negotiations were often, on the other hand, used by trade unions to distinguish their positions from those of their rivals. For some, particularly the CGT and CFDT, this resulted in a

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refusal to make concessions that could be exploited as weakness, while others, normally the reformist CFTC or FO signed agreements. Under such conditions, agreements were often signed by minority trade unions and therefore lacked legitimacy. Such attitudes meant that although the 1950 legislation proved more resilient and more successful in institutionalising collective bargaining in France, the practice still remained underdeveloped, with conflict and/or legislation rather than regular, institutionalised bargaining procedures providing the main mechanism for conflict resolution. This was especially true at company level, where no structures, formalised or otherwise, existed for collective bargaining, other than in a few large companies, due to the weakness of trade unions and their exclusion from the workplace. Trade union weakness at the local level also meant that the implementation of national agreements was patchy and often carried out unilaterally by employers. Indeed, rather than dampening conflict, collective bargaining was often associated with it as unions tried to force concessions from employers. Thus, ‘For a long time, collective bargaining in general, and the branch-level agreement in particular, remained episodic and conflictual practices, dependent upon the involvement of the state and the balance of power.’12 This was still the case in the 1970s, despite a 1971 amendment to the 1950 Act that gave greater scope to multi-industry level bargaining and formally established company-level agreements. In reality, this amendment merely ratified existing practice, particularly in the case of multi-industry bargaining, which had developed from the end of the 1950s, especially on the theme of social guarantees.13 Nevertheless, this was given an extra momentum, and in the years following the strike wave of May 1968, multiindustry-level agreements were signed over issues such as job security (1969), vocational training (1970), salaried status for manual workers (1970), maternity rights (1971) and collective dismissal procedures (1974). These were framing agreements, with detailed implementation the subject of industry agreements, which rose to 1560 per year in the 1970s. There was also a rise in company bargaining due to the emergence of qualitative demands in 1968 and in the unskilled workers’ strikes of the early 1970s – demands that required a change in work organisation. In addition, a tight labour market and high turnover meant that employers were willing to concede company-specific financial and social benefits.14 Such negotiation was aided by the December 1968 law that allowed trade unions to set up workplace branches in response to trade union demands and the Grenelle Accords following the strike wave of May 1968. Company-level agreements rose to 600 per year between 1968–75,15 but were mainly confined to large companies and generally adapted higher-level agreements to local conditions. From the mid-1970s, however, the number of agreements again fell. The high levels of inflation brought about by the economic and oil crises meant that employers were less willing to concede large wage rises for industrial

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peace as their profit margins were eroded, while rising unemployment weakened the ability of the unions to impose their views or extract concessions. Multi-industry agreements, such as the 1975 agreement on working conditions, were less often followed up by agreements at lower levels, rendering them difficult to implement.

A new bargaining environment Thus, as the conditions for Fordist capital accumulation came under strain from the 1960s, and deteriorated sharply from the mid-1970s onwards, tensions were felt in the collective bargaining system that had developed within the Fordist framework. Social and economic change undermined a system based upon industry-level bargaining, primarily over wages, and in the wake of its failure, upon central state intervention. First, in an increasingly globalised and fianancialised economy, increased competition resulted in contrasting fortunes for different companies and sectors, with the result that the rigidity of centralised and codified wage relationships became problematic.16 Economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s created a need for companies to align agreements to real wages, and a pressure for more decentralised bargaining. While inflation weakened the relevance of national pay agreements, these involved long drawn-out negotiations. Companies, on the other hand, needed to react more quickly to change, particularly in a context of falling profit margins and more intense global competition. The articulation between industry and company level was placed under further strain in a context of high unemployment, as agreements that sacrificed immediate advantages, such as wage rises, for guarantees on future employment (which depended upon company performance) were concluded. In effect, these challenged the notion that lower-level agreements should always improve upon higher-level ones.17 Second, as companies reorganised production and work in the wake of this change, job classifications, training and qualifications, as well as job security and redundancy packages became increasingly important themes for bargaining. Indeed, at the end of the 1980s, a number of landmark agreements on manpower planning in several large industrial companies placed the question of the employment relationship, as opposed to the more limited wage relationship, at the heart of the bargaining agenda.18 Fordist relations of production, relying upon a mass of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, were compatible with the establishment of job classifications and concomitant wage levels at the industry level. In effect, the mode of industrialisation tended to homogenise working practices and conditions within the national market. The move to more flexible working practices, and the emphasis on notions of ‘competence’ rendered the hierarchy between industry- and company-level agreements in these domains problematic, and weakened employer hostility to company-level collective bargaining. Furthermore, new social demands emanating from the workforce

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contributed to the tensions undermining the concentration on national industry wage bargaining. The emergence of qualitative demands required local regulation rather than the national agreements that could deal with the quantitative demands of a relatively homogeneous workforce. Focused on work processes, the militancy of workers at company level in the early 1970s was difficult for national trade union confederations to control, and also displaced dialogue to the company level.

The institutionalisation of decentralised collective bargaining in the 1980s? The Auroux Laws did not begin primarily as an attempt to reform French industrial relations in response to global economic pressures, but as an attempt to democratise industry by reinforcing the position of employees and their collective organisations within the workplace. Decentralised collective bargaining was seen as a means of reinforcing employee influence over working conditions and the organisation of the company through an articulation with the other channels of employee representation present (see Chapter 7). As far as collective bargaining was concerned, the aim was to strengthen trade unions, and hence dialogue, and therefore facilitate the resolution of conflict through bargaining, thereby allowing the state to disengage itself from the industrial relations arena. As Morin observes, ‘there was a will to privilege negotiation over the law at all levels in order to adapt working conditions’.19 In effect, the Auroux Report noted that the industry level remained the predominant level at which bargaining took place, with 77 per cent of employees covered by an industry-wide agreement, but only 9 per cent of firms signing company-level agreements.20 Eleven per cent of employees in firms of ten or more employees were not covered by a collective agreement at any level, and only a quarter were covered by plant-level agreements. Furthermore, low trade union density and divisions among unions undermined the legitimacy of agreements. To reinforce the rather patchy bargaining system in France, the 1982 Collective Bargaining Act obliged firms with a trade union branch present to negotiate annually over hours and pay at company level. This was seen as encouraging employers to become more aware of their social responsibilities, and trade unions more aware of the economic constraints within which the firm operated. To increase the legitimacy of agreements at plant level, any union obtaining over half the votes cast in workplace elections could now veto them. At national-industry level, unions and employers are also now obliged to meet annually to discuss pay and every five years to discuss job classifications. This represented an attempt to promote responsible negotiations that would bring agreements on basic pay and conditions closer to practice through a process of regular updating. To reinforce the role of trade unions in the bargaining process, they were given greater rights to company information, and the right to bring in expert help to decipher that information in the form of accountants etc.

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Further legislation has reinforced the institutional framework of, and incentives for, employers to engage in, company-level bargaining particularly in the area of working time. A decree of 16 January 1982 first introduced the possibility of dispensation from the law on the question of working time through company-level agreements. The 1993 Five Year Employment Law made this possible in companies without a trade union presence but covered by a branch-level agreement, after consultation with workplace representatives, who had the right of veto over such proposals. Following this, the multi-industry agreement of 30 October 1995 gave rise to the law of 12 November 1996, and aimed to render it easier to sign agreements that derogated from branch-level agreements in companies without a trade union presence. For this, employees could be ‘mandated’ by an external trade union organisation to negotiate, or this function could be performed by an employee elected by the whole workforce. These dispositions required a branch-level agreement, defining the themes for negotiation, in order to be implemented, and any deals concluded would need to be ratified by a Commission mixte paritaire, on which equal numbers of employers and trade union representatives sit, at the branch level. Few branch-level agreements were signed within this framework, however. In an attempt to encourage negotiation on the issue of the reduction of working time, the state has promoted some potentially far-reaching reforms of the collective bargaining framework over the last few years. The Robien Law of 1996, and the 1998 and 2000 Aubry Laws on the reduction of working time have reinforced incentives for company-level bargaining by tying state financial aid to the conclusion of agreements. Furthermore, as few branch-level agreements were signed to facilitate bargaining in companies without trade union representation following the multi-industry agreement of 30 October 1995, the Aubry Laws took up the idea of a system of employee representatives ‘mandated’ to conclude agreements in the absence of trade union representatives. In this case, however, no branch-level agreement is necessary in order for such ‘mandating’ to take place. In addition, the second Aubry Law of 19 January 2000 introduced the idea of ‘majority consent’ into the negotiating process. If trade unions could sign agreements that defined the concrete conditions of work, rather than the minimal ‘laws of the trade’, and if these agreements could downgrade higher-level agreements or the law, and were binding upon all employees in the workplace, such agreements needed greater legitimacy than that afforded by the signature of a trade union deemed to be representative of all employees in that workplace, no matter how many, or few, members it had, by dint of belonging to a ‘representative’ national confederation. For this reason, the second Aubry Law on the 35-hour week made the granting of financial aid for the reduction of working time, in the form of reduced employer social contributions, conditional upon the agreement being signed by trade unions gaining a majority of the votes in the last works committee elections or, in their absence, by employee delegates amassing a majority of

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votes. Failing this, an agreement signed by unions representing a minority of the workforce, or by elected or mandated representatives, could be ratified by a referendum of the whole workforce. There is little doubt that company-level bargaining has been given a great boost by the various legislative acts of the past twenty years, with 6000 agreements being signed per year by the end of the 1980s, compared with 1600 at the start of the decade.21 The number of company-level agreements continued to rise steadily throughout the 1990s to reach 13,328 in 1998, and more than doubled in the following year to reach 30,965.22 Much of this recent increase can be accounted for by the introduction of the Aubry Laws on the reduction of working time. Indeed, working time was the subject of 80 per cent of company-level collective agreements, compared with 36 per cent for wages and 64 per cent for employment.23 Indeed, with the question of the reduction of working time high on the agenda of the social partners and the state since the mid-1990s, the increase in the number of company-level agreements has been accompanied by a shift in the subjects of collective bargaining. There has thus been a significant rise in themes linked to employment, as well as smaller rises in the proportion of agreements tackling the issues of training and the rights of trade unions and representative institutions.24 Finally, the nature of collective bargaining has changed in the sense that it has become far more complex due to the need to approach several issues at once – the effects of wage rises and changes in working time on future levels of employment and productivity; greater flexibility in hours and work organisation, and the training requirements thus generated, to accompany the reduction of working time; or training requirements and the introduction of new technology, for example.25 While this shift creates space for compromise bargaining, it also requires greater expertise, particularly on the part of employee representatives, in order that the economic constraints upon the company and the aspirations of the employees, which may themselves be contradictory, can be reconciled. In this respect, bargaining shifts from a concentration on regulating the wage relationship to regulating the whole of the employment relationship. The development of company-level bargaining therefore has serious consequences for the French industrial relations system as a whole. First, the traditional hierarchy of laws and agreements regulating the employment relationship is thrown into question, with legislation enabling local agreements to downgrade higher ones and the provisions of the law. In the case of the negotiation of the reduction in working time, the link between the branch and the company level has been decisively broken, giving autonomy to the negotiations carried out at company level. Furthermore, the issue of working time is a complex one, often needing, as we have seen above, agreement on a range of other questions in order to be introduced. This autonomy of local bargaining from higher agreements and the law has led to what Jean-Emmanuel Ray has termed a ‘dispensatory public order’.26 Although

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legally limited to the area of working time, in practice ‘the field open to this type of derogation has continually widened’, with the effect that it ‘radically alters the function of collective bargaining. From a tool to improve upon the law, it becomes an instrument for the decentralised change and adaptation of the rules governing work, particularly in the firm.’27 Second, in the case of negotiations on the reduction of working time, the notion of ‘majority consent’ at the level of the company replaced the external control of the branch, where trade unions are stronger. This stipulation has two important, far-reaching effects. First, it reinforces the autonomy of the company level as an arena for collective bargaining, and legitimises agreements signed at this level. Second, the notion that trade unions can sign agreements in any domain that are valid and binding upon a workforce because they are deemed to be ‘representative’ regardless of their workplace strength is seriously undermined. Again, for Mériaux, this ‘principle of majority consent [is] no doubt destined to extend beyond the precise case of agreements on the reduction of working time’.28 Thus, the whole question of trade union ‘representativeness’, the rules governing the attribution of ‘representative status’ and the bargaining rights it gives rise to, are called into question. This growth in company-level collective bargaining has been accompanied by a concomitant fall in the number of branch-level agreements. Thus, the number of agreements concluded has fallen from around 3000 in the mid-1980s to around 900 in the mid-1990s, and 733 in 1999. However, these figures translate a decline in activity at the sub-national (regional, departmental and local) levels and a relative stability at the national level.29 Within branches, sub-national agreements tend to rely heavily on national ones, suggesting a centralisation of negotiation at the branch level. Most agreements, about 500 per year, concern wages, but codicils also deal with training, pensions, classifications, employment etc.30 Despite this apparent decline, there has been an extension of coverage at the branch level since the beginning of the 1980s, as agreements have been signed in new sectors. Since 1982, when three million employees were not covered by a branch-level agreement, there has been considerable growth in the number of employees covered. At the end of 1997, 93.4 per cent of employees in companies of more than ten employees were covered by a branch-level agreement, compared with 86.4 per cent in 1985.31 Although this progression meant that only 3.6 per cent of French wage earners did not benefit from the protection of any kind of collective agreement, questions remain as to the importance and strength of such agreements. The paradox between a high coverage rate and the weakness of collective bargaining in France has been noted for many years now.32 The development of national branch-level bargaining can, again paradoxically, be seen as a further source of weakness due to the fragmentation of collective agreements, and the disparities between them. Jobert remarks that in 1998 there were 709 sectoral agreements in force,

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ranging in their coverage from 1.8 million employees in metalworking to a few hundred in sectors such as rousseurs et tailleurs de lin.33 In pushing for the generalisation of cover at the branch level, the state attempted to group sectors together, urging those without a branch-level agreement to sign up to existing ones, to avoid this fragmentation. Employers, however, preferred a narrow conception of their profession, and only a handful of the 60 sectors concerned did so.34 An additional source of fragmentation is linked to employer strategies for flexibility. The division of companies into subsidiaries, subcontracting and the casualisation of labour have meant that cover is often reduced to core activities, rather than being applied to all employees on the basis of the main activity of their company. Thus, in the 1980s, agreements were signed covering temporary employment agencies as a specific sector of employment.35 Furthermore, the legitimacy of many agreements is open to question on many counts. First, they are often signed by trade unions only representing a minority of employees in the sector. Second, as far as wages are concerned, in the case of a failure to conclude an agreement, an ‘employer recommendation’ is sufficient to establish the norms for companies in the sector. Third, the articulation between branch- and company-level bargaining has broken down as the latter has been given a large degree of autonomy in being able to derogate from higher-level agreements. Thus, as Jacquier has pointed out, many companies do not wait for branch-level agreements to provide a framework for their own negotiations, but sign agreements ahead of negotiations in their branch, undermining the capacity of the latter to set the ‘laws of the trade’.36 For Jobert, ‘The branch, as an organised and regulated structure, provides a resource for collective action in the company rather than a set of prescriptive rules.’37

The limits of ‘joint regulation’ at company level Some commentators see the growth of company-level bargaining, and its growing autonomy from higher levels of negotiation, as a move towards a system of joint regulation of the employment relationship between employers and trade unions – or other representatives of employees – at the company level.38 In this outlook, those areas of the employment relationship previously the subject of unilateral employer control have become the subject of joint regulation due to the extension of collective bargaining in these areas. Evidence for such an evolution can be found in a change in attitude and strategy on the part of the social partners, particularly the employers. As we have seen, French employers have traditionally been opposed to the presence of trade unions in the workplace, and such a concession was only won following the upheaval of the May 1968 strike wave. In 1982, the CNPF vehemently opposed the Auroux Laws, claiming that company-level wage bargaining would result in ‘each year, a profound and long disruption in the

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firm’.39 This attitude soon changed, however, primarily because there is an obligation to bargain but not to reach an agreement, after which an employer can act unilaterally. This always carries the risk of worker responses in the form of striking, of course, but economic conditions, particularly high unemployment, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, have considerably reduced this risk (see Chapter 3). Along with the realisation that the reforms had not instituted a form of workers’ control, came the further realisation that flexibility could be negotiated at the company level, and that, by concluding agreements, trade unions could be implicated in difficult decisions which often had consequences for employment, thereby legitimising them. Trade unions, too, seem to have reconciled themselves to the new relationship with employers implied by the institutionalisation of companylevel collective bargaining. The CFDT has always favoured a decentralised system of industrial relations, seeing this as a means of promoting workers’ self-management (autogestion) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and were a leading influence over the content of the Auroux Laws. Their strategy since the 1980s has been to attempt to shape economic and industrial modernisation through compromise bargaining (donnant-donnant) in order to ensure that the costs of that modernisation were not borne by wage earners alone. The CGT and FO, however, were more circumspect in their support for the Auroux Laws, fearing the break up of national solidarity, the incorporation of activists and workforces, and the shifting of bargaining activity to a locus where trade unions are weak. For the CGT, therefore, the laws did not go far enough in strengthening the position of unions in the workplace, while FO remained attached to national sectoral bargaining as a means of ensuring the widest possible coverage and uniformity of conditions for employees. Nevertheless, all the major confederations show a high propensity to sign agreements where they are present, with the CFDT and FO signing in around 90 per cent of cases and the CGT in around 75 per cent since the early 1990s, with the latter’s score rising to 85 per cent in 1999.40 As Jobert remarks, this is in contradiction to the received wisdom of a systematic opposition on the part of the CGT to concluding deals with employers – ‘a myth fed in part by [the CGT] in order to reinforce its image of an oppositional trade union’.41 Indeed, the high propensity of the CGT to sign local agreements is in marked contrast to their activity at the branch level where they sign around one-third of agreements (as opposed to 70 per cent for FO and the CFDT, with a dip to 65 per cent in 1999 for the former).42 The above would appear to suggest that collective bargaining has now become routine in French companies. In effect, the fact that negotiations take place on an annual, or more frequent, basis in many companies suggests that the local actors have accepted and agreed upon the ‘rules of the game’. In other words, both the bargaining process and the actors involved in it would appear to be considered legitimate by all involved. Discussion therefore takes place on a different basis to that of the post-war period when

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collective agreements were seen as the result of a temporary balance of power and the bargaining process was integrated into a class struggle strategy. In this sense, then, institutionalised negotiation has replaced conflictual negotiation. A closer examination of the present system of collective bargaining, however, reveals that although certain steps have undoubtedly been made in the direction of a decentralised system of labour regulation based upon institutionalised compromise bargaining and the search for cooperation, the process is far from complete. First, even though it may have been weakened by developments over the past two decades, the industry level remains an essential pivot in the French system of collective bargaining, setting the basic framework for local-level deals in many areas. In addition, legislation has attempted to reinforce the branch as the level at which certain issues are negotiated. The law of 31 December 1991 renders negotiations over training obligatory at this level, adding to the obligation to negotiate over classifications every five years contained in the Auroux Laws. In these areas, the branch level is central to the determination of general orientations and priorities, reinforcing its role in the organisation of the sector, something that has also occurred through the development of framework agreements that define procedural norms to be followed in lower-level negotiations.43 Multi-industry bargaining has also developed. The end of the 1980s saw agreements on technological change (1988), the flexible organisation of working time (1989), sexual equality (1989), working conditions (1989) and the hiring of employees on fixed-term and temporary contracts (1990). More recently, employer demands to negotiate a ‘new social constitution’ underline the continuing importance of this level of negotiation for the regulation of relations between capital and labour in France. As we have seen, reforms of the unemployment benefit funds and pensions as part of the refondation sociale have not been possible without national multi-industry bargaining, not to mention the agreement of the state. Thus, this level continues to play an institutional role in the treatment of general social questions. Indeed, Morin argues that we may be witnessing the establishment of a system based on specialised negotiation at different levels. Thus, general social questions are the preserve of the multi-industry level, classifications and training that of the branch level and working time and organisation that of the company level.44 Next, the state still plays an important role in the bargaining process through the articulation between the latter and social legislation. In effect, the state encourages negotiation on certain themes at all levels, and transposes the results of bargaining into law in some areas through the extension procedure. In the case of the reduction of working time, agreements signed at the branch level required validation by the Ministry of Labour to be extended, while at company level they were subject to the scrutiny of the Direction Départementale du Travail to verify their conformity to the law

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before the company concerned could benefit from state aid. As in the case of the agreement in the metalworking sector, the state has not been afraid to use its powers to shape the content as well as the procedures of collective bargaining in France (see Chapter 2). Thus, while the legislative framework may have been loosened through the notions of ‘dispensatory’ and ‘majority’ agreements being given local legitimacy through workplace referenda and the like, an element of external control over company-level collective bargaining remains. Current discussions over the reform of collective bargaining, based on the 2001 ‘common position’ and involving the state, unions and employers’ organisations, again highlight the role of the state in setting the bargaining framework.45 Furthermore, this bargaining activity takes place under legal compulsion, and may not therefore be a sign of the emergence of a bargaining culture that depends upon the will to enter into mutual compromise arrangements. Thus, annual wage bargaining is obligatory under the 1982 law on collective bargaining, while the recent upsurge in company-level collective agreements was a direct result of the legal requirement for companies to reduce their working time. Indeed, boosted by the need for companies to sign agreements to benefit from state aid to help reduce working time, the signing of agreements by mandated employees took off spectacularly after 1998. In 1999, they accounted for 41.3 per cent of local-level agreements, and 80 per cent of these were signed in companies of less than 50 employees.46 Despite its spectacular growth, however, company-level collective bargaining remains largely a phenomenon limited to larger companies. In 1998, half of the agreements signed were done so in companies employing more than 200 people, while 64 per cent of employees covered by a company agreement worked in companies employing more than 1000 people. In total, only 24 per cent of employees were covered by a company-level agreement.47 The cleavage can also be seen in terms of the industrial sector, with services less well covered than industry, a factor again linked to company size. This division between bargaining in small and large undertakings is undoubtedly linked to trade union presence, and confirms a long-term characteristic of French industrial relations. In large companies where trade union delegates are present, employees tend to be better protected than in small companies where they are absent and employees experience greater difficulties in exercising their rights. Nevertheless, there was undoubtedly an institutionalisation of collective bargaining in France over the last two decades of the twentieth century, with the main characteristic being the upsurge in company-level agreements. This has gone hand in hand with a reduction in strike rates (see Chapter 8), and has resulted in a situation of permanent negotiation, particularly over wages. In many cases, this has allowed for a more supple and continuous consultation between employers and trade unions than under the system of updating national agreements, and has broken the link

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between conflict and negotiation. However, this has taken place under the pressure of legal and economic constraints, and in the context of growing trade union weakness. In reality, permanent negotiation leading to true compromise requires strong trade unions to negotiate on behalf of, and to control, the rank-and-file. That this is not the case in France can be seen, first, by the development of coordination movements from the mid-1980s onwards, and the subsequent emergence of ‘autonomous’ unions, particularly in the public sector, as employees felt their unions were unable, or unwilling, to negotiate on their behalf and accused them of granting concessions too easily (see Chapter 8). Thus, many have argued that in a context of high unemployment and trade union weakness, where collective bargaining takes place, it does so largely on employers’ terms. Coutrot claims that wage negotiations are often a sham, with two out of three employers recognising that they do not influence their decision as to increases at all.48 Case studies on negotiations over the application of the Robien and Aubry Laws on the reduction of working time have shown that the subject of the negotiations is usually defined by the employer. Market constraints and the appropriate responses to them form the background to negotiations. Thus, economic and financial arguments predominate, placing the negotiation process in the field of competence of the employer and legitimising the development of flexible working practices. The influence of employee representatives in the process depends upon their resources of expertise and information, and hence upon their links with union organisations or other agencies outside of the workplace. In companies with non-unionised representatives, even those working under a trade union ‘mandate’, the asymmetry is evident, but problems are also posed for unionised representatives cut off from their federations and confederations.49 Second, in a context of trade union weakness, the shift to an autonomous level of company-level bargaining for the complicated task of the regulation of the employment relationship carries with it the risk of ‘employer selfregulation’.50 For Souriac-Rotschild, the right of opposition of non-signatory unions to company-level agreements, is dependent upon conditions that are so difficult to meet (gaining 50 per cent of the votes of those eligible to vote in workplace elections) that ‘one could wonder whether the right of opposition has been created in order not to be used and therefore, in reality, to strengthen minority, dispensatory agreements’.51 Studies by Mériaux and Trompette in companies that have signed agreements on the reduction of working time point to the weakness of trade union representation, the lack of experience of trade union negotiators and the complexity of the issues at stake as limiting the influence of the trade unions over the content of the agreements, resulting in unilateral employer regulation under the guise of an agreement.52 The growing autonomy of local collective bargaining from the law and from branch-level agreements provided by the opportunity of concluding

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agreements that derogate from the norms established at these higher levels effectively increases such a risk. This is especially true where trade union representatives, with their organisational resources and knowledge of the law, are absent. Moreover, a lack of trade union representation in many cases has undoubtedly led to the practice of agreements being signed by works committees, although this is not recognised in law. Trade unions, except in particular circumstances, have a monopoly over collective bargaining, and such agreements are considered to be unilateral decisions of the employer.53 Such a problem may be overcome in future years, if, as the CFDT hopes, mandatement, combined with the experience of negotiating a reduction in working time, can be used to give trade unions a foothold in smaller companies and/or can be used to extend the scope of negotiations in these companies. Although the recent increase in trade union presence (see Chapter 7) may give grounds for optimism here, such practices may also carry their own dangers. For Jobert, the practice of mandating employees to negotiate on behalf of their colleagues calls into question the legitimacy of some agreements: can we speak of negotiation when mandated employees are chosen by management, as seems to have been the case in some companies? [. . .] The trade unions outside of the company who agree to these mandates rarely have the means to ensure the independence of the people mandated and to help them to follow through the implementation of often complex agreements.54 In effect, the decentralisation of collective bargaining in France has made possible and legitimised the deregulation of the labour market. Employers have managed to gain agreement for dispensations from national agreements as necessary for the profitability and survival of the company, and have managed to introduce greater flexibility into manpower management and production processes. Indeed, one of the aims of legislation in decentralising bargaining since the Auroux Laws has been to change the attitudes and behaviour of both trade unions and employers with respect to collective bargaining in order to facilitate such flexibility as a means of improving international economic competitiveness. The problem for trade unions is that this process may strengthen the role of unions in the workplace in an institutional sense, but it will only do so to the extent that they engage in compromise bargaining with employers, i.e. to the extent that they accept the legitimacy of employers’ economic and financial arguments and negotiate the technicalities and implementation of the response to them. In the absence of any agreement on this, the employer can fall back on his or her unilateral decision-making power. Thus, Coutrot and Boulin argue that the concessions received by employees in exchange for ‘dispensatory’ agreements are often couched in terms of imprecise aims rather than concrete rights, the achievement of which the employer cannot guarantee (for example a promise

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not to lay workers off in return for wage moderation and/or flexibility in working time).55 In effect, in accepting flexibility in the organisation of work, trade unions may be engaging in compromises that may certainly cater for the long-term interests of employees (the continued profitability or survival of the company, and therefore of employment within it), but these are often perceived as having a negative immediate effect on working conditions and/or wages. Thus, where the reduction in working time is accompanied by wage moderation and/or flexibility, ‘individual, immediate and obvious sacrifices [are made] in exchange for hypothetical and collective benefits’56 (lower unemployment). Hence, the risk for unions of ‘institutionalisation’ and alienation of their base, and the calling into question of their legitimacy by more radical competitors. Only when this ‘altruism’ is associated with more prosaic interests – the reduction of working time with no loss of salary as a means of stimulating employment, for example – can this risk be nullified.57

Conclusion The state tried to reinforce the position of unions in collective bargaining through legislation at the beginning of the 1980s. This institutionalisation of decentralised bargaining took root, however, as it served employer rather than union interests, responding as it did to the logic of economic pressures bearing down on the capitalist enterprise at the time. In effect, decentralised collective bargaining responds to the new economic imperatives of a deregulated labour market and a flexible workplace that can react quickly to change in product markets in the context of economic globalisation. Furthermore, the legislation was introduced at a time when unions were at their weakest due to the fear of unemployment. For these reasons, employers have been able to shape the legislation to their needs, with the result that trade unions have been further weakened and bargaining is not characterised by reciprocal compromise but by a trend to further flexibility without this giving rise to any real concessions on the part of employers or to an upsurge in industrial conflict. While legislation may have prompted this change, in the French context, economic conditions are perhaps more important in explaining why it has developed and taken root to the extent that it has. In effect, while company-level bargaining may be a relatively new phenomenon in France, the regulation of labour has, since the Second World War, rested upon a compromise that was implicit rather than explicit. In France, the particular form that the Fordist compromise took gave control over the productive process to employers and left the fruits of production to be bargained over by representatives of employers and employees. Such a division was conducive to national industry-level bargaining, especially as, within industrial branches, the dominant mode of production – Taylorism – ensured a relative uniformity of skills and conditions within different workplaces. The weakness of unions in France, however, meant that such bargain-

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ing was supplemented by considerable state intervention, either to pressure the social partners into negotiating, or to set norms through legislation. The internationalisation of economic activity, however, combined with the onset of economic crisis in the 1970s, conspired to unravel the system of collective bargaining that had grown up in France over the post-war period. With increased international competition, employers demanded greater flexibility in the management of their companies and therefore sought to escape from the rigidities imposed by industry-level bargaining and state legislation. Wages, in particular, came to be seen as a pure cost rather than a factor of demand and hence of future profits, and therefore needed to be controlled – something that was more easily done at the local rather than the national industry level. Since the promulgation of the Auroux Laws, collective bargaining has gained autonomy from higher-level agreements and the law, and the locus of regulation has shifted towards the enterprise. This has destabilised the whole notion of a hierarchy of norms based upon an articulation between the law and the various bargaining levels. The growth of decentralised bargaining is thus indicative of a change in the mode of labour regulation in response to a change in the regime of accumulation. As Jobert points out, the function of branch-level agreements is to limit competition within a particular market, whereas company-level agreements aim to secure a competitive advantage within a market, particularly as far as wages are concerned.58 The shift from the primacy of branch-level agreements to company-level collective bargaining marks a change in function for the collective bargaining system. Rather than promoting norms for an industry, the aim is now to improve the competitiveness, and ensure the survival, of the company in an increasingly hostile environment. Nevertheless, such change should not be exaggerated. Only a quarter of French employees were covered by a company-level collective agreement at the end of the 1990s. While negotiations on the 35-hour week have undoubtedly extended coverage, as was their intention, it is likely that the state and legislation will continue to play a major role in ensuring certain minimum standards for wages and working conditions in the absence of more widespread bargaining coverage, especially at the local level. Furthermore, as the 35-hour week shows, the state remains a major player in the French system of collective bargaining, pushing often reluctant actors into negotiation, and providing a legal framework for negotiation to take place in order to pursue socially desirable goals. In effect, the French system is still at a crossroads. While a decentralised form of regulation based upon collective bargaining is emerging, whether this forms the basis of a new mode of regulation still depends, paradoxically and to a great extent, on the action of the state. Recent developments suggest a reinforcement of the trends identified in this chapter. François Fillon, the new Minister of Employment of the right-wing government elected in 2002 stated, in early 2003, his intention to present a bill to parliament aimed at strengthening collective bargaining.59 Based upon the ‘common position’ signed by employers and

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unions on 16 July 2001, this may completely reverse the hierarchy of norms. The ‘common position’ proposes a principle of majority agreements at the local level, with minority agreements being valid only if not opposed by trade unions gaining a majority of votes in workplace elections, or if ratified by a workplace referendum. In the absence of unions, employees can be mandated by external unions or elected by the workforce to negotiate and conclude agreements. Branch-level agreements would only come into effect in the absence of such agreements. In attempting to reinforce the legitimacy of local agreements and giving them precedence over higher-level agreements, this would evidently cement the shift to a decentralised form of labour regulation in France. The unanswered question is whether this can provide the basis of a true social compromise à la Fordism, or whether it will merely lead to the domination of labour by capital, and therefore to everdeteriorating conditions for those with work and for those without.

7

Workplace representation

Introduction: employee representation structures In the past, and particularly before the Second World War, the workplace was considered the domain of the employer, with no sharing of authority possible. Although the legitimacy of capitalist relations of production were contested even into the post-war period, any claims of workers’ control were effectively abandoned under the tacit Fordist compromise, which left production issues firmly in the hands of employers and limited bargaining to the distribution of the fruits of production. Nevertheless, a complex system of employee representation in the workplace grew up as institutions were added to each other in a rather ad hoc fashion. Although the terminology may change between the public and private sectors, the main, although by no means only, structures for employee representation in the workplace are employee delegates, works committees and trade union branches. In companies and establishments of less than ten employees, there are no legal dispositions covering the representation of employees. Once the threshold of ten is passed, however, employees have the right to elect employee delegates (délégués du personnel ). These deal with individual and collective employee grievances on wages, working conditions, the implementation of labour law and collective agreements. In this sense, their function closely resembles that of trade unions, although they do not have the right to negotiate collective agreements.1 The employer must meet with them collectively once a month and they are allocated 15 hours per month to fulfil their duties. They were first legislated for in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War, but the legislation was implemented in few cases before falling into abeyance with the return of a conservative government. Re-instituted by the Popular Front government in 1936, they are supposed to be present in companies employing more than ten people, with their total number depending upon the size of the firm. They are elected annually by the whole workforce, divided into two colleges – one for manual workers and lower clerical staff and one for technicians and managers. The election takes place in two rounds, with only the main trade union confederations or any other organisation recognised as representative within the firm being allowed to

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put up candidates in the first round. There is a second ballot only if under half of those eligible to vote in the first round do so. If a second ballot does take place, any employee may stand as a candidate. The 1982 Auroux Laws reinforced their presence in companies with less than 11 employees by allowing for their election where several firms operate on a common site and where there are at least 50 employees in total, for example on building sites or in shopping centres. Despite this attempt to extend coverage to cover most of the private sector, in the mid-1990s they were present in only 38 per cent of companies, with less than one-third of those employing between 11 and 49 people covered. However, increasing presence with the size of company meant that 60 per cent of wage earners were covered.2 By far the largest proportion of délégués du personnel, 41 per cent, did not belong to any union, with the CGT (18 per cent) and the CFDT (16 per cent) the most represented trade unions.3 Works committees are consultative bodies that were legislated for in 1946, and are supposed to be established in all companies and establishments employing 50 or more people, financed by the company to the tune of 0.2 per cent of its wage bill. They can also be set up in companies of under 50 employees by collective agreement. Works committees must be informed and consulted on ‘the organisation, management and general functioning of the company’,4 and have extensive rights to information. They must receive quarterly information from the management on matters such as the general progress of orders, production, finance and manpower, including details of, and a justification for, short-term contracts and subcontracted work. The employer must also submit an annual written report to the works committee covering the firm’s activities, turnover, profits and losses, production, substantial capital transfers, subcontracting, grants from the state or other public bodies, investments and salaries. The works committee may employ an outside expert, at the company’s cost, to help it examine the annual report. Works committees also have rights to consultation on the general management of the workplace, manpower policy, hours of work and employment conditions. They must also be consulted before any decisions can be taken on any change in the legal or economic organisation of the company, such as sales of assets, takeovers or mergers. Since 1982, such consultation must also take place on the introduction of any new technology which may have an impact upon employment, qualifications, pay, training or working conditions. In firms of more than 300 employees, an outside expert may also be brought in to study the situation, again paid for by the company. In a few specific areas – profit-sharing schemes and individual working hours – the agreement of the works committee is necessary. Although introduced to treat issues on which the social partners could cooperate, works committees often have little real decision-making power except over social and cultural issues, and, particularly in smaller companies, their duties are often limited to areas such as running the workplace canteen.5 When requested by the employer, representatives must maintain

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confidentiality about the information they receive concerning production processes and finances. The representatives are elected according to the same procedure as for employee delegates, and the committee is made up of these elected representatives and the employer or his/her nominee who chairs the monthly meetings. Elected representatives receive an allocation of 20 hours per month to perform their duties. To enable them to carry out their functions properly, elected representatives can receive economic training. Each representative trade union can also appoint an observer to the works committee. Although initially resisted by employers as a form of workers’ control in the company, they are now accepted as legitimate bodies, and were present in 95 per cent of eligible companies in 1998 according to the REPONSE survey.6 The composition of the works committee is related to the size of the workplace: in companies of under 50 employees, non-trade union representatives gained 59 per cent of the votes in 1999, and 56 per cent in workplaces of between 50 and 100 employees. On the other hand, trade union scores increase with the size of workplace.7 Trade union workplace branches (sections syndicales d’entreprise) had no legal right to exist before 1968, but were given legal recognition as a result of the strike wave of May of that year. Now, they can appoint their own delegates (délégués syndicaux) in workplaces of 50 or more employees, while in smaller firms, employee delegates can also act as trade union delegates for their term of office. For nationally representative unions to establish a trade union branch in a company it is sufficient to send an official letter to the Ministry of Labour. Thus, in theory, a workplace trade union branch can be constituted by a single employee. Trade union local branches and delegates enjoy office facilities in larger companies, and can collect dues in working hours, use notice boards, distribute tracts and organise monthly meetings, which must nevertheless take place outside working time. Since 1982, their rights have been reinforced by an increase in their allocation of hours to perform their duties and by the right to circulate freely within the company. Although they are, like employee delegates, responsible for representing employees’ individual and collective grievances, their remit is somewhat more general, and until recently they were the only institution legally entitled to sign collective agreements at the company or plant level. Indeed, their rights in this domain were considerably reinforced by the obligation for annual negotiations over wages and hours contained in the 1982 Auroux Laws. In the 1990s, there was a rise in trade union coverage in workplaces of 50 or more employees, from 63 per cent to 72 per cent between 1993 and 1999. In terms of employees covered, this represents a rise from 78 per cent to 84 per cent over the period.8 This evolution is accounted for by the absorption of small- and medium-sized companies into larger groups where a trade union presence is more common, and by the encouragement given to trade union presence and negotiation by the first Aubry Law on the reduction of working time. However, once again, the presence of trade union

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representatives is related to the size of the workplace. The 1999 REPONSE survey found that, overall, only 37 per cent of workplaces of 20 or more employees had a trade union representative. This figure falls to only 22 per cent for companies employing between 20 and 50 employees, compared with 97 per cent in workplaces of over 1000 employees. In addition, where they are present in small units, these generally belong to larger companies.9 Furthermore, each trade union has only a weak presence in terms of workplaces covered. The CFDT is present in 18.3 per cent, followed closely by the CGT (18.1 per cent), then by FO (12.3 per cent). In terms of the number of wage earners covered, the better implantation of the CGT in larger workplaces means that it can reach 42.4 per cent of wage earners, compared with 41.4 per cent for the CFDT.10 In addition to these structures, since 1982, in companies and establishments employing 50 or more people, the works committee and employee delegates can establish a health and safety committee (comité d’hygiène, de sécurité et des conditions du travail, CHSCT). These are now present in 70 per cent of such workplaces, with a presence ranging from 60 per cent of workplaces employing between 50 and 100 people, to 96 per cent of those of over 1000.11 In multi-establishment companies, a central works committee (comité central d’entreprise) also exists to deal with problems affecting the whole company, while employees in companies that are part of a group also have representation via a group committee (comité de groupe). French companies are also subject to the European Union directive on European Works Councils (see below). Furthermore, the Auroux Laws instituted a new form of direct rather than representative representation at the workplace level through ‘self-expression groups’ (groupes d’expression directe). These will be fully discussed later in this chapter. Since 1993, in response to the difficulties of finding enough volunteers to fulfil all of the various representative functions in the workplace, and in response to employer complaints of the rigidities they impose on their organisations, it has been possible to elect ‘single representative bodies’ (délégations uniques du personnel) in companies of less than 200 employees. Scores for these bodies are included in the results of elections for works committees. Nearly half of those eligible companies who held elections in 1999 elected such a body.12

The functioning of the system of workplace representation in the post-war period: conflictual cooperation These representative bodies do not form a coherent system but grew up in an ad hoc manner according to the constraints of the times, with the result that The present system is the result of an accumulation of representative bodies that appeared at various stages in the history of the French indus-

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trial relations system and that are the expression of sometimes contradictory choices regarding the levels of collective bargaining, the role of union activity in the plant and the company, and the proper place of elected employee representation.13 As a result of this evolution, there is some confusion of functions among the various bodies, particularly as individual representatives frequently fulfil several functions due to a lack of candidates to fill the various positions. In larger companies, the trade union representative often coordinates the activities of the other representatives in a ‘mixed representation system’, associating elected representatives and trade union organisations.14 Indeed, trade union monopoly of the first round of the electoral system institutionalises a de facto control of the system of employee representation by trade unions, where they are present, enabling them to play an important role in the coordination of the activity of the various institutions. Furthermore, there are links between the various elements of the system that favour such coordination. The health and safety committee and the works committee may be confronted with the same questions concerning new technologies; for example, negotiations on manpower matters will come under the jurisdiction of the works committee, while the right to sign any agreement is the preserve of the trade unions; employee delegates may pass employee demands on to the works committee or the health and safety committee for consideration; employee delegates may request the presence of a trade union delegate during their monthly meetings with management; and union branches have the right to send ‘observers’ to the meetings of the works committees and to receive any information given to the elected representatives on these bodies. The lack of trade union presence in smaller companies, however, suggests that a dual system of employee representation has developed (see below). Despite the ad hoc nature of the development of the system of employee representation, there is a common thread in that employers constantly attempted to retain their autonomy in the running of their company by excluding trade unions from the workplace. Consequently, any gains in the direction of employee representation have occurred at a time when employers have been weakened and on the defensive. Thus, employee delegates were introduced in 193615 to calm conflict when revolution was feared, as part of the Matignon Agreement that signalled an end to the Popular Front strike wave. They therefore represented a major concession by employers, who nevertheless ensured that the institution should be independent of trade unions to the extent that all employees, not just union members, should vote for the delegates. The effect was to keep union representation and collective bargaining firmly outside of the workplace. Works committees were established in the period of relative social consensus following the end of the Second World War: the cooperation of the working classes was vital for the success of post-war economic reconstruction, and employers were discredited by

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profiteering and collaboration during the war – a context reflected in the aims of the institution. Consensus within the workplace was to be promoted by a regular flow of information and dialogue that would promote compromise and enable problems to be resolved before overt conflict broke out. Once again, union and employer strategies combined to keep employee representation formally distinct from trade union representation, which was reserved for outside of the company. Trade unions were only allowed into the workplace as part of an agreement to end conflict in May 1968, again as employers were forced into significant concessions in the face of large-scale social upheaval. Before 1968, in many ways, the system of employee representation was suited to the tacit Fordist compromise. The absence of trade unions from the workplace reflected the mutual distrust of employers and trade union organisations. Nevertheless, the elected institutions allowed for some form of collective employee representation in the company that fell far short of workers’ control, while permitting the exclusion of trade unions as collective bodies from the workplace. Employee consultation could take place within the company while collective bargaining, particularly over wages, and any direct trade union intervention were kept firmly outside, at the branch level. Although representative institutions potentially posed a danger for employer autonomy in the workplace, they were preferable to direct trade union representation.16 Thus, employers could retain control over the management of the company and the organisation of work despite the necessity for consultation. Furthermore, according to Tchobanian, employers have always preferred works committees over employee delegates, for several reasons.17 First, employee delegates were established to transmit grievances and demands, and were therefore seen as contesting management decisions and indirectly carrying out trade union functions. Second, the employer chairs the works committee and can therefore integrate it into the life of the company more easily despite the threat it may pose to the employer’s authority. In any case, this threat was limited as works committee rights were restricted to information and consultation and not extended to decision-making, while in practice, employers ensured that their role was restricted to social matters in a large number of cases. For trade unions, the system nevertheless presented many advantages. In essence, it provided unions with an institutionalised, albeit indirect, presence in the workplace, which could be used to increase union influence among the workforce and transmit union demands to employers despite the hostility of the latter to any form of trade union action in the workplace. In a period of CGT hegemony over the working class, when trade union activity was centred on the national level and aimed at mass mobilisation for political reform, local activists could not be manipulated into signing deals that conflicted with national strategies. They could, however, integrate the other representative organs – the employee delegates and works committees – into a conflictual strategy to contest management decisions within the company, without being

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implicated in the regulation of work. Thus, the employee delegates’ main activities during their monthly meetings with management were to present general union demands, and in this they were often accompanied by trade union representatives.18 They could also use the information gained via works committees for mass mobilisation at local and national levels. The system therefore allowed trade unions to continue to harass employers in the workplace without officially engaging in any dialogue with them.19 The legalisation of workplace trade union branches in 1968 brought no radical change to this situation. Their introduction represented a serious concession on the part of employers, but they still largely refused dialogue with trade unions in the workplace. Indeed, following their introduction, there was a rise in the number of works committees in French companies as employers encouraged their development as a way of forestalling the development of trade union branches.20 In effect, employers preferred informal relations with their employees, or limited consultation with the elected institutions over trade union intervention. On the other hand, unions tended to see the délégué syndical as the coordinator of the various structures of employee representation.21 Such attitudes still suited the unions as they would still not be implicated in the regulation of work (and therefore in the exploitation of workers). However, both the CFDT and the CGT aimed to make workplace union branches the focal point of the representation system, with the works committee subordinate to trade union aims, although the extent to which this occurred depended upon union strength and employer positions. Where unions were weak, works committees functioned normally, but had little influence; where unions were strong and the employer opposed bargaining, unions coordinated their activities with the works committees; but where employers favoured bargaining with one union, the local branch dominated.22 Generally speaking, after 1968, it became easier for unions to coordinate the activities of the other institutions. Thus, they could use them for information gathering and ensure that any collaboration between the works committee and the employer was avoided. As trade union activists, and particularly CGT activists, provided the backbone of personnel for these bodies, particularly in larger companies, they were subordinate to trade union structures and strategies, and remained integrated into a conflictual pattern of industrial relations rather than providing a spur to consensus and dialogue. Nevertheless, for employers, this permitted the channelling of conflict – and its resolution according to prevailing power relations, which at times may have meant making concessions – without directly involving unions, and while avoiding local bargaining.23 In this sense, the system of workplace representation has been described as one of ‘conflictual cooperation’.24

The 1970s: the destabilisation of the system Worker resentment against Taylorism and demands for a better quality of working life in the 1970s, however, undermined the bases for this

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‘conflictual cooperation’, based upon a system of mixed representation. In 1977, the CNPF argued for an ‘active social policy’ in the workplace in response to two developments. There was the high labour turnover and absenteeism engendered by dissatisfaction with Taylorist production relations, as well as frequent strikes over work organisation among unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The answer to the problem for employers was to implement limited experiments in new forms of work organisation (see Chapter 5) to respond to worker demands for more interesting work. More importantly in the context of this chapter, direct communication and participation methods – such as ‘open management policies’, quality circles and project groups – were implemented. These posed a direct challenge to the representative bodies in the workplace. In effect, employers were able to bypass the constraints of consulting with trade union dominated bodies pursuing a conflictual strategy within the workplace in a situation of CGT hegemony. The result was a reduced influence of these bodies. In effect, internal social questions were to be regulated without input from the trade unions, whose influence was to be constrained to those matters covered by law or to collective bargaining outside of the company. Thus, through this ‘active social policy’, employers were able to reassert their autonomy from representative institutions and trade union action in the workplace. Indeed, these new policies of employee participation were often denounced by trade unions as a management trick, implemented without any real debate on how they could benefit workers, particularly as they were rarely the subject of consultation or negotiation, but were introduced on the sole initiative of the employer. The problem for trade unions, though, was that such policies often found the favour of employees, thereby accentuating even further trade union decline at the company level.25 Only the CFDT had demanded, in 1973, any form of employee expression, seeing it as a move towards autogestion if linked to trade union action. Thus, employers were able to implement forms of expression and representation that met with their own needs and undermined forms of representation that gave trade unions a presence in the workplace. In 1978, in response to these developments, the CFDT changed tack, following its recentrage, and argued for direct (i.e. non-trade union) forms of expression provided that they were negotiated with workplace union branches.26 The second development related to the need for greater competitiveness in a global economy at a time when Taylorism was reaching its limits in this respect. At the end of the 1970s, the CNPF argued for a decentralisation of the regulation of employment relations to allow companies greater flexibility to adapt to changing economic circumstances. The questions raised by these twin developments, concerned with the quality of working life and work organisation, could not be resolved through bargaining at the national level. Workplace representative structures had the potential to contribute to finding responses to these developments, but this would require an increase

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in their role, and a willingness on the part of employers to enter into true dialogue with them over matters that had traditionally been seen as the unilateral preserve of management. Employers, however, still refused bargaining, and resisted any trade union intervention, at the workplace level. A survey carried out among company bosses by Bunel and Saglio in 1975 showed that a majority remained hostile to trade unions, preferring informal, direct participation to formalised negotiation.27 In effect, employers wanted a shift towards more flexible local regulation of employment matters, but did not want trade unions involved in such regulation.

The Auroux Laws and workplace employee representation It was in this context that the 1982 Auroux Laws attempted to reconcile the competing concerns of trade unions and employers by strengthening the role of trade unions and representative bodies within the workplace, while decentralising the regulation of employment relations to allow companies greater flexibility to respond to the new economic pressures they faced. In the previous chapter, we saw how the Auroux Laws attempted to reinforce the role of trade unions in the workplace by instituting an obligation to bargain annually over wages and hours. In addition to this, the rights of works committees were strengthened and the CHSCT was created in order that elected representatives would have greater influence in the organisation of the company and of work. Thus, works committees were accorded greater rights to information and consultation and rights to call on outside experts at certain junctures. Consultation was made obligatory on matters such as work organisation, manpower policy – including hiring and firing – working time, the introduction of new technologies, and major financial decisions such as mergers and large investments. The aim here was that these rights would give the works committee the information necessary, and therefore the means, to influence decision-making. This would occur either directly through the consultation process, or indirectly through an articulation with the negotiation process within the firm as trade unions would be able to act in full knowledge of the facts. Rather than being used to avoid bargaining, works committees were to be integrated into the negotiating process. This was seen as encouraging the ‘negotiated modernisation’28 of the company: a better provision of information would make employee representatives more aware of the economic constraints under which the firm functioned, while the decisions implemented would take account of the interests of employees as expressed by their representatives on the works committee. As well as trying to reinforce the position of the representative bodies, the other measure taken by the Auroux Laws to respond to the challenges appearing since the 1970s gave employees the right to express their ideas and grievances concerning work directly to management through

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‘self-expression groups’. Thus, the role of employee participation in the modernisation of the firm was recognised. The aim was again also, however, in line with CFDT thinking, to strengthen the workplace role of trade unions, which was seen as threatened by the direct participation policies put in place by employers. Employees were therefore granted the right to organise groups to discuss the content, organisation and conditions of their work, during working hours, for at least one hour every two months. When introduced in 1982, these provisions only affected companies of more than 200 employees, but since 1986 they have affected those employing more than 50. Again, this is a non-union form of participation, but breaks from convention in instituting a direct rather than representative form of participation. Nevertheless, it was articulated with trade union action in the workplace. The form, organisation, length and frequency of meetings, as well as the leadership of the groups and the manner of the transmission of issues raised to the representative institutions and the company management were all to be a matter for agreement between the management and workplace unions. Hence, this form of expression, rather than competing with trade union representation, would be complementary to it. In the absence of agreement with the trade unions, negotiations could take place with the works committee or the employee delegates. Thus, the reform responded to the fear that new management techniques of direct communication with the workforce were undermining trade unions and representative institutions in the workplace. It also aimed to increase employee influence over conditions of work and introduce a measure of democracy into the workplace – a condition not fulfilled, it was feared, by an employer-controlled ‘active social policy’. Trade unions were already effectively distanced from their base in the workplace due to their concentration on long-term national political goals, and their consequent neglect of workplace issues from the 1960s onwards. Prompted by a rethinking of strategy in the CFDT in the mid-1970s, this reform was also, therefore, seen as a means of reinforcing communications between the trade unions and their base, as employee concerns in the workplace would be publicly aired and taken up by the unions. It also recognised the need for direct, decentralised communications processes to overcome the dysfunctional aspects of Taylorist production. Allowing employees to express themselves would break with rigidly hierarchical relations in the workplace and encourage moves towards a more flexible work organisation in which employees would find greater satisfaction through the mobilisation of their task-related knowledge. Finally, this was seen as aiding the adaptation of companies to the new economic environment as the reform would modify trade union–management relations, replacing conflict and mistrust with negotiation and compromise as employees’ views were heard, thereby once again facilitating consensus over the modernisation of the company. Taken as a whole, then, the Auroux Laws aimed to rationalise the system of employee representation in the workplace, articulating the representative

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institutions with a decentralised system of collective bargaining on the one hand, and direct forms of employee participation on the other. On the one hand, the position of unions as the privileged interlocutor of employers was confirmed. They alone could negotiate agreements, apart from in a few limited cases, such as profit-sharing schemes, while the works committee and health and safety committee received greater rights to intervene in the organisation of the company and of work. The right of direct expression, on the other hand, would push trade unions to intervene in the direct participation policies implemented in companies, as the self-expression groups were to be the subject of local collective agreement. Thus, three juxtaposed, but hitherto relatively independent forms of regulation – managerial initiative, consultation with elected representatives, and trade union action and collective agreements within and outside of the firm – became linked. Within this configuration, the workplace representative institutions were to play a central role due to their position at the interface of collective (trade union) action and employer social policies.29 As far as the self-expression groups are concerned, the CFDT remained the only union to greet them with any enthusiasm. For the CGT, the reforms did not go far enough, while FO felt that they would undermine the collective representation of employees in the workplace. Employers, too, initially expressed great hostility to the legal regulation of employee consultation and to the obligation to negotiate with trade unions over the issue, claiming that work organisation was a domain of unilateral management action as it was concerned with finding the best way to manage a company. However, by 1990, between 10,000 and 12,000 companies had arrangements for self-expression groups, with 3.5 million workers covered. Nevertheless, although a majority of employees in companies of 50 or more employees were covered by an agreement on direct expression in 1991, the practical effects of the agreements were limited.30 Groups often only met for a few times before disbanding, and often merely contented themselves with expressing demands to management rather than playing a more active role in improving the organisation of work. As it was implemented during a time of trade union weakness and decline, employers largely managed to turn the legislation to their own advantage. In effect, the unions generally had no clear strategy over the implementation of the groups; they often lacked local activists to oversee the implementation process; or local activists often had a poor knowledge of the law. Also, at local level, trade unions had little expertise in the issues raised concerning wok organisation due to their previous concentration on national political goals. In smaller companies, managers could frequently claim that the reform was unnecessary as the hierarchy was accessible, or that alternative structures for employee involvement existed.31 The latter strategy was not confined to small companies, as the proliferation of quality circles in the early 1980s testifies (see Chapter 5). Where groups were set up, this was often on management initiative. The existing framework of social relations in the workplace was therefore

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reinforced as the leadership of the groups was handed over to middle managers, thereby overcoming the fear of the CGC that the groups would undermine their members’ position in the workplace by creating an alternative hierarchy that would bypass them as employees engaged in direct dialogue with senior management. In fact, hierarchies, and the position of middle management within them, were reinforced as they could now detect problems arising from their subordinates more easily and deal with them directly, thereby enhancing their status. They could also use such individualised participation as a criterion for promotion, weakening opposition to management and its plans and integrating employees into company values. Rather than complementing representative institutions, direct expression groups therefore often undermined them, particularly the employee delegates who saw their role of expressing grievances usurped as employees expressed their concerns directly to management.32 Consequently, trade unions often found themselves bypassed with a weakened hold over the workforce, and the collective strength of labour was diminished. Furthermore, where rival structures such as quality circles exist they can be given more favourable treatment than groups in which trade unions may be involved, for example in the responses given to requests for a change in practice. In this way, trade unions are undermined while direct communication is made more attractive and given greater legitimacy in the eyes of the workforce. Lastly, employers can also create disillusionment with the groups. Employees can only express their views and cannot take decisions through these groups. This remains the prerogative of management, and delaying decisions on, and answers to, the questions raised is a powerful way of ensuring that the groups are short-lived. As a result of all the above problems, self-expression groups have largely failed to take hold in French companies. The 1998 REPONSE survey found that they were present in only one in three establishments of 20 or more employees in 1992, a figure that fell to only one in five in 1998.33 A rise in other forms of direct participation, such as quality circles and project groups over the same period34 suggests that the greater use of management-controlled structures is squeezing out the space for self-expression groups. Nevertheless, where they have operated, the groups’ main results appear to be in improving the immediate work environment where this has few costs for management. They may also have encouraged greater discussion between trade unions and management by bringing employee concerns to the surface. Trade union demands have sometimes been given greater legitimacy where they have taken up issues aired in self-expression groups. Their weakness at local level, however, is a stumbling block, as they are often unable to cope with the sheer number and diversity of questions raised. In addition, the issues raised often concern the content and organisation of work. This is an area in which trade unions, and particularly the CGT, have traditionally been reluctant to intervene, arguing that improving the efficiency of work processes would be tantamount to increasing exploitation

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by increasing productivity without securing a concomitant reward for employees, and that it leaves employees open to manipulation by management.35 Such an oppositional stance, however, results in increasing marginalisation, particularly as employees appreciate the opportunity to at least air their views concerning their work. Similarly, the influence of works committees in decision-making appears to be limited to a small number of companies. This is often associated with a lack of training, knowledge of the law and external expertise, particularly in smaller companies where the works committee members are not unionised.36 Furthermore, it should be remembered that their powers go beyond consultation in only a very few instances, with no obligation on the part of the employers to take the views of the works committee into account. Thus, employers can act in a purely formalistic manner, respecting the letter of the law by providing works committees with the information that it is required to without taking any account of how the information is used. A study by Harff and Henriet, in the late 1980s, found this to be the most common practice, ahead of ignoring the law in the absence of any pressure from representatives to comply, or using the new rights to establish a true dialogue over changes in the company and its economic environment.37 In this study, the elected representatives generally accepted this formalistic approach to fulfilling the legal requirements of informing works committees of the functioning of the firm. Even when this is not the case, however, employer control of information is a considerable power resource that can be mobilised to undermine the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. A comparative case study of indirect employee participation structures in the British and French gas industries found that French management attitudes towards the works committee were marked by formalism despite the protests of the trade unions, and particularly of the dominant CGT, in the establishment studied. The unions complained that information was provided too late, and often in a technical form, so that it was difficult to digest in order that coherent counter-proposals could be elaborated before a matter was discussed in the works committee. Furthermore, it was alleged by union representatives, and admitted by managers, that decisions were effectively taken before any matter was presented to the works committee.38 In the 1980s, a survey by Foucher found that few works committees received sufficient economic and financial information to produce effective counter-proposals to management plans.39 Likewise, in a survey conducted in the mid-1990s, a majority of managers stated that negotiations with trade union representatives or discussions with the works committee did not change the decisions that they made.40 Generally speaking, then, the new powers accorded to works committees do not seem to have been accompanied by an increase in influence. This appears partly due to a reticence on the part of works committees to use these new powers. The new right to call in an outside expert at the employer’s expense to examine the introduction of new technologies in

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companies employing more than 300 people, for example, is seldom used. A study carried out for the Economic and Social Council found that, ten years after its introduction, it was taken advantage of in less than 3 per cent of eligible companies.41 The new powers given to representative institutions must be seen in conjunction with attempts to reinforce local collective bargaining (see Chapter 6). A better provision of information to trade union representatives was expected to lead to more realistic bargaining stances, while improved dialogue was supposed to lead to improved understanding of the needs of, and constraints upon, the interlocutor, resulting in a high-trust environment in which consensus and compromise could develop. The greater rights to information and consultation accorded to works committees would thus reinforce the bargaining process, with the result that the latter would become an element of joint regulation in the company rather than being integrated into a dynamic of permanent conflict.42 Although conflict is in decline, there is no apparent shift towards a joint regulation of the workplace, with questions raised as to the validity of the decentralised negotiating process (see Chapter 5). Likewise, the increased rights of works committees have not transformed the balance of power in the workplace. The articulations between the different representative bodies, and the uses made of them in different workplaces, depend upon the strategies of the actors and upon the types of workers represented, but the main result appears to be the reinforcement of the role of the works committee in the management of the indirect wage – the social funds and profit-sharing schemes.43 At the end of the 1990s, not much appeared to have changed form the late 1980s, when Lane asserted that, ‘Rights to information and consultation are frequently ignored by management or interpreted in a onesided way.’44 With hindsight, this result is not surprising as these new powers were accorded in a context of trade union weakness. As with collective bargaining, effective employee representation bodies at the local level depend upon strong workplace trade unions. The Belier Report of 1990 found that provisions for employee representation worked poorly in small companies, where representative institutions were often absent, and recommended a merger of institutions.45 The result was the introduction, in 1993, of the single channel of representation. In other cases, where trade unions are absent, the works committee becomes a de facto bargaining body – although this is not strictly allowed by law except in a few areas – or is integrated into management communications policies. In smaller companies, then, there is a certain blurring of consultation and negotiation, which often results in management domination of these processes.46 But the confusion of functions and lack of personnel to take on the responsibilities of representing their colleagues remain problems for these bodies even in larger companies with trade union representation, and have even been exacerbated due to the rising number of different sorts of committees. This has also given rise to a new problem since

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the 1980s: the development of professional activists cut off from their base by their accumulation of mandates and the credits of hours that go with them.47 The increased rights of elected representatives to intervene in questions concerning the organisation of the company and work, and the role of trade unions in establishing the self-expression groups, were intended to reinforce relations between the trade unions and their base, and thereby respond to the problems of trade union marginalisation and legitimacy caused by employer social policies in the workplace. However, the institutionalisation of trade union action may, on the contrary, have weakened links between the unions and their base. Traditionally, trade union action in the workplace was exercised informally through the employee delegate and took the form of a conflictual harassment of employers (maximalist demands and mobilisation of the base) in which the notions of a class-based unionism and the need to respond to the everyday concerns of employees could be reconciled. The result was, according to Tchobanian, ‘conflictual joint regulation’.48 In effect, employee delegates allowed for the expression of the aggregated grievances of a relatively homogeneous workforce while avoiding the direct intervention of the trade unions. This permitted some limited employee participation and some element of joint regulation through confrontation with the rigid company hierarchy. Employer policies of direct participation, selfexpression groups, company-level collective bargaining and the increased rights of other representative bodies have, however, reduced the space available for the intervention of the employee delegate. At that same time, the institutional position of trade unions was reinforced at just the moment when their membership went into decline and they experienced difficulties in renewing their activist base (see Chapter 3). The resulting accumulation of mandates among the few willing to take on representative functions has led to the development of a strata of full-time officials in many workplaces who are consequently cut off from their constituencies.49 This, in turn, results in a change of function for the union and its representatives, and has further accentuated the decline of trade unions at the local level. Howell argues that, taken as a whole, the Auroux Laws represent a shift towards microcorporatist regulation.50 Partly, he argues, this is due to the decentralisation of collective bargaining, which we have dealt with in the previous chapter. As far as representative institutions are concerned, he argues that the strengthening of works committees and the right of direct expression encourage non-union forms of local regulation. While this cannot be denied, especially where smaller workplaces are concerned, certain caveats must be placed on such an assertion. First, as we have argued, the overall impact of the Auroux Laws as far as workplace representation is concerned has been limited. Second, in the case of works committees, recent examples show that they can place a limited constraint upon employer action due to the articulation between their rights and national legislation. When Marks and Spencer announced that it was to close all its mainland

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Europe stores, including 18 in France, on 29 March 2001, it did so without respecting French law, which required it to consult with its works committees in advance. As a result of legal action taken by trade unions in the company, the Paris courts suspended the closures on 9 April until such consultation had taken place. When the redundancy conditions for its French employees were negotiated, the Labour Inspectorate intervened to ensure that employees benefited from the best terms possible. The British retailer was thus forced to renegotiate, before 30 November, with the central works committee, social measures judged inadequate by the Labour Inspectorate, before it could proceed with a plan by which the French retailer Galeries Lafayette would re-employ those employees made redundant, if the employees so wished. In the end, those accepting jobs in Galeries Lafayette received a guarantee that their salary would remain unchanged for three years, despite the fact that the latter paid 10–15 per cent less than Marks and Spencer, with Marks and Spencer paying the difference. For those who accepted redundancy, compensation was raised from 1.3 months per year of service to 1.5.51 This example is significant for two reasons. First, it shows that the articulation of works committees with national bodies (the Labour Inspectorate) and legislation (the requirement to consult with the works committee and to accompany redundancies with adequate social measures) can impact upon employer actions. This impact, however, is very limited given the wider picture of job losses, and in reality is reduced to a defensive negotiation of the conditions of implementation of decisions taken by employers. Second, however, it demonstrates that even where trade unions mobilise employees against employer actions, as was the case here, they remain largely powerless when faced with the international restructuring of companies.

European works committees – an adequate response? It was precisely such concerns that, in part, underpinned European-level regulation on employee participation. The debate over employee participation at the European level has a long and complex history, stretching back to the early 1970s,52 but was given fresh impetus with the entry into force of the Single European Act in 1987. It was argued, first, that the boost to international acquisitions and mergers provided by the single-market project threatened to undermine nationally regulated information and consultation structures owing to the increasingly transnational nature of company decision-making. Second, a ‘social dimension’, including European Union (then Community) support for the institutionalisation of management– employee relations at the European level, was seen as necessary to gain support for the project from organised labour.53 Finally, the European Works Council (EWC) Directive was adopted on 22 September 1994. The Directive required transposition into national legislation or binding collective agreements by 22 September 1996 in the countries affected.54 It

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applies to companies and groups with at least 1000 employees within these states and at least 150 in two of them. These companies or groups must negotiate procedures for the information and consultation of their employees within three years of a request being made by employees or their representatives, or by central management. In the event of a failure of negotiations, the Directive lays down some basic provisions. These stipulate that the EWC is to consist of between three and 30 members, with at least one member from each national establishment, and can meet with ‘an appropriate level’ of management at least once a year to receive information on the company’s general prospects. Included in this are the areas of finances, sales, production, employment, corporate structure and changes in organisation, including closures, cutbacks, transfers of production, collective redundancies and the introduction of new working methods and processes. In addition, the EWC should be consulted ‘in good time’ on any management proposal likely to have serious consequences for employees. These rights apply only to matters concerning the company or group as a whole or affecting two or more establishments in different countries, and do not interfere with the decision-making rights of management. The lead in establishing transnational bodies for the information and consultation of employees was taken by French companies. The first was set up in Thomson Consumer Electronics well before the 1994 Directive, in 1985, although the trend really only started in 1990 when the first draft Directive was published, and intensified from 1993 when adoption became virtually certain under the Social Protocol of the Maastricht Treaty. The previous requirement for works and group committees in France has undoubtedly made compliance with the Directive easier, as companies have been able to establish voluntary EWCs based upon pre-existing national institutions and practices, including provisions for negotiation with nationally representative trade unions and paid time off for representatives.55 In mid-1999, 1205 companies were affected by the Directive, of which 111 had their headquarters in France. Of these, one-third had reached agreement on the subject.56 According to the European Commission in a 1999 report on EWCs, ‘the transposition of the directive allows the creation, in all countries, of a model for transnational negotiation, that can be used for objectives other than the representation of workers. There is thus [. . .] a hope of developing European collective bargaining in groups of a European dimension.’57 However, to date, EWCs seem to have fallen far short of this ambition. The report goes on to state that they guarantee ‘only a very low level of transnational information and consultation’.58 Further problems recognised in the report concern those of guaranteeing that ‘information and consultation take place in good time, and in any case before a decision is taken’, and of the articulation of European and national-level systems of information and consultation.59 The conclusions of the Institut de recherches économiques et sociales (IRES) in France are much the same: ‘European committees carry little

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weight when it comes to influencing the strategic decisions of parent companies and large transnational groups.’60 Again, this is seen as not only due to the weak level of rights given to these committees, but also to the difficulties of coordinating international trade union action and positions. The Observatoire des relations professionnelles et de l’innovation sociale carried out a study of six French companies that had established a EWC, and found that the works councils suffered from many of the same problems as works committees in France.61 Employee representatives did not have sufficient documentation to prepare meetings adequately, or this was given too late; representatives suffered from a lack of expertise and technical assistance; and management often refused preparatory consultation with excuses that this would lead to over-burdensome arrangements or would jeopardise the confidentiality of information. It must also be remembered that the Directive covers only workforces in large multinational enterprises, and even then the area of competence of the EWC is strictly limited to the international dimensions of a company or group’s operations. It is, then, hardly surprising that trade unions have called for a reinforcement of the powers of EWCs. For the ETUC, ‘After ten years of functioning, practice shows that the members of EWCs are poorly or not at all informed of what is happening in the company. Too often they are presented with a fait accompli and are only made aware of decisions after they have been taken.’62 Such was the case, for example, when, on 27 February 1997, Renault announced its decision to close its Vilvorde plant in Belgium and relocate production to Spain, France and Slovenia. On 4 April, the French courts decided that Renault had not complied with its obligation to consult the company’s EWC. Despite widespread protest against the closure (see Chapter 8), and the obligation to consult at a European level, the closure and relocation of production went ahead. Likewise, the management of Marks and Spencer only informed representatives of the company’s EWC of their decision to close all shops on the European mainland on 28 March 2001, after the decision had been taken.63 As we have seen above, although the intervention of the Labour Inspectorate led to better redundancy or reemployment terms, the company was able to proceed with restructuring by the end of the year, as it originally wished.

Conclusion Under Fordist relations of production, institutions for workplace representation in France reflected the conflictual nature of French industrial relations by enabling some form of limited collective employee representation while allowing for the exclusion of trade unions from the workplace. The demands for an improved quality of working life, including for more employee influence, coupled with the greater need for local flexibility and quality in production, rendered such arrangements insufficient. Rather than institutions based upon conflict, what was needed were arrangements that promoted

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cooperation. Such circumstances created a window of opportunity for greater employee and trade union influence in decision-making. Taken globally, the Auroux Laws on collective bargaining, elected representative institutions and the right of direct expression should have encouraged trade union coordination of the various forms of employee representation in the company, which would have greater influence over the organisation of the company and of work. Although most companies of over 50 employees now have trade union representation, the large number of companies without any, or with weak trade union sections, means that the works committee often becomes the central pivot of the system, particularly in small companies.64 Furthermore, at the end of the 1990s, non-unionised representatives made up the majority of works committee members in establishments employing between 20 and 100 people, while trade union representation was totally absent in four out of five companies employing between 20 and 50 people. In those of between 11 and 49 employees, which are not covered by the law on works committees, there were, in the mid1990s, employee delegates in only one in three. Thus, collective workplace representation is closely linked to the size of the establishment, with it being a minority phenomenon in smaller ones. In establishments of under 200 employees, it is generally non-union, and only in companies of over 200 employees is the full range of institutions found. Even in the latter case, however, trade union weakness reduces the efficiency of the system in many cases. Employees in small establishments may be covered by an enterprise or group committee, but these are far removed from their immediate working environment, and do not intervene on matters affecting only one establishment. It should also be emphasised that none of the representation and consultation structures in place give employees or their representatives any decisionmaking powers. In the representative bodies, the control of information is a major power resource in the hands of employers, in particular – as with collective bargaining – as consultation generally takes place in areas of their expertise. Information may be given at the last minute, may be too voluminous or technical to be easily digested in readiness for a meeting, in order that counter-proposals may be drawn up. In addition, definitions of areas of consultation may give rise to conflict over interpretations, for example in the definition of ‘new’ technology. Thus, managers may obey the letter but not the spirit of the law – a frequent complaint of trade union representatives on these bodies. Direct participation is limited to low-level workshop or office issues and employees have no decision-making power. Strategic policy therefore remains firmly in the hands of managers and employers despite the presence of strong institutional bodies aimed at securing dialogue and consensus. In this sense, attempts since the early 1980s to improve employee representation in France have been grafted onto pre-existing attitudes and arrangements within companies and have been shaped by them rather than transformed them.

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For Tchobanian, ‘the right of direct expression seems to have produced more agreements than it has direct participation’.65 In other words, the legal obligation to negotiate such a right has had little effect for the reasons outlined above. More generally, one has to look outside of the system of industrial relations to explain this failure, and the more widespread failure of the Auroux Laws to increase the influence of trade unions, elected representatives and employees over the organisation of work and of the company. Economic, political and sociological change has eroded the trade union base and reduced the appeal of class-based action, particularly for the expanding numbers of white-collar workers. The fragmentation of the working class, employer human resource management policies, which emphasise individual responsibility and rewards for performance and quality, and the concomitant rise of sectionalism and individualism, also explain why employers have managed to encourage individual rather than collective, representative forms of participation in the workplace. Finally, as the examples in this chapter amply demonstrate, in a context of European integration and increasingly complex international company ownership patterns, decisions directly affecting wage earners are often taken in distant headquarters. Even if local mechanisms gave employees some say in the local regulation of work, such influence is easily nullified by decisions taken at higher levels, and sometimes in other countries. EWCs may be a first step to reducing the imbalance in power relations that this represents, but progress to date has been far from adequate at this level. As with French national mechanisms for employee representation, their powers are limited to consultation, and the problems of international coordination present a further challenge to their efficacy. In effect, while the ‘economic imperatives’ of globalisation and high levels of unemployment weaken the power of labour in any form, including their rights to consultation and expression in the workplace, the margins for manoeuvre are increased for capital and reduced for labour. In a context of the internationalisation of company management, strengthening what are essentially workplace consultation rights has little effect, particularly as these are poorly articulated with weak consultation rights at the heart of corporate power – the international headquarters of major economic players.

8

Conflict

When collective bargaining and consultation have failed or simply do not take place, employees have many ways of pushing for reform in their favour or of demonstrating their opposition to employers. They may, for example, have recourse to go-slows, work-to-rules, absenteeism, turnover and sabotage. These, however, are mainly individual responses to dissatisfaction. Collective action can include written and verbal protest delivered through representatives. The ultimate weapon of employees, however, and the most visible and measurable form of conflict revealing a high level of dissatisfaction, is strikes. The collective withdrawal of labour also requires a high level of organisation and a strong sense of collective solidarity, and strikes can therefore tell us much about the state of unions, the working classes, societal power relations and industrial relations in general. For these reasons they will form the focus of this chapter.

The legal framework The right to strike was first recognised in France in 1864, even before the legalisation of trade unions in 1884. This has led to the paradoxical situation whereby it is an individual right, although it can only be exercised collectively. Since 1946, it has been enshrined as a constitutional right, but apart from this is subject to little legal regulation. In law, a strike represents a suspension of the employment contract, so, in theory, one cannot be sacked for striking, unless a serious offence, such as the destruction of machinery, is committed during the strike. On the other hand, while the right to strike exists, this should not interfere with the freedom to work, and strikes should have purely professional aims. In other words, political strikes are illegal as any cessation of work should be over employment issues such as wages or conditions. Since 1963, when a strike by Parisian transport workers paralysed the capital, strikes can only be called in the public sector with five days’ notice and may only be done so by representative unions. These laws, however, have proved difficult to implement at times of social conflict. First, although by law no one can be sacked for striking, this provision is often overcome if a company wants to rid itself of what it sees as a

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troublesome element and is willing to pay compensation to do so. Second, the freedom to work is also difficult to uphold when mass picketing takes place. Third, although political strikes are illegal, they often occur. This is partly because it is often difficult to tell whether a strike is ‘political’ in nature or not – for example, when pressure is aimed at the state over wages, tax reform or employment policy, or even to change its industrial or economic policy. All these could affect the employment prospects, working conditions, and/or take-home pay of workers. The May 1968 strikes clearly had elements of both ‘political’ and employment matters. Some strikes, however, clearly do not come into this grey category, for example ‘days of action’ against racism, or the 1960–1 protests against army action in Algeria. Thus, many strikes, rather than being disputes between employees and their employer (including the state), are attempts to appeal to public opinion and to pressure the government into action. Finally, although wildcat strikes are technically outlawed in the public sector, this did not prevent coordination movements among public sector workers from calling them outside of their official trade union organisations in the 1980s (see below). On the other hand, as the right to strike is an individual one, strikers can be individually liable for any offences committed during the conduct of a strike, with the result that, ‘some employees, chosen at the management’s discretion, or even at that of non-strikers, find themselves caught up in the legal process and condemned to pay high levels of damages’.1

Use and characteristics of the strike weapon in France before the 1980s In the early twentieth century, before the First World War, a strike was seen by revolutionary syndicalists as the ultimate weapon that would lead to worker emancipation through revolution and the overthrow of the capitalist system. Attempts to organise large-scale strikes were often associated with violence and bloody state repression. Four striking workers were killed by the police, for example, in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges in 1908 and strikers were requisitioned for military service and 3300 sacked during the 1910 railway workers’ strike.2 Revolutionary syndicalist aspirations effectively died out at the end of the First World War with the increase in the industrial and military power of the state and the failure of the 1920 railway workers’ strike. Yet the myth of the revolutionary strike appeared again in the 1936 Popular Front strike wave, and again in May 1968. Even more recently for Guy Groux, ‘in December 1995, its [the strike’s] symbolic power appeared unchanged’.3 Since the early part of the twentieth century, with increasing prosperity and the institutionalisation of unions, there has definitely been a reduction in the violence associated with strike activity.4 Nevertheless, such behaviour could still be seen in the Latin Quarter in May 1968, when riot police

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confronted student demonstrators wielding molotov cocktails. In June of the same year, a striker was killed during confrontations at the Peugeot factory in Sochaux, and more recently, in December 1986, Malik Oussekine was killed by riot police, again during student protests. Such incidents are now thankfully rare, but the strike was still seen in political terms in the postwar period. The CGT, particularly, saw strikes as a trial of strength, a useful means of testing the balance of power between capital and labour. The legacy of revolutionary syndicalism could be seen in their ‘combative’ conception of trade unionism and the priority it gave to direct action over collective bargaining. The statutes of the CGT, as set out in the 1906 Charter of Amiens, committed the organisation to ‘the complete emancipation [of workers], which can only be achieved by the expropriation of capitalists; it [the work of unions] sees the general strike as its means of action’.5 It was not until 1999, and its 46th Congress at Strasbourg, that the CGT officially accepted the primacy of bargaining over conflict. Direct action still had a mythical quality, and was seen as beneficial, not only as a means to harass employers, but also for its educational function, training workers for revolution, giving them organisational skills and building up solidarity and class consciousness.6 Localised conflicts were therefore harnessed for trade union goals through giving local struggles a societal significance and articulating them within a wider class struggle. Industrial relations were politicised, not only through appeals to public opinion for support (although this was an important part of strike movements), but also through drawing local members of parliament, regional and departmental councillors, prefects and even ministers into disputes. As they were conceived of as a weapon to be used against a class enemy, strikes were often still accompanied by lesser, but still illegal, acts of violence, such as factory occupations, picketing to prevent entry to a workplace, and even the sequestration of managers – a form of revenge for the tight control that they exercised in the workplace. Such action was, however, tolerated and rarely sanctioned.7 In addition, the CGT would often call for ‘days of action’, one-day strikes to protest against government policy and to put pressure on the state for reform. This was not the only aim of such action. It was also designed to influence national politics by raising the consciousness of workers over the class struggle, making them aware of their collective strength and garnering support for the PCF in elections.8 In such a heavily politicised context, strikes were seen by employers as an illegitimate form of action, as a threat to the whole social, not only economic, order. The workplace weakness of trade unions, however, meant that strikes often started spontaneously and were recuperated by trade unions who were pushed into strike calls by pressure from below for fear of being cut off from, and losing control over, their base. This problem was aggravated by interunion rivalry. There was, in effect, competition among union confederations to be seen to be leading strike movements, again for fear of being outflanked

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by other confederations who could attract members through support for strikers. This lack of control over the base was exacerbated by another legacy of revolutionary syndicalism. The primacy of direct action within this doctrine meant that unions did not build up powerful bureaucracies but depended upon committed local activists to educate local workforces in the class struggle. Mass memberships for bargaining purposes or the collection of dues was never a priority, and unions never, therefore, had the resources to provide strike funds. Workers therefore relied upon local solidarity rather than the support of trade union bureaucracies, thus weakening the power of the latter to control the former.9 Under these conditions, strikes tended to be of short duration, averaging, with one or two exceptions such as May 1968, one to two days in the postwar era, but they occurred frequently.10 They were also predominantly motivated by wage demands.11 They thus suited the economic conditions of Fordism and the CGT’s strategy of wage maximisation as a means of squaring the circle between the need for material gain and ideological aspirations. In a period of low unemployment and high demand, employers were less willing to resist the threat and pressure of strike action, as the costs could be high in terms of lost orders. On the other hand, high growth, increasing productivity and buoyant demand meant that the cost of buying industrial peace could be recouped through price rises. When examining the 1968 Grenelle Accords, for example, Jean-Pierre Oppenheim argues that: ‘One can easily guess that a secret aspect of the agreement was hammered out between employers and the government to establish what would happen after Grenelle and to offer certain guarantees to the heads of companies, including the devaluation of the franc which, a few months later, was to take back from workers most of the rise in purchasing power won through rises in nominal wages.’12 Thus, short ‘guerrilla’ campaigns were used as a means of harassing employers and these suited the CGT strategy of wage maximisation, but did not seriously undermine the conditions for capital accumulation while the conditions for Fordist growth remained good. Indeed, in the absence of regularised wage bargaining, such quantitative redistributional disputes provided the wage gains that were crucial to Fordist growth. In short, trade union–employer hostility, and a conception of industrial relations based upon the class struggle, meant that strike action remained the primary means of resolving redistributional conflicts. The strike represented negotiation by other means, and was often used as a means to put pressure on employers to negotiate rather than being a last resort in the event of a failure of negotiations. While the above sets out the general contours of strikes in France, a shift in their characteristics began to occur from the late 1960s onwards. Strike levels were rising from 1966 onwards as the unity in action pact between the CGT and CFDT gave the labour movement renewed confidence. For Crouch and Pizzorno this represented the resurgence of class conflict after a period of relative quiescence since the early 1950s.13 In France, the May

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1968 strike wave was the most visible manifestation of this, but as has already been suggested in the Introduction, should not been seen as a potential workers’ revolution. Indeed, in many ways, May 1968 revealed the contradictions of the French labour movement and its actions more starkly than at any other point in the past. ‘What happened in May 1968 is the most notorious example of a movement divided between revolutionary practice as regards forms of action (paralysis of the economy, occupation of plants, street demonstrations, the symbolic use of the red flag) and an extremely conventional demand content (for the 40-hour week and minimum wage guarantees).’14 Nevertheless, it does have some importance for the changes it presaged for the regulation of labour in France. While many of the workers’ demands in May 1968 centred on the traditional economic ones of higher pay and shorter hours, new themes were emerging that were qualitative rather than quantitative in nature. Thus, the notion of autogestion, or workers’ self-management, was popularised by the CFDT, with the CGT being forced to at least pay lip service to it. In its radical form this notion was certainly revolutionary, describing a system wherein factories are run by elected representatives of workers and wherein democratic and decentralised planning processes regulate the economy and society. Some workers certainly sincerely believed that the time had come for the overthrow of traditional hierarchical capitalist structures and many more were attracted by the idea, caught up in the heady atmosphere of the time. Most, however, merely wanted an end to the rigid Taylorisation of the workplace and to the harsh management discipline that accompanied it in its French, Fayolist version.15 Indeed, following May 1968, a wave of strikes spread among unskilled and semi-skilled workers in companies such as Renault.16 Again, the traditional calls for higher wages for these low-paid members of the workforce could be heard. However, qualitative demands were also expressed. The Lip watch factory strike of 1973–4 became a national cause célèbre for autogestion as workers faced with a Swiss takeover of their company and redundancy took control of their factory, continued production and paid themselves. In most cases, however, strikes of the time, such as those of immigrant workers in Renault in 1969, and semi-skilled operatives in 1971, did not amount to calls for autogestion, but to calls for the ‘humanisation’, or the improvement of the quality, of working life. In the face of such demands, the state set up the National Agency for the Improvement of Working Conditions (ANACT), in 1973, to research into, and sponsor experiments in, alternative means of organising production. Employers engaged in limited experimentation in job enrichment, job enlargement and autonomous work groups in response to the strikes of semi-skilled workers, and, in 1977, argued for an ‘active social policy’ in the workplace in order to allow for greater employee expression (see Chapter 4). On the trade union side, the CGT limited itself to more traditional demands. Where it attacked assembly-line production, this was generally to denounce work rates rather than the very existence of

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Taylorised production.17 The CFDT, on the other hand, took up many of the qualitative themes being expressed by workers. Thus, conflict from the late 1960s onwards began to challenge one of the major supports of the Fordist compromise – the scientific organisation of work. Conflict based upon the redistribution of the wealth created by Fordist growth could be managed within the system through concession then economic readjustment (price rises, currency devaluation) while the economy was still relatively sheltered from global competition and pressures, although this was becoming increasingly problematic. Even employee concerns about the quality of their working life appeared manageable with some minor, largely cosmetic, reforms of the workplace. However, in reality, these new demands questioned not only the organisation of work and the social control it implied. They also challenged the role of trade unions within Fordist regulation by throwing up demands that they had, until then, not considered to be in their area of responsibility and that could not be dealt with at the national level. Thus, the emergence of qualitative demands was also accompanied by the decentralisation of conflict as previously marginalised voices – young, female or immigrant unskilled workers – made themselves heard.18 These challenges to Fordism were compounded by changed economic conditions and thinking following the 1970s oil crises, which were to have a profound impact upon the nature and levels of strikes.

Developments since the 1970s As we have seen, from the late 1960s onwards, the conditions for Fordist capital accumulation in France deteriorated as increasing wage costs fuelled inflation and international competition in product markets became stiffer. In a more open economy, increased wage costs could not be easily passed on to the consumer in the form of price rises, and European economic integration rendered impractical the devaluation of the franc as a means of ensuring international competitiveness. Such developments really hit home following the 1970s oil crises, and a marked decline in strike rates is perceptible from this time on. This decline accentuated in the 1980s and 1990s. The decade 1970–9 saw an average of 3.56 million days lost per annum, the 1980s, 1.98 million and 1990–8, 1.38 million.19 During this last period, nearly half of the total was made up by one year – 1995, when 5.88 million working days were lost in the largest strike wave seen since 1968. In the private sector, the number of conflicts has fallen by a staggering 75 per cent, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, from nearly 4000 in 1975, to just over 1000 in 1999.20 As a result, strikes in France have increasingly become a public sector phenomenon over the last 20 years. While ‘the propensity to strike appears higher in the administrative services of the state than in the private sector [. . .] it is in the nationalized company sector that conflicts are most numer-

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ous: the SNCF, RATP and Air France are companies renowned for their number of days lost to strikes’.21 Where strikes did occur in the last two decades of the twentieth century, they tended less and less to be the large-scale national days of action favoured by the CGT in the period of high economic growth, and instead localised conflicts based on the company, or even the establishment, workshop or office. Official Ministry of Labour statistics do not distinguish between national days of action and other ‘generalised conflicts’. Monique Borrel, however, has analysed the role of strikes in social and political change in France from 1950 to 1985, and as part of this work has separated days of action from other widespread conflicts for the period 1954–86.22 From this, a rough indication can be found of the decline in the importance of such events. The indication is rough since no figures for individual days lost are given for ‘minor’ days of action such as the CGT’s call for a demonstration in defence of employment on 8 September 1986, which attracted a disappointing 10,000 demonstrators in Paris. From Borrel’s data, Table 8.1 demonstrates quite clearly the reduced salience of such events following the high point in their usage in the 1960s and 1970s. This trend continued over the following ten years to the point that, in 1998, Landier and Labbé were able to declare that, ‘The large-scale trade union days of action that punctuated social life in the 60s and 70s have practically disappeared.’23 Many observers also detect a ‘localisation’ of conflicts resulting from a decline in ‘generalised conflicts’.24 Figures from the 1990s would appear to confirm that, the exceptional year of 1995 apart, this is the case (see Table 8.2). Thus, for Landier and Labbé, ‘Conflicts seem to obey local, specific logics, without any relationship between them. They are provoked by various and multiple causes that at times appear contradictory.’25 In general, there has been a shift in the main motives for strike movements. In the early 1970s, the majority of strikes broke out over wage demands, while the 1980s saw a shift to employment matters as many companies laid off workers in the wake of Table 8.1 ‘National days of action’, 1954–86 Period

Average number of calls for action per year

Average number of individual work days lost per year

1954–9 1960–4 1965–9 1970–4 1975–9 1980–6

0.5 0.0 1.4 2.2 2.8 1.6

241.0 0.0 371.2 621.2 552.0 131.1

Source: Borrel, M. (1996) Conflits du travail, changement social et politique en France depuis 1950, Paris: L’Harmattan.

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Table 8.2 Strike levels, 1992–8 1992

1993

1994

Localised conflict No. of strikers (000s) No. of days lost (000s)

n.d. 238.7 215.0 359.0 510.9 500.5

Generalised conflict No. of strikers (000s) No. of days lost (000s)

n.d. 132.0

18.4 22.3

1995

1996

1997

1998

521.8 136.4 145.9 121.3 783.8 444.1 393.4 345.6

25.5 1141.4 20.5 1336.8

4.9 3.7

9.3 61.7

1.3 7.6

Source: 1992: Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) Les Clés du Social en France: manuel d’initiation social, Paris: Editions Liaisons, p. 96; other years: INSEE (2000) Annuaire statistique de la France 2000, p. 157.

economic recession. International competition and lost product markets led to industrial reconstructuring and many harsh, and sometimes violent, strikes in the iron and steel, motor manufacturing and shipbuilding industries.26 Since 1996, the Ministry of Employment has published an annual overview of strikes in the private sector. These show a shift, in the latter half of the 1990s, from strikes over wages to strikes over working time. Thus, the proportion of strikes concerned with wages had fallen from 56 per cent in 1995 to half that level in 1999. On the other hand, under the influence of the Aubry Laws, working time was the second largest cause of strikes – 25 per cent – in 1999 after only appearing as a category in 1997, when it accounted for 12 per cent.27 Overall, though, strike rates have continued to fall for several reasons. First, economic recession from the late 1970s brought in its wake high unemployment, a problem aggravated by the introduction of new technologies in many traditional manufacturing sectors. Unskilled labour, in particular, became easily replaceable, creating a ‘reserve army’ of labour. The shift of employment into tertiary industries also meant a reduction in personnel in those sectors, particularly in heavy industry, with a tradition of industrial unrest. Recession, combined with more intense international competition, also meant that company profits were squeezed as demand fell, with the result that employers were less willing to buy industrial peace with high wage rises. Furthermore, in a period of slack demand, many companies had built up stocks, and strikes could therefore be, paradoxically, functional for them, allowing them to continue trading without paying their workforce. However, in general, slack demand and profit squeezes were seen to weaken the position of firms, and workers therefore desisted from industrial action out of fear of unemployment, either through replacement by the ‘reserve army’ or through company bankruptcy. This, in particular, explains the secular decline in the number of private sector strikes and the perception that conflict is increasingly a public sector phenomenon. A further factor in the decline of the use of strikes is the quiescence of unions following the arrival of the Left in power following the 1981 elec-

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tions. Apparently social democratic government had arrived in France through oppositional rather than consensus politics, with the industrial wing of the labour movement playing its role through conflict rather than integration into capitalist economic structures. In the absence of social democratic policy processes, worker militancy represented a rational strategy for the reduction of social inequalities and the conquest of material security in the three decades following the War. The dynamics created by such militancy were harnessed by the Left from the mid-1960s onwards, and particularly in the 1970s, as such militancy was channelled into the objective of conquering political power, largely through the organisation of large-scale days of action. Once in power, however, the shift from oppositional mobilisation to an instrument of social regulation within a social democratic framework was to prove difficult for the trade unions. Institutionalisation and the desire to support a ‘labour friendly’ government at a time when unemployment was soaring and austerity policies were being implemented, resulted in the demobilisation of their base.28 The evolution in the characteristics of strikes can also be related to the general decentralisation of industrial relations in France, particularly the decentralisation of pay bargaining by the Auroux Laws. This decentralisation can also be seen in the restructuring of companies and in the trend towards smaller workplaces. Under Fordist conditions of production, large workplaces, where all workers were subject to the same, or similar, conditions, made it easier for unions to organise, and obtain support for largescale action. These decentralising trends are in part responsible, too, for a weakening of the national solidarity upon which French trade unionism is based. Organisation and interest aggregation are also made more difficult as local issues concerning the quality of working life require regulation at the local level, and therefore give rise to localised conflicts, the demands of which the unions find difficult to aggregate at the national level. This solidarity and aggregation of interests and demands has also been rendered more difficult by the growing individualisation of the employment contract and by labour market segmentation (see Chapter 5). The emergence of different sectors of the workforce, each with their own particular problems and interests – part-time and temporary workers, fixed-term workers, the unemployed, secure and insecure workers etc – has produced a multiplicity of different, often contradictory, interests amongst workers within the same company. Labour market fragmentation and other divisions along age, gender and ethnic lines,29 along with the discrediting of left-wing ideologies, have to a certain extent destroyed workers’ solidarity and sense of community within the workplace. Core workers, for example, may desire pay rises, or increased overtime, while peripheral workers may see this as a threat to their continued employment in the company. In this respect, the 1980s and 1990s can be seen to have witnessed a weakening of the sociological basis for collective action, particularly in the form, promoted by French unions, and the CGT in particular, of class mobilisation. Indeed, the

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explanation for the decline and changing nature of strikes in France has to be as much social and cultural as economic. Changing employment patterns have seen a fall in employment in sectors with a tradition of trade union militancy and a rise in those sectors – mainly white-collar employment – in which such a tradition is lacking. Along with the declining size of the workplace, this shift is often associated with a lack of trade union representation, an additional factor inhibiting the development of collective action. Several authors have argued that, from a purely economic point of view, collective action is irrational. Olson, for example, argues that as the benefits of collective action are not confined to those who participate, economic rationality would lead individuals to profit from the actions of others without participating themselves.30 This is all the more true of the French case, where, not only are the benefits of collective action dispensed to all workers without distinction, but engagement in collective action may also have negative consequences for those taking part, particularly as the right to strike is an individual one. Reynaud therefore argues that collective action depends above all upon moral obligation, that which derives from ties of solidarity, exchange and mutual help, from convictions, faith and doctrine or from the internal rules of an organization. It is this that makes a solid and effective group, capable of concerted action, out of activists. It is the strength of their convictions and the intensity of their exchanges, their obedience to common imperatives that enable them to act and mobilise others.31 As social links based on the notion of belonging to a class have weakened, so has collective mobilisation in defence of ‘class interests’. Group ties within the workplace are still necessary for collective action to take place, but the nature of these ties has changed, being based on an occupational, or other group, identity rather than a class one. This is not to say that this identity was not present before the 1980s. Indeed, Capdevielle has shown that it was present until the late 1970s before undergoing a resurgence in the late 1980s.32 The difference, however, is that such identities were subsumed within a wider class identity. The decline of communism as the vehicle of a social and political project for the working classes, along with social and economic change, however, has weakened the class solidarity that prevented a fragmentation of demands along occupational lines. As a result, action is taken for pragmatic reasons, with individuals taking action as employees of a particular company or members of a profession rather than as members of a class. Hence, national ‘days of action’ called for by the CGT have declined in numerical and symbolic importance, and where collective action does take place, it is characterised by ‘localism’ and sectional interests.

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The rise of the corporatiste strike With localisation, strikes have become more corporatiste, in the French sense of the term – aimed at defending sectional interests rather than pushing for reform within the context of a national class struggle. From 1986 onwards, such strikes have occurred, amongst others, among railway workers (1986–7), teachers (1987), nurses (1988), Parisian Metro workers (1986–7) and Air France employees (1988). With the decline of private sector trade unionism, such strikes have also become a largely public sector phenomenon. This partly reflects the government’s use of public sector pay restraint as an economic policy tool within its ‘competitive disinflation’ strategy from the mid-1980s, as well as budgetary and manpower cuts and demands for greater flexibility that result in a deterioration of working conditions. It also reflects the fact that this part of the workforce benefits from a much higher degree of employment security than in the private sector. Nevertheless, in the private sector, such strikes have also hit the fishing and road haulage industries in the 1990s. Although their heyday may have been during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the phenomenon is not dead. During their fiveweek long strike in March–April 2001, midwives created a coordination to maintain unity during their strike over pay, grades and manpower.33 These coordination movements have certain common features.34 First, they are ephemeral, generally only lasting for the duration of the strike movement, and are characterised by their radicalism – sometimes accompanied by high-profile direct action such as the lorry drivers’ blocking of motorways and access to petrol stations in 1992, 1996 and 1997 – and rank and file democracy. In these respects, they can be seen as the heirs of the French anarcho-syndicalist tradition. Second, those taking part are often young, and well qualified, but reject traditional union organisations for their excessive politicisation and consequent division. The strikes in the SNCF and RATP over the winter of 1986–7, for example, followed shortly after strike calls by trade union organisations over the classic demands of pay and employment levels were only weakly supported. On the other hand, with the exception of the autonomous drivers’ union, the FGAAC (Fédération générale autonome des agents de conduite), the trade unions recoiled from calling a strike on the eve of the Christmas holidays, fearing a lack of support from a general public that relied upon the transport system to travel to family festivities. The strike thus broke out outside of traditional union structures, although it was later supported by the CFDT, and, later still, by the CGT. Despite their involvement, occupation-based coordination movements were formed by train drivers and railway workers in order not to leave the direction of the strike in the hands of the trade unions. As a result of the sidelining of traditional union organisations, these strikes are often long and bitter as strikers find it difficult to aggregate their various frustrations into negotiable demands, while the representativeness and legitimacy of union bargaining stances are called into question. Third, these demands are very concrete and often

164 Conflict related to the defence of the profession and of the status and career prospects of those exercising it. Hence, an identity based upon the profession rather than a sense of belonging to a class – and a fortiori, an exploited one – is at the root of the discontent expressed through these movements. Such movements therefore reflect the decline of collective class solidarity, and its replacement by an identity based upon an occupation and enterprise culture. For Capdevielle, this professional identity has been reinforced as class-based identities have been undermined by economic and social change. As a result, these movements, although radical in nature, do not contain an ideology of protest or a political or social project, in contrast to those of before the 1980s, and cannot extend themselves beyond the professional group concerned. As a consequence, such strikes, especially in the public sector, are often portrayed as characterised by immobilism and the protection of the sectional interests of privileged workers, in opposition to the necessary modernisation of the profession or the ‘general interest’. Thus, in the run-up to the 1995 strike movement, the neo-liberal Finance Minister Alain Madelin remarked upon the ‘injustice between the French in the protected sector and those in the exposed sector’, highlighting the fact that the former had to pay only 37 years of contributions to receive a full pension, while those in the private sector had to pay 40, and President Chirac correlated civil service wages with tax levels.35 Such attempts by political leaders to isolate strikers were not, however, successful, despite the evidently sectional nature of these movements. Opinion polls consistently recorded high levels of support for strikers despite the inconvenience caused. Indeed, after three weeks of the 1986–7 SNCF strike, and in spite of the problems encountered at a time of high frequentation of the public transport system, 55 per cent of French people supported the strikers.36 In effect, large numbers of public sector workers could sympathise and identify with their colleagues.37

From the defence of sectional interests to the refusal of neo-liberal globalisation On the surface, the November–December 1995 strike wave had much in common with the coordination movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a prelude to the strike, public sector unions had already engaged in a oneday strike on 10 October 1995 in protest at a wage freeze, manpower reductions and government announcements of an intended reform of pensions that would result in an increase from 37 to 40 years of payments for a full pension. Amongst railway workers, there was also the question of ending the SNCF’s monopoly of freight traffic under pressure from the EU. Such concerns, although fundamentally sectional, were articulated with a wider concern to defend public services.38 In September and October, in complete contradiction to the electoral promises of President Chirac, tax rises and increased social security charges were announced within the framework of a

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neo-liberal economic policy,39 culminating in Prime Minister Alain Juppé’s announcement of social security reform in the National Assembly on 15 November. This included the CRDS – a new tax of 0.5 per cent on all income to help soak up the deficit of the social security funds – a reform of the health care system, and greater parliamentary control over all social security expenditure. At the same time, the Prime Minister announced a reform of public sector pension provisions along the lines mentioned above. The response of the unions was swift. The fonctionnaires and railway workers called for a strike on 24 November, and were joined in the following week by Parisian transport workers, gas and electricity workers. From 4 December, the strike spread to other public sector organisations to become the largest strike seen in France since 1968.40 According to figures from the Ministry for the Interior, nearly a million people took to the streets on 12 December, at the height of the movement.41 By the end of the strike, cemented by a social summit involving unions, employers and government officials on 21 December, the unions had managed to get the reform of pensions and of the SNCF postponed indefinitely. The ‘Juppé Plan’ for the reform of the social security system was, however, to be implemented the following year. The November–December strike wave gave rise to many varying interpretations among French political and intellectual elites. Some saw it as an essentially corporatiste strike, aimed at defending purely sectional interests. Pascal Perrineau and Michel Wieviorka, for example, criticised the strike in Le Monde for its defence of vested interests and lack of global perspective, particularly in its failure to establish any ‘articulation between the individuation and internationalisation of our society’.42 In essence, for these, the movement is seen as a defensive call to protect French public services, with no alternative vision to reconcile the competing demands of employees and economic globalisation being proposed. Having no long-term or societal perspective, the strikes of November–December 1995 were not a true social movement, but an ‘imaginary’ one.43 The original demands and the drift back to work once certain demands – particularly the pensions question – were met would support such an analysis. Others, however, have seen in this strike a wider malaise that rejected a certain vision of society articulated by political leaders who were increasingly cut off from the populace they were supposed to represent. Thus, for people like Pierre Bourdieu, the strike opposed the destruction of what could be termed the basis of the French version of the ‘European social model’: democratic government and excellent public services available to all in the aim of reducing social inequalities.44 The neo-liberal direction of European integration and economic globalisation are seen as the root of this malaise. European directives aimed at the dismantling of public sector monopolies in the provision of certain services, and the impact of the Maastricht criteria for economic and monetary union, were squeezing the state’s margin for manoeuvre. In effect, the reform of the welfare state, particularly

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in the absence of any widespread consultation, was equated with the abandonment of the ‘republican pact’ between governors and governed in response to European integration and the dictatorship of global markets within a purely liberal logic. Within this outlook, although it remained absent from the conflict, the European Union, with its economic liberalism and requirements for reducing state deficits to meet the Maastricht criteria, became the ‘unspoken essential element of the strike’.45 Leaving aside the debate about whether the 1995 strike wave constituted a true ‘social movement’, it can be seen to have certain elements in common with the earlier coordination movements, although it was led by established trade unions. First, as we have seen, their primary motivation was sectional, to defend certain ‘privileges’ or ‘guaranteed rights’ associated with membership of certain professions. In this respect, it was easy for opponents to portray them as backward-looking and a brake on necessary social and economic modernisation. Second, despite this, the strikers benefited from startling levels of public sympathy given the amount of inconvenience caused, particularly in Paris and other large cities, where public transport was brought to a standstill for virtually a month.46 In 1995, however, public attitudes for the strikers were not limited to a mere expression of sympathy for those facing similar pressures in their working lives. Rather, the accumulation of the different parts of the public sector out on strike and the common rallying cry of a rejection of the Juppé Plan for social security reform led to an articulation between the specific/ sectional and the general. The public sector’s defence of employment levels, pension rights and wage progression was seen as a defence of employment as a whole, and of public services and the welfare state against the neo-liberal direction of economic globalisation and European integration. Indeed, the geography of protests in 1995 closely mirrored that of the ‘no’ vote which narrowly lost the Maastricht referendum of 20 September 1992 with 49.2 per cent of votes cast.47 It was, in essence, seen as a question of the choice about the future direction of society. Although no alternatives were put forward by the strikers, the one sketched out by governing elites was clearly rejected. In this respect, many commentators saw the movement as a ‘strike by proxy’,48 with public sector workers, in secure employment, striking on behalf of all workers and supported by those in the private sector, who could not take to the streets because of their insecure labour market position. From this perspective, the 1995 strike represents a considerable turning point in the recent history of French strikes. This is not because it signals a return to conflict and militancy, as some predicted at the time. An examination of strike figures and the prevalence of localised conflict for subsequent years are enough to refute such a hypothesis (see above). It is a turning point, however, because, for the first time, European construction, the global economy and their impact upon working and social conditions within France became major themes, however implicit, in a major French strike movement, and thereby imprinted themselves on the national consciousness.

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Themes such as the role of the state, the quality of public services and occupational statuses had been present in previous coordination movements, but remained tightly confined within the profession concerned and not articulated with these wider concerns. Thus, when looked at in historical perspective, the 1995 strike movement appears to represent a bridge between the relatively isolated, sectionalist defence of employment and working conditions of the coordination movements and the articulation of that defence with more global economic concerns. That such an articulation was necessary was brutally brought home to French wage earners in the following years. In 1997, French Renault workers appeared to have learnt the lesson that the defence of jobs required international and not just national struggle. On 27 February that year, Renault announced the closure of its Vilvorde plant in Belgium in order to shift the production carried out there to Douai and Flins in France, as well as to factories in Spain and Slovenia, with the aim of reducing production costs. This led to ‘the first eurostrike’49 on 7 March, as action was carried out in Choisy de Cléon, Le Mans, Orléans, Maubeuge, and even Douai, which was to benefit from some of the jobs lost in Vilvorde. French workers also participated in demonstrations in Billancourt and Brussels.50 Although the site was finally closed following an agreement between management and employees on 3 July, the former was forced to delay the implementation of its decision in order to consult its European works committee (see Chapter 7). As the above case shows, despite unprecedented examples of international solidarity, it is extremely difficult for trade unions to combat the crossborder reorganisation of multinational companies, and this, as we saw in the Introduction, is what employees and their organisations most fear in an open, globally competitive economy. At the turn of the century, several strikes in France articulated this fear all too clearly. March and April 2001 were punctuated by a series of announcements made by companies to the effect that they would be laying off employees.51 The most publicised of these were Marks and Spencer and Danone. These announcements led to widespread action in the defence of jobs, wherein one could again detect the articulation between sectionalist concerns for the preservation of employment and general concerns concerning workers’ rights in a global economy. Marks and Spencer announced the closure of all of its stores in mainland Europe on 29 March, with the loss of 1700 jobs in France. In this case, it was the brutality of the announcement that shocked French workers and politicians, with no prior consultation or even information having taken place. The result was a strike in defence of their jobs by Marks and Spencer employees in France, and a denouncement of decisions taken by far-off managers to please shareholders. A ‘eurodemonstration’ was also staged in London by the CGT, CFDT and FO as well as the ETUC in an attempt to gain the sympathy of British colleagues, but this only met with bewilderment despite the support of the TUC.52 In the end, the redundancy plans

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had to be postponed (but could not be prevented), as the company had not complied with French law on informing works committees of collective redundancies.53 In the case of Danone, anger was provoked by the announcement, again on 29 March, that the LU biscuit factories in Calais and Ris-Orange were to close, with the loss of 570 jobs after the group had made a profit of four billion francs the previous year. Once again ‘redundancies for the benefit of shareholders’ were denounced as the link was made between the plight of French employees and the demands of anonymous shareholders seeking maximum returns on their investments through international reorganisation.54 LU workers also turned to the state for protection from the ravages of transnational capitalism, and to their compatriots through the organisation of a boycott of Danone products, a move that was only partially successful, despite being supported by many politicians and local mayors.55 While both cases benefited from the sympathy of the French public, this was not enough to prevent the reorganisations occurring. The Danone case did, however, lead to a tightening of the law on collective redundancy through the Law on Social Modernisation, passed in June 2001 (see Chapter 2).

Continuity and change in conflict Thus, levels of conflict aside, what appears to have changed as far as industrial conflict is concerned in France is its focus. Until the late 1960s, strikes were seen as a weapon to be used in an ongoing class struggle, and concrete aims, usually, but not exclusively, centred around wage demands were articulated with a social project aimed at the transformation of capitalism. In the late 1960s, the emergence of new occupational groups – young, immigrant or female semi-skilled workers – coincided with the displacement of conflict to the workplace and the rise of qualitative themes. With economic crisis, strikes became more defensive and focused on the preservation of employment, but still looked to the state for answers. With the decentralisation of industrial relations from the early 1980s onwards, strike movements became more localised and centred on the immediate employer. The state as employer increasingly became the target of discontent as the majority of strikes tended to occur in the public sector. The rise of coordination movements in the mid-1980s reflects this shift away from class-based action to occupationally-based strike movements pushing narrow sectional demands. With the development of debates on European construction and economic globalisation, and their detrimental effects on employment in France, such sectional demands have once again become articulated with wider social concerns. In this respect, the November–December strike wave represents an intermediary stage between the narrow sectionalism of the coordinations and the articulation of such sectionalism with the wider societal and global concerns of recent strike movements. Such change should not, however, be exaggerated. After the 1995 strike,

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conflict once again became fragmented. The ‘eurostrike’ and international solidarity such as that seen during the Renault–Vilvorde dispute are rare phenomena. Most disputes remain limited to the immediate workplace or company, have a decidedly sectionalist hue to them and often involve the state in some way or another – either as employer or as mediator and/or legislator. It is not surprising, given the declining union strength and the high rates of unemployment of the 1980s and 1990s, that the level of conflicts has also fallen.56 Conflict, however, has not disappeared, and may resurface with improving labour market conditions, particularly where wages are concerned. Indeed, as unemployment fell and labour shortages appeared in some sectors, evidence of increased combativeness could be seen at the local level at the end of the twentieth century. In 1999, almost all of the disputes occurred at local level, mainly in large companies, while ‘generalised’ industrial action accounted for only 1 per cent of the 573,561 days lost, compared with 2 per cent in 1998 and 14 per cent in 1997.57 In the same year, negotiations over the reduction in working time contributed to a 60 per cent rise in strike activity in the private and semi-public sector. Furthermore, in a context of economic growth and falling unemployment, the beginning of 2001 saw widespread strikes over pay in many sectors, after years of wage restraint linked to the implementation of the 35-hour week.58 As wage moderation helped companies increase profit margins in spite of the impact of the 35-hour week, employees demanded a more equal distribution of the wealth created over the previous few years. Moreover, by the end of the 1990s, trade unions appeared to have halted the development of coordination movements and to have remained central actors in social conflict, being at the origin of eight out of ten strikes, with the CGT calling one in three. A further one in three is called by more than one union, with the CFDT coming far behind, being at the origin of only one in ten strikes.59 Wages are still the motive for most strikes – nearly onequarter of them – followed by employment and working time.60 Nevertheless, these strikes are sometimes led, in opposition to the traditional union organisations, by the new hard-line trade unions such as SUD, which in this respect are the inheritors of the 1980s and 1990s coordination movements. Such was the case, for example, in the March–April 2001 railway strike, when SUD-Rail was at the forefront of the movement, along with the autonomous train drivers’ union the FGAAC. Both continued with the strike movement long after the CGT had called for a return to work on 7 April, following ten days of strike action. Furthermore, the strike remained largely limited to the long-distance train drivers who were often seen as a ‘labour aristocracy’ by their colleagues within the company.61 Although local disputes over employment, working time and wages account for the majority of disputes – over 75 per cent in the private sector62 – ‘national days of action’ are not totally a thing of the past, as the 1995 strike movement showed. At the beginning of the twenty-first century,

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when they have attempted to mobilise on a national level, unions have met with varying levels of success. The demonstration against the Danone redundancies, called only by the PCF and the CGT among the major trade unions, in Calais on 21 April 2001, attracted paltry numbers (14,000 according to the police).63 On the other hand, MEDEF proposals to reform the supplementary pensions system, which would have threatened the right to retire at 60 on a full pension, led to large-scale demonstrations on 25 January 2001, involving 300,000 people in many large French cities, including an estimated 80,000 in Paris.64 Confronted with trade union unity on the issue, MEDEF backed down, and on 10 February 2001, signed an agreement with the CFDT and CFTC renewing the arrangements for financing supplementary pensions until 31 December 2002 (see Chapter 2). With the exception of this latest example, however, such ‘national days of action’ are generally called on a sectional basis, as could be seen in disputes in the health and education sectors in 2001. Even more telling was the fact that two national days of action were called within a few days of each other in January 2001 by a unified union movement, but the objectives of each remained distinctly separate. The first, mentioned above, was to protest at MEDEF’s proposals for a reform of the supplementary pension system, while the second, five days later, on 30 January, concerned civil service pay. While the first was aimed at both public and private sector employees, trade unions asked private sector employees to abstain from the second in order not to confuse the issues.65 Furthermore, although mobilisation for the ‘day of action’ was disappointing for the unions in the Danone dispute, this and other conflicts have shown that French unions still have the capacity to articulate strike movements with wider questions such as developments in global capitalism. In both this and the Marks and Spencer dispute, unions were highly successful in gaining media coverage for the question of shareholder value and the treatment of employees in multinational companies. As the 1995 strikes showed, if the right nerve is touched, French unions still have the capacity to bring many people out onto the streets despite their weakness. Indeed, this weakness means that spectacular events, whereby lorry drivers block roads or tens of thousands of people process through the streets of major towns carrying flags and banners, are still very much a feature of many French strikes. On the one hand, such events gain much-needed publicity and, hopefully, from the strikers’ point of view, sympathy from the general public. Such media attention and sympathy contributes to creating a favourable balance of power so that otherwise weak unions can pressure the state into intervention – a tactic clearly visible in the LU-Danone dispute. In a sense, such an articulation renews with the past. Modern commentators may condemn the corporatisme of many strike movements of the last two decades, but self-interest is nothing new in strikes. The success of trade unions, and particularly the CGT, in the period of Fordist growth was to articulate self-interested wage struggles with wider, class-based societal

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struggle, and this contributed to a vast improvement in the living and working conditions of large sections of the French population. Likewise, as Oppenheim has pointed out, the OS strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s were essentially sectionalist,66 but they fed into a wider debate about the dehumanisation of work through Taylorist processes. Nowadays, conflict may increasingly concern the maintenance of employment or ‘guaranteed rights’ and therefore be defensive rather than a vehicle for positive social change, but it carries within it, often explicitly, the rejection of a neo-liberal framework for European construction and economic globalisation. In this way, local struggles are articulated with the defence of a social model won through the articulation of local and wider struggles in a previous period. Thus, there is much continuity in the nature of industrial conflict in France. Nevertheless, a change of focus is also apparent. Trade union involvement in anti-globalisation campaigns, and their now seemingly obligatory presence at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and in the corteges of protesters at world economic and European summits, suggests that developments in the direction of international protest are a distinct possibility. Indeed, there is evidence that the tradition of imbuing sectional or local conflicts with a wider societal significance is not dead. On the contrary, it may have been given a new lease of life with redundancies in several French and foreign-owned companies in France being linked to economic globalisation and the rise of shareholder value. Following the antiglobalisation demonstrations at the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, the European summit in Nice in December 2000 witnessed large-scale demonstrations. The CGT, CFDT, FO and UNSA were present under the umbrella of the ETUC to press the case for the integration of the Charter of Fundamental Rights into European treaties, while G10 and the FSU were present to denounce the weakness of the Charter.67 Such a globalisation of concerns, however, may bring its own dangers for the labour movement. Economic, social and technological change may mean that the workers’ movement, however broadly defined, and the forms of conflict associated with it, are losing their centrality within capitalist society.68 Thus, anti-capitalist protest has shifted from the workplace, and the place of workers in society, to focus on issues concerned with the globalisation of capitalism. The direct and other protest actions of ‘new social movements’, based upon anti-globalisation, environmental concerns or Third World/ global poverty issues, therefore constitute the vanguard of the fight against global capitalism, while the ‘workers’ movement’ has been displaced from its central role in the struggle for social transformation. Trade unions have formed links with some of the new social movements and have engaged in collective action and protest with them. However, on the domestic front, this is not a movement for social transformation, but a reaction to change in global capitalism. The aim is not to transform French capitalism, but to protect it against the threat of neo-liberal economic globalisation. In other words, it is a rearguard action to protect what remains of the Fordist

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compromise and the French model of society – involving a generous welfare state and a powerful central state ensuring full employment and the provision of essential public services – as it is gradually whittled away by the adaptation of the French economy to a neo-liberal global economy. At workplace level, this increasingly translates into demands for the preservation of employment or of certain ‘guaranteed rights’ that are seen as threatened by processes of European integration and globalisation.

Conclusion The level of strike activity and the nature of strikes have changed considerably since the heyday of the Fordist compromise. Up until the late 1960s, the CGT’s dominant position within the French labour movement meant that frequent, repetitive strike action was used to harass employers and push up wage levels. Such sectionalist action, however, was given an ideological colouring through calls to working-class solidarity and the supposedly transformative power of social conflict. Within this outlook, national days of action also sought to pressure the state into reform. In a situation where collective bargaining was underdeveloped and workplace dialogue refused by an employer class that jealously guarded its authority within the workplace, such action represented a rational and coherent strategy to improve the material condition of the working classes. Such a strategy, however, began to unravel in the late 1960s as the demand for qualitative change grew in the workplace, challenging not only the scientific organisation of work that formed one of the essential pillars of the Fordist compromise. Trade union strategies that relied upon the homogenisation and aggregation of demands at the national level were also called into question. The CFDT responded to, and began to articulate, some of these demands following its radicalisation in 1968, but economic crisis and its subsequent recentrage and support for the 1981–4 socialist government meant that it did not reap the benefits of workplace militancy. As unions, particularly the CGT and CFDT, lost membership due to their support of a socialist–communist coalition that presided over increasing unemployment and austerity policies, coordinations grew as a challenge to the traditional union organisations, particularly amongst public sector workers. The essential difference between the periods preceding and following the economic crises of the 1970s, apart from the level of activity, is that in the earlier period strike movements articulated quantitative wage struggle with a desire for change, based upon the aspirations of a relatively homogeneous working class. Since the late 1970s, however, they have been essentially defensive, attempting to cling to the gains previously won, often through struggle. National economic restructuring and the actions of employers and the state, under the pressure of intensified global competition, are evidently factors here. These have brought about not only mass unemployment, but also the fragmentation of the working class through the accompanying social

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and economic change. It would be wrong, however, to ascribe the subsequent localism and sectionalism of strike movements simply to these phenomena. Although coordinations reflected a resurgence in occupational identity, as Jean-Pierre Oppenheim has argued, this was already apparent in the OS strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s: ‘The evolution of job classifications, in distinguishing between unskilled and skilled workers, in introducing the “intermediary” category of white collar employees, technicians and supervisors, shows the extent to which the “working class” was no longer an entity that could share the same slogans or even generate the same solidarities.’69 The shift in the nature of strikes away from a class-based action towards a more sectionalist outlook can therefore be attributed to long-run trends in the evolution of the workforce, particularly as, in the late 1960s and early 1970s as well as in the late 1980s and early 1990s, young workers were at the forefront of the movements. Thus, when looking at conflict, it can be seen that the Fordist compromise was already under strain for social, as well as economic, reasons from the late 1960s. Certainly, sectionalist and localised conflict has been reinforced by economic change since the late 1970s, but it was already present, albeit in a different, less defensive guise, before. Indeed, the real impact of economic globalisation on social conflict in France can only be detected in a direct fashion belatedly, from 1995 onwards. Before then, international competition and the consequent squeezed profit margins, industrial restructuring, high unemployment and labour market fragmentation all contributed to the decline in strike activity and its increasing localisation. It is only from 1995, though, that European integration and the anonymous shareholders of multinational companies begin to be blamed for the deterioration of social and economic conditions. The result has been a return to an articulation between local and sectionalist concerns on the one hand and wider societal concerns on the other. Whether the organisational impediments to such a globalisation of concerns can be overcome or not in order that such an evolution is durable remains to be seen. One major problem will be the focus of any future protests. While the state may be an appropriate target for public sector workers seeking to defend their ‘guaranteed rights’, as the Danone case has shown, it may no longer be the appropriate interlocutor for private sector workers faced with the actions of multinational employers.

Conclusion

Globalisation and labour regulation There has been much debate about the reality of economic globalisation and its effects. Some argue that the world economy has been globalised for centuries, and that present concerns are not much more than a smokescreen erected by employers and certain governments in order to justify a neoliberal focus for economic policy-making that places power more firmly than ever in the hands of capital.1 Others see the process as a very real one, often with inevitably dire consequences for organised labour as regime competition leads to the dismantling of social protection and employment rights in order to provide the optimal conditions for inward investment and capital accumulation in the new global economy.2 The view taken here is that increases in international competition, volumes of imports and exports and foreign direct investment, as well as the growing power of institutional investment capital on an international scale do indeed herald a structural change in capitalism that started in the latter half of the twentieth century. This change is not purely quantitative either. Product markets are no longer conceived of on a purely or predominantly national scale, but are international and fragmented. This has been made possible not only by the dismantling of economic barriers to cross-border investment, production and marketing, but also by technological progress. The communications revolution has made information available on a global scale and permits exchanges of information to take place in real time. The automation and computerisation of production allow for a productive flexibility that can respond to the new market demands. Meanwhile economies of scale in such production require, more than ever before, wider – i.e. international – markets in order to optimise the potential for capital accumulation and to achieve the critical mass necessary for companies to compete on an international level. Finally, examples such as those of Marks and Spencer and Danone amply demonstrate the extent to which shareholder value has become important in investment and employment decisions as the search for increasing returns on investment capital means that profitability is no longer necessarily positively correlated to output or productivity. As we have seen,

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France has been at the forefront of such developments, with large numbers of jobs dependent upon companies operating in international financial, labour and product markets. From a regulationist perspective, such a change in the mode of accumulation of capital inevitably has consequences on the regime of regulation of labour. The focus of economic growth is no longer on expanding the domestic market as a source of profit, but on seeking to expand the firm’s activity on the international stage. The link between domestic wage growth, productivity and profitability that was central to Fordist growth patterns is therefore broken. As profits are sought in markets other than that in which production occurs, wages are seen in terms of cost rather than as a factor of demand. There thus occurs a downwards pressure on wages and social protection, including protection from the ravages of international competition in the labour market. In terms of labour regulation, such trends translate into increasing flexibility and an intensification of work for employees as their collective defences in the workplace and at the national level are dismantled, while international regulatory mechanisms remain weak and ineffective. A return to a form of liberal economic and labour market regulation, reminiscent of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becomes the order of the day as the state loses its capacity for national economic management and withdraws from the industrial relations arena. In the French case, so the argument goes, there is a profound shift from state-centred labour regulation to ‘microcorporatism’, based upon the ‘enforced cooperation’ of employees and their representatives with management plans at the workplace level.3

Microcorporatism: the French case Evidence from the French case can certainly be marshalled to support such an argument. As we have seen, the state’s margin for manoeuvre in national economic management has been reduced, although it could be argued that through European integration it has regained or maintained some economic sovereignty that would otherwise have been lost due to the developments in global capitalism described above. What is less in doubt, however, is that the state has lost its capacity to protect the jobs of those working for multinational companies in France, whether French or foreign owned, when these companies engage in labour shedding as part of the international restructuring of their operations. In the face of fears over such developments, employer demands for flexibility, both in the substantive norms covering the employment contract and in procedural norms, have been largely acceded to by the state and forced upon trade unions. Labour is deployed in a far more flexible manner and the wage relationship is increasingly individualised. Collective bargaining, too, has become more flexible and has been decentralised, with the links between the different levels of bargaining weakened. Portrayed as the necessary adaptation to global economic pressures, such trends have

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reinforced the hand of employers and resulted in rising profitability while wage earners suffer the consequences in terms of increased job insecurity, stress and low wage growth. In addition, ongoing welfare state reform, particularly in the areas of unemployment benefit and pensions, increasingly shifts responsibility and risk from the collectivity to the individual in an attempt to reduce the financial burden on the former in the name of international economic competitiveness. Certainly, trade unions have emerged much weakened from the changes of the past three decades. Industrial restructuring in the wake of increased international competition, especially for traditional heavy industries, and the sociological changes that accompanied the attendant shift in employment patterns, have certainly been a major factor in declining trade union strength since the late 1970s. The changing composition and fragmentation of the working class, the collapse of the Soviet communist model and the triumph of global capitalism are all undoubtedly factors in the decline of the CGT. More generally, an inability to protect jobs and the decentralisation of industrial relations have affected all trade unions in France, although the CFDT’s strategy of compromise bargaining does now seem to be bearing fruit, in terms of membership numbers at least. Given the grave weaknesses of French trade unions and the startling decline in levels of industrial conflict in France since the 1970s, combined with employer strategies aimed at integrating workers into the capitalist ethos of the enterprise, however, this could be seen merely as a case of enforced cooperation. However, such a mechanistic, even deterministic, view of the relationship between changes in the economic and industrial relations spheres does not tell the whole story. While trends towards microcorporatism are certainly discernible in France, such trends are undermined by elements of continuity. Economic globalisation has resulted in pressure for change in the above directions, but this change has not occurred in a historical, political or social vacuum. The pre-existing characteristics of the system of industrial relations in France, in particular, employer attitudes, trade union structures and strategies, as well as the role of the state, have all had a major mediating effect on the extent and shape of new developments. Thus, employer demands for greater flexibility have not resulted in the death of Taylorist practices in the workplace as functional flexibility has been difficult to achieve amongst workers deskilled by a previous reliance upon Taylorism for productivity gains. Rather than heralding a radical transformation of workplace relations, new management strategies testify to the perseverance of French management attitudes towards control of the workplace. In this respect, new communications strategies and shifts towards greater employee responsibility through quality assurance procedures and the like are not evidence of a new way of thinking for managers (although they can be in some more enlightened quarters). Instead, they have been tailored to fit old attitudes and have more to do with control of the workplace than its democratisation. Likewise, structures for employee

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representation have not democratised the workplace in spite of the aims of the Auroux Laws, as strategies have been mobilised that nullify such lofty ambitions. This may be seen as a reassertion of management control, but in reality this control was already extensive in the heyday of the French version of the Fordist compromise. Managers and employers have merely reacted to increasing skills levels among certain sections of the working population by implementing more sophisticated control strategies. In addition, such strategies are sometimes only new in the extent to which they are used. Thus, the individualisation of the wage relationship is certainly a growing phenomenon, but is not entirely new. The subjective use of the bonus and promotions system under Fordist relations of production is nothing if not an attempt to manipulate behaviour through a dose of individualism in labour regulation. The pre-existing configuration of industrial relations in France is again important in explaining the extent of trade union decline, and the factors here are political and historical as much as economic. Trade union division and weakness meant that French trade unions were never able to force regular and institutionalised collective bargaining on the state at the national level, or on hostile employers at the local level, until the advent of the Auroux Laws of 1982. The result was a conflictual industrial relations system, and trade union strategies aimed at national-level political change. Reliance upon the state for reform and change, however, further contributed to trade union weakness and left them exposed when it came to confronting major political, economic and social change from the mid-1970s onwards. While it is true that the state has attempted to reinforce the position of collective labour in France in order to extricate itself from labour regulation, the fact remains that this strategy has not had the desired effect, particularly at the workplace level. Thus, workplace union branches and bodies for employee representation have been given new rights in order that unions can bargain on an equal footing with employers. It is, as has been argued here, highly questionable whether this has happened. In effect, unions remain chronically weak and largely dependent upon the state for their survival. The weakness of unions is certainly reflected in the decline in strike levels since the 1970s in France, even if wage conflict has not been eradicated altogether and in fact re-emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century in response to perceptions that social justice was not served by high levels of company profits coexisting with wage restraint. The localised nature of the bulk of such conflict is, on the face of it, consistent with the microcorporatist thesis that the decentralisation of industrial relations has weakened workplace unions by cutting them off from their national confederations and wider networks of solidarity. Once again, though, the relationship between economic change and industrial relations in France is not simple and unilinear. The rise of sectionalist demands and strike movements has not destroyed traditions of national solidarity. Rather, these movements have inserted themselves into such traditions, articulating essentially

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sectionalist interests with wider social concerns. In the post-war period, wage demands – which are nothing if not sectionalist in nature – were inserted into class-based mobilisation aimed at social transformation. From 1995 onwards, public sector workers have succeeded in articulating their concerns over their employment status with wider concerns over the future of the French model of society – based on the provision of high levels of public services by a strong state pursuing the general interest – in the face of the neo-liberal direction of European integration. And this has been achieved with often startling results in terms of public support for their cause. National expressions of support have also been forthcoming when the protection of jobs has been articulated with wider concerns over the financialisation of the economy and the growing weight of shareholder value in investment and employment decisions. Although ultimately unsuccessful, strikes over redundancies at companies such as Marks and Spencer and Danone effectively demonstrate that such conflict does not remain purely localised, but is inserted within, and contributes to, a debate over the future direction of social regulation. Furthermore, impressive and effective – although admittedly only in the short term – national days of action have been organised to protest against welfare state and pension reform in the last ten years. Such actions again bring to the fore a debate about the future direction of society – a debate from which the state cannot extricate itself. Indeed, the state’s central role in French industrial relations has not been easy to dispense with. Collective bargaining may have been decentralised but it still remains largely state sponsored, as the Aubry Laws on the reduction of working time amply demonstrate. Indeed, as we have shown, these laws codify in the most minute detail what can and can not be done in the workplace with respect to the working hours of employees. Decentralisation may have occurred, but France, with its incredibly detailed Labour Code, still has one of the most highly regulated employment systems in the world. Rather than the withdrawal of the state, what has been witnessed since the early 1980s is a shift in the nature of state intervention in France. Before then, attempts to erect a system of regulation based on autonomous collective bargaining largely ended in failure. The lesson learnt by the socialist government that came to power in 1981 was that, in the French context, voluntarism was not an alternative to statist regulation. Hence, the legal obligation to bargain and the progressive establishment of a framework in which rather than legislating directly, the state devolves the precise content and implementation of legislation to the social partners. Thus, although bargaining may have been made more flexible through the notion of ‘dispensatory’ agreements, ‘majority consent’ and mandatement, it still takes place within a framework largely regulated by the state. Even where dispensation is permitted, this is within parameters established by the state. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that through social legislation and other forms of intervention, such as the minimum wage, the state sets a floor for employee rights applicable to all companies. Indeed, as we have

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seen, the frequent complaint of employers over the last few years is that the social intervention of the state has increased as its powers of economic regulation have waned. This is not to say that economic globalisation has not affected industrial relations in France. As we have argued, decentralisation has occurred in response to demands for greater flexibility as a means of ensuring the competitiveness of French companies. The decentralisation of collective bargaining is the most important and visible element of this trend. This, however, does not inevitably mean microcorporatism, despite the weakness of labour at the local level. Certainly, a further shift in the direction of microcorporatist labour regulation cannot be ruled out in the future if, as the MEDEF desire and the new right-wing administration propose, local agreements take precedence over higher-level agreements and the law. Such a development would, however, face some serious obstacles.

Obstacles to microcorporatism in France First, the proposed reforms not only aim to give local agreements precedence over higher ones, but also make them dependent upon being signed by unions gaining a majority of votes in workplace elections.4 One effect of this would be to deprive the CGT of any remaining systematic opposition to the signing of agreements in the knowledge that they would be implemented anyway if signed by another union organisation. This would mean bringing the CGT even further out of isolation and so deprive employers of the easy strategic option of bypassing it, and playing unions off against each other, by signing agreements with minority unions in the workplace. Rather than reinforcing microcorporatism, then, the reform may well reinforce the strength and legitimacy of workplace trade unions as their ability to engage in workplace regulation would depend upon their ability to prove that they can effectively represent the interests of employees. Second, under the French constitution, the state is responsible for trade union, social security and labour law. Devolving the latter entirely to the social partners through a system of regulation based pre-eminently on collective bargaining may well therefore require a change in the Constitution.5 This, of course, is not an impossibility. The change in the presidential mandate in France from seven to five years was achieved via referendum. General public apathy meant that the reform was carried out despite the fact that only 30 per cent of those eligible bothered to turn out to vote. A similar scenario could well accompany any change in the area of labour law. However, as such a change would entail a fundamental change in social regulation, this cannot be guaranteed, particularly if the unions oppose such a move and attempt to mobilise voters on the issue for fear of losing the safety net that the state provides. Even if such a change were to take place, however, it would not necessarily give employers a free hand to regulate their workplaces. First, given

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strong state traditions in France, it is difficult to see how it could completely extricate itself from labour regulation. In particular, voters hold governments responsible for levels of unemployment, and it is difficult to see how this will change in a country where those in office have often been sanctioned for their inability to deal effectively with the problem over the last 30 years. Hence the Jospin government’s attempts to reinforce the conditions for redundancies through the Law on Social Modernisation. The timidity of the measures compared with the requirement for administrative authorisation for collective redundancies that prevailed from 1976 to 1986 demonstrates the state’s dilemma in the globally competitive economy. Too much regulation may well scare off future investors, but too little can be seen as an abdication of responsibility in the eyes of electors. Whether the French state can continue to provide high levels of social protection in isolation given the regime competition resulting from the internationalisation of labour markets and investment capital is a moot point.6 In any case, despite their scepticism with regard to politicians and the political system, French voters still look to the state to defend the general interest. At the end of 2001, 66 per cent desired a stricter regulation of financial markets, 64 per cent wished for greater control of companies with respect to workers’ rights and 55 per cent wanted greater control to be exercised over international trade. At the time of the Danone dispute, in January 2002, 59 per cent wanted tighter rules on redundancy.7 The result is a hesitancy on the part of the state between flexibility and regulation. Next, microcorporatism may well be challenged by a developing internationalisation of industrial relations. As we have seen, the international coordination of trade union action has taken place in some areas, particularly at a European level with the emergence, in the 1990s, of ‘Eurostrikes’. On an institutional level, developments have gone furthest in the realm of employee representation with the arrival of EWCs. Certainly, such developments are in their infancy and have not redressed the balance of power in favour of employees and their representatives when faced with international capital. However, as the effects of economic globalisation are felt more strongly, demands for a reinforcement of international labour regulation may well grow. If European integration, and enlargement to the East after 2004, continue on a predominantly neo-liberal footing, the legitimacy of the whole European project could conceivably be called into question by exposed populations in Western Europe. In this respect, some further concessions to the preserving of the ‘European social model’ may well be necessary to prevent the growth of anti-European sentiment and the rise of right-wing nationalism.

The need for international regulation in a global economy In essence, the present state of industrial relations in France reflects this tension between the neo-liberal direction of European integration and eco-

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nomic globalisation on the one hand and the fears these developments arouse as to the future of a social model constructed during the post-war period on the other. In France, this model involved central state provision of a high level of public services, hence the success of trade unions such as SUD in articulating fears about the future. A French version of, or a ‘tacit’, Fordist compromise underpinned this social model. As we have seen, this was based upon employer control of the workplace in exchange for the modernisation of productive processes, and this exchange permitted productivity rises that fed into higher levels of employment and wages – including the social wage – increased consumption and high profitability in a virtuous circle. In France, this compromise was more conflictual than in most other western economies, giving the state an important role in conflict mediation and labour regulation. As economic globalisation has undermined the basis of this compromise, familiar problems have come to the surface as the state hesitates between flexibility and regulation in the search for a new model of labour regulation. The MEDEF’s position is clear. Its refondation sociale project is profoundly neo-liberal in its inspiration and will shift risk onto employees even more than this has happened over the last three decades. For the state, such a scenario poses serious problems that echo those that it has had to confront in the past. A system of regulation based upon autonomous collective bargaining between employers and unions at the local level requires strong trade unions within the company if it is not to be a smokescreen for unilateral employer regulation and lead to a serious fragmentation of conditions of employment and therefore aggravated social inequalities. In the past, the state has substituted itself for strong trade unions in order to fulfil its historic mission as the motor of social progress and the guarantor of a certain level of social equality. As this role is undermined by economic globalisation, some form of international regulation would appear all the more urgent if the very legitimacy of market-based economic systems – so recently accepted by the labour movement in France – is not to be, in its turn, seriously undermined. The new social contract sketched out by the MEDEF, in which flexibility and risk are exchanged for imprecise aims, rather than guarantees, of employment, is insufficient. On a global level, US opposition to regulation, for example in the form of the Tobin tax on international currency speculation, suggests that regulation through bodies such as the WTO or ILO is not a realistic prospect for the foreseeable future. However, as the bulk of EU member states’ trade takes place with other member states, the reinforcement of European social policy represents a possibility for the construction of an international system of regulation that would take into account the growing internationalisation of trade and the need to preserve the benefits of a social model that the European labour movement fought so hard to achieve. This would evidently have to go further than the present provisions of the Charter of Fundamental Rights or EU directives on consultation or working time in order to eradicate wage

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competition among employees and regime competition across the different member states. Such regulation could, however, afford some protection for employees served by weak unions in France, while permitting the flexibility in labour deployment desired by employers, by providing a middle course between the rigidities of Fordism and an American-style abandonment to the forces and preferences of powerful multinational economic actors. The construction of such a model is far beyond the scope of this book, and will necessitate lengthy negotiations between states and the social partners at the European level. Although undoubtedly difficult and complex, the alternative of neo-liberal globalisation and increasing labour market and regime competition on an international scale makes the effort not only worthwhile, but also very necessary.

Notes

Introduction 1 Harris, N. (1987) The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of Ideology, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 198. 2 Ross, G. and Martin, A. (1999) ‘European unions face the millennium’, in A. Martin and G. Ross (eds) The Brave New World of European Labor: European Trade Unions at the Millennium, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–25. 3 Aglietta, M. (1997) Régulation et crises du capitalisme, Paris: Odile Jacob; (1998) Le capitalisme de demain, Paris: Fondation Saint-Simon; and (1999) ‘La globalisation financière’, in CEPII, L’économie mondiale 2000, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 52–67. 4 Ferner, A. and Hyman, R. (1998) ‘Introduction. Towards European industrial relations?’, in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Changing Industrial Relations in Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. xi–xxvi. 5 Ferner, A. and Hyman, R. (1998) ‘Introduction. Towards European industrial relations?’, in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Changing Industrial Relations in Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. xvi–xlix. Exceptions to declining union strength are Spain and Finland. Unions in other Scandinavian countries have also managed to limit their losses. See Ebbinghaus, B. and Visser, J. (eds) (2000) The Societies of Europe: Trade Unions in Western Europe since 1945, Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, p. 63. 6 See Boyer, R. (ed.) (1988) The Search for Labour Market Flexibility: The European Economies in Transition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, especially Boyer’s introduction: ‘Wage/labour relations, growth and crisis: a hidden dialectic’, pp. 3–25. 7 Ibid. See also Lepietz, A. (1995) Green Hopes: The Future of Political Ecology, Cambridge: Polity Press; Boyer, R. (1997) ‘How does a new production system emerge’?, in R. Boyer and J.-P. Durand, After Fordism, London: Macmillan, pp. 1–63. 8 See Dunlop, J. T. (1958), Industrial Relations Systems, New York: Holt. 9 For a full discussion of a strategic choice and power resource approach to industrial relations see Parsons, N. (1997) Employee Participation in Europe: A Case Study in the British and French Gas Industries, Aldershot: Avebury, pp. 31–48. 1 Changing contexts: from Fordism to the ‘new world economy’ 1 Dreyfus, M. (1995) Histoire de la CGT, Paris: Editions complexe, p. 215. 2 Hanley, D. L., Kerr, A. P. and Waites, N. H. (1979) Contemporary France: Politics and Society since 1945, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 2. This proportion was to rise to one in four following the nationalisation programme of 1981–2.

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3 See Lange, P., Ross, G. and Vannicelli, M. (1982) Unions, Change and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945–1980, New York: Allen and Unwin. 4 See Parsons, N. (1995) ‘Works committees and the regulation of workplace conflict in France’, in R. Gunther and J. Windebank (eds) Violence and Conflict in the Politics and Society of Modern France, Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 83–99. 5 Lange, P., Ross, G. and Vannicelli, M. (1982) op. cit. 6 Ferner, A. and Hyman, R. (1992) ‘Introduction’, in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Industrial Relations in the New Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, p. xxxiv. 7 Fourastié, J. (1979) Les Trente glorieuses ou la révolution invisible, Paris: Fayard. 8 Eck, J.-F. (1990) Histoire de l’économie française, Paris: Armand Colin, p. 8; (1998) La France dans la nouvelle économie mondiale, 3rd Edition, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, p. 29. 9 Brémond, J. and Brémond, G. (1990) L’économie française face aux défis mondiaux, Paris: Hatier, p. 15. 10 Lange, P., Ross, G. and Vannicelli, M. (1982) op. cit. 11 For Oppenheim, ‘It would be totally incorrect to think that the millions of strikers [. . .] dreamed of revolution: for most of them aspired to wage increases and a reduction in work rhythms, or an improvement in their quality of life to enable them to take greater advantage of the pleasures of the consumer society denounced by their “accomplices” in the student movement’: Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) ‘Après Mai 68: la quête d’un nouveau modèle de relations sociales adapté à une économie ouverte’, in M. Parodi, P. Langevin, J.-P. Oppenheim and N. Richez-Battesti, La question sociale en France depuis 1945, Paris: Armand Colin, p. 42. 12 The Gaullist UDR polled 46.4 per cent of the vote in the first round on 23 June 1968, clearly ahead of the second largest party, the PCF, on 20 per cent. Of the Gaullist electorate, one-quarter was working class (compared with nearly half for the PCF). Figures from Tartakowsky, D. (1995) ‘Les evènements de mai’, in C. Willard (ed.) La France ouvrière. Tome 3: de 1968 à nos jours, Paris: Editions de l’Atelier/Editions Ouvrières, p. 44. 13 Howell, C. (1992) Regulating Labor: The State and Industrial Relations Reform in Postwar France, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 9. 14 Ibid. 15 Hewlett, N. (1998) Modern French Politics: Analysing Conflict and Consensus since 1945, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 56. 16 Howell, C. (1992) op. cit. Almost immediately after becoming ‘fully Fordist’, argues Howell, changes in the international economy meant that the Fordist mode of regulation had become exhausted. 17 Boyer, R. (1984) ‘Wage labor, capital accumulation and the crisis, 1968–82’, in M. Kesselman (ed.) The French Workers Movement: Economic Crisis and Political Change, London: Allen and Unwin, p. 20. 18 Freyssinet, M. (2000) ‘Grandes tendances’, in L’Etat de la France, 2000–2001, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 82–3. 19 Eck, J.-F. (1998) op. cit., p. 29; OFCE (2001) L’économie française 2001, Paris: La Découverte, p. 117. 20 OFCE (1998) L’économie française 1998, Paris: La Découverte, p. 117. 21 OFCE (2001) op. cit., p. 119. 22 Ibid., p. 121. 23 Ibid., p. 119. 24 See Milewski, F. and Péléraux, H. (1998) ‘L’Investissement des entreprises’, in OFCE, op. cit., pp. 26–32.

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25 Milewski, F. (2000) ‘L’histoire conflictuelle de la répartition du revenu national’ in L’Etat de la France 2000–2001, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 380–4. 26 Ibid. 27 For example, 5 per cent of the active population had the baccalauréat or a higher level diploma in 1950, compared with 10 per cent at the end of the decade, 16 per cent at the end of the 1960s and 25 per cent at the end of the 1970s. See Gambier, D. and Vernières, M. (1998) L’emploi en France, Paris: La Découverte, p. 66. 28 See notably Piore, M. J. and Sabel, C. F. (1984) The Second Industrial Divide, New York: Basic Books. 29 See for example Boyer, R. (1997) ‘How does a new production system emerge?’, in R. Boyer and J.-P. Durand, After Fordism, London: Macmillan, pp. 1–63; and Taddëi, D. and Coriat, B. (1993) Made in France: L’industrie française dans la compétition mondiale, Paris: Livres de Poche. 30 Conseil économique et social (1996) Organization du commerce mondiale: Rapport présenté par Olivier Giscard d’Estaing, Paris: Direction des Journaux officiels, p. 128. 31 Henriot, A. (1997) ‘Quelle place pour la France dans la nouvelle géographie des échanges internationaux?’, in C. de Boissieu (ed.) Les mutations de l’Economie française, Paris: Economica, p. 208. 32 Généreux, J. (1993) Chiffres clés de l’économie française, Paris: Editions du Seuil, p. 43. 33 Milner, S. (2001) ‘Globalisation and employment in France: between flexibility and protection?’, Modern and Contemporary France, 9: 3 (special issue on ‘France and Globalisation’), p. 328. 34 Ministère de l’économie, des finances et de l’industrie (MEFI) (1999) Politique économique 2000: rapport économique, social et financier du Gouvernement, Paris: Economica, pp. 94–5. 35 Ibid., p. 94. 36 Alternatives économiques, No. 184, September 2000, 44–5. 37 Ministère de l’économie, des finances et de l’industrie (MEFI) (1999) op. cit., p. 97. 38 Commisssion Permanente de la Concertation pour l’Industrie (CPCI) (1999) L’Etat de l’industrie française. Rapport 1999, Paris: CPCI, p. 46. 39 At the same time, inward FDI grew by 39 per cent to reach over 200 billion francs. See Milewski, F. (2000) ‘Nouvelle contraction de l’excédent extérieur’, in L’Etat de la France, 2000–2001, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 443–9. 40 Heyer, E. (2001) ‘Le commerce extérieur’, in OFCE (2001) op. cit., pp. 40–6. 41 Chaponnière, J.-R. (1998) ‘La France, pays carrefour des investissements directs’, in MEI/DGSI/SESSI, Industrie française et Mondialisation, Paris: MEI/DGSI/ SESSI, pp. 35–48. 42 Win in France (2000) Bilan des décisions d’investissements étrangers en France en 1999, Paris: DATAR/IFN, p. 1. 43 CPCI (1999) op. cit., p. 46. 44 Lehoucq, T. (2000) ‘Les entreprises étrangères dans l’industrie française: Une forte implantation’, Les 4 Pages des statistiques industrielles, No. 132, juin 2000, Paris: SESSI, p. 1. 45 Arthuis, J. (1993) L’incidence économique et fiscale des délocalisations hors du territoire national des activités industrielles et de services. Rapport de la Commission des Finances au Sénat, no. 337 (4 juin 1993). 46 Chaponnière, J.-R. (1998) op. cit., pp. 43–4. See also Oudin, J. (1998) Rapport d’information sur la politique industrielle et commerciale de l’Union européenne face à la mondialisation de l’économie, Paris: Délégation du Sénat pour l’Union européenne, No. 462 (28 mai 1998).

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47 Mathieu, E. (1998) ‘La production industrielle française à l’étranger: à égal des exportations’ in MEFI/DGSI/SESSI op. cit., p. 70. 48 Ministère de l’économie, des finances et de l’industrie (1999) op. cit., p. 107. 49 Mathieu, E. (1998) op. cit., p. 69. 50 Ibid., p. 66; Chaponnière, J.-R. (1998) op. cit., p. 36. 51 Grahl, J. and Teague, P. (2000) ‘The Regulation School, the employment relation and financialisation’, Economy and Society 29: 1, 164. 52 It is beyond the scope of this work to describe the attempts made by the Regulation School to construct a post-Fordist model of capital accumulation and regulation, particularly as these have tended to look at other economic systems in an attempt to see whether their ‘modes of regulation’ would be applicable to France. The main response is seen as occurring in Britain and the US with a shift towards labour market flexibility and competition without any major change in company-level production systems, a development described as liberal productivism in Lepietz, A. (1995) Green Hopes: The Future of Political Ecology, Cambridge: Polity Press. Japanese management systems have also come under scrutiny in Coriat, B. (1991) Penser à l’envers, Paris: Christian Bourgois; Taddëi, D. and Coriat, B. (1993) op. cit.; and Boyer, R. (1997) op. cit. For a fuller account, see Grahl, J. and Teague, P. (2000) op. cit. 53 Again, space prevents us from dealing fully with Aglietta’s insights. Only those that are of salience to the following chapters of this work are dealt with here. For his recent major works on the development of capitalism see Aglietta, M. (1997a) Régulation et crises du capitalisme, Paris: Odile Jacob; (1997b) Macroéconomie internationale, Paris: Montchrestien; (1998a) Macroéconomie financière, Paris: La Découverte; (1998b) Le capitalisme de demain, Paris: Notes de la Fondation Saint-Simon, no. 101, novembre. 54 Boyer, R. (2000) ‘Is a finance-led growth regime a viable alternative to Fordism? A preliminary analysis’, Economy and Society 29: 1, 111–45. 55 Aglietta, M. (1999) ‘La globalisation financière’, in CEPII, L’économie mondiale, 2000, Paris: La Découverte, p. 55. 56 Boyer, R. (2000) op. cit. recognises that the normal indicators of financialisation are much higher in the US, Canada and the UK than in the rest of Europe or Japan. These include wealth in stocks and shares in relation to households’ disposable income, capital gains in relation to income and the reference norm of profitability for financial market operators. However, his modelling suggests that France does at least show some characteristics of finance-led systems (pp. 135–8). 57 Alternatives économiques, No. 182, June 2000, p. 40. 58 Ibid., p. 42; Hamon, H. (2000) ‘La Bourse en folie?’, in L’Etat de la France, 2000–2001, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 412–15. 59 Bilan du Monde, 1998, p. 173. 60 Sauviat, C. and Pernot, J.-M. (2000) ‘Le poids croissant des investisseurs instutionnels’, in L’Etat de la France, 2000–2001, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 423–5. 61 For example, in 1997 Danone, the food producer, sold off Panzani (pasta) and Carambar (confectionery) because they were not generating a 10 per cent return on capital (Bilan du Monde, 1998, p. 173). 62 In the French case, the improvement of price competitiveness has been achieved through a reduction of aggregate wage costs rather than by substituting capital for labour. See Legendre, F. and Le Maître, D. (1998) La sensibilité de l’emploi au coût du travail: une exploration à partir des données de panel. Document de travail no. 6, Paris: Conseil supérieur de l’emploi, des revenus et des coûts. Boyer, R. (2000) op. cit. also argues strongly that labour market flexibility is strongly associated with the new regime of accumulation.

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63 It should be emphasised that Aglietta does not see these changes as predetermined by the change in the nature of capitalism. Indeed, much of his work deals with the need to devise a new mode of regulation to ensure that the regime of growth is oriented towards social progress rather than regression. See for example, Aglietta, M. (1998b) op. cit. 64 Aglietta, M. (1999) op. cit., p. 60. 65 Ibid., p. 67. 66 Dockès, P. (2000) ‘Nouvelle économie, néocapitalisme’, Le Cercle des économistes. Chroniques écononomiques, 2000: L’odyssée de l’économie, Paris: Descartes et Cie, pp. 47–57. 67 Ibid., p. 52. 68 Milner, S. (2001) op. cit., p. 327. 69 Piore, M. J. and Sabel, C. F. (1984) op. cit. 70 Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., p. 213. 71 Ibid., p. 24. 72 Ibid., pp. 218–20. 2 The role of the state 1 Boyer, R. (1985) ‘The influence of Keynes on French economic policy: past and present’, in H. Wattel (ed.) The Policy Consequences of John Maynard Keynes, New York: Macmillan. 2 Howell, C. (1992) Regulating Labor: The State and Industrial Relations Reform in Postwar France, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 56–7. 3 Eck, J.-F. (1998) La France dans la nouvelle économie mondiale, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, p. 35. 4 See Brémond, J. and Brémond, G. (1990) L’économie française face aux défis mondiaux, Paris: Hatier, pp. 10–13. 5 At the time of inception, two-thirds of the seats on the various administrative bodies for the funds – health insurance, family allowances, pensions – went to the trade unions. Later, by a reform in 1967, this was reduced to half as the principle of parity between employers and unions was introduced. The law of 17 December 1982 reintroduced the principle of majority representation for wage earners, with unions being given 16 seats, as opposed to six for employers, on the various social security bodies, but was later overturned in 1996 in favour of the parity principle. 6 Before this, the unemployed did, however, receive public ‘social assistance’. See Join-Lambert, M-T. (1997a) ‘Le système d’indemnisation du chômage et son articulation avec la protection sociale’, in M.-T. Join-Lambert (ed.) Politiques sociales, Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, p. 571, extracts reproduced in G. Nezosi (ed.) (2000) La crise du paritarisme. Problèmes économiques et sociaux, No. 844, 8 September, 18–20. 7 Mériaux, O. (1994) ‘Esquisse d’une mécanique du paritarisme: la formation professionnelle’, Travail, No. 31–2, automne-hiver 1994–1995, extracts reproduced in G. Nezosi (ed.) (2000) op. cit., 38–9. 8 Milner, S. (2002) ‘France in historical perspective: the impossibility of partnership’, in S. Berger and H. Compston (eds) Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Europe: Lessons for the 21st Century, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, p. 105. 9 Ibid., p. 104. 10 Hanley, D., Kerr, A. P. and Waites, N. H. (1979) Contemporary France: Politics and Society since 1945, London/Boston/Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 2. 11 Hayward, J. (1985) The State and the Market Economy: Industrial Patriotism and

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27 28 29 30 31

32 33

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Economic Intervention in France, Brighton: Wheatsheaf, p. 172; Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) Les clés du social en France, Paris: Editions Liaisons, p. 88. Join-Lambert, M.-T. (1997a) op. cit. Join-Lambert, M.-T. (1997b) ‘La protection sociale entre assurance et solidarité’, in M.-T. Join-Lambert (ed.) op. cit., extracts reproduced in G. Nezosi (2000) op. cit., pp. 21–4. Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., p. 57. Figures from Adam, G. (2000) Les relations sociales année zéro, Paris: Bayard, p. 247. Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., p. 42. Ibid. For a recent critique of what is seen as excessive legal regulation see Amadieu, J.-F. and Boissard, D. (2001) La démocratie sociale en danger: Laissons vivre les partenaires sociaux!, Paris: Editions Liaisons. Hanley, D., Kerr, A. P. and Waites, N. H. (1979) op. cit., p. 2. Adam, G. (1985) Le Pouvoir Syndical, Paris: Dunod, p. 55. Goetschy, J. and Rozenblatt, P. (1992) ‘France: the industrial relations system at a turning point?’, in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Industrial Relations in the New Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 425. Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., p. 108. For a full analysis of Chaban-Delmas’ ‘New Society’ reforms see Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., pp. 82–110. Ibid., p. 101–2. Ibid., p. 97. Petit, P. (1988) ‘Problems of the state in dealing with the system of wage/labour relations: the case of France’, in R. Boyer (ed.) The Search for Labour Market Flexibility: the European Economies in Transition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 40. Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., pp. 70–1. Parsons, N. (2002) ‘France in the 1990s: still struggling with the weight of history’, in S. Berger and H. Compston (eds) op. cit., pp. 111–24. See Knapp, A. and Wright, V. (2001) The Government and Politics of France, 4th edn, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 318–19. Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., especially pp. 90–3. Representative status was accorded in the aftermath of the Second World War and confirmed in the 1950 Law on collective bargaining. Crucial to this status was the attitude of the unions during the war. While it also depended upon membership figures at that time, it made no allowance for any subsequent evolution. ‘Representative’ unions can establish workplace branches simply by informing the Ministry of Labour that they are doing so, no matter how many, or few, members they have in the company concerned. Holcblat, N. (1998) ‘Politique macro-économique: Une inflexion limitée’, in L’Etat de la France, 1998–99, Paris: La Découverte & Syros, pp. 398–9. Daley, A. (1998) ‘The hollowing out of French unions: politics and industrial relations after 1981’, in A. Martin and G. Ross (eds) The Brave New World of European Labor: European Trade Unions at the Millennium, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, p. 177. Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., pp. 156–60. Wages as a proportion of valued added rose from 64 per cent to 72.5 per cent between 1970 and 1973, squeezing company profits as economic growth slowed down. From 1983 onwards, the distribution of the fruits of economic growth favoured profits rather than wages and the latter fell as a percentage of value added to their 1970 level by 2000 as company profits surpassed their 1970

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43 44

45

46 47 48

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levels. See Milewski, F. (2001) ‘L’histoire conflictuelle de la répartition du revenu national’, in L’Etat de la France, 2001–2002, Paris: La Découverte & Syros, pp. 386–9. See Tuchszirer, C. (2001) ‘La nouvelle convention d’assurance chômage: la PARE qui cache le forêt’, Mouvements, No. 14, March–April, 15–24. See Le Monde, 9 April 2002. Daley, A. (1999) op. cit., p. 178. Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., pp. 134–41. Decree no. 82–41 of 16 January 1982, Journal Officiel, 17 January 1982, p. 295. Legislative attempts to control the use of fixed-term contracts represent the main exception to this. See L’Horty, Y. (1999) ‘L’emploi précaire en France’, Regards sur l’actualité, March, 15–27. Le Monde, 18 April 2001, lists 12 companies that had recently announced such plans as well as containing articles on redundancies at Phillips and Moulinex-Brandt. See also: European Industrial Relations Review, No. 329, June 2001, p. 7. See Chapter 7 and European Industrial Relations Review, No. 328, May 2001, p. 5; No. 329, July 2001, 15–18. Marks and Spencer announced the closure of all its stores in Europe on 29 March, with the loss of 1700 jobs in France. In this case it was the brutality of the announcement that shocked French workers and politicians, with no prior consultation or even information having taken place. In the case of Danone, anger was provoked by the announcement, again on 29 March, that the LU biscuit factories in Calais and Ris-Orange were to close, with the loss of 570 jobs, after the group had made a profit of four billion francs the previous year. See M. Croissandeau, ‘La gauche face aux charettes de la croissance’, Nouvel Observateur, 12–18 April, 2001, 74–6; Le Monde, 7 April 2001. According to Frédéric Lemaître, the management of Danone saw this as ‘indispensable’ because the operating profit of the biscuits operation was ‘only’ 7.9 per cent compared with 10.5 per cent for the group as a whole, and this was seen to affect share prices: Lemaître, F. (2001) ‘Danone s’apprête à supprimer 3000 emplois en Europe dont 1700 en France’, Le Monde, 11 January 2001. The figure of 1700 jobs was later reduced to 570 when the official announcement was made on 29 March. Notably, the law aims to make redundancy plans more expensive, particularly for large companies, by increasing redundancy payments, tightening rules on redeployment for laid-off workers, and requiring companies to help with the ‘reindustrialisation’ of the area in which job losses occur. See Le Monde, 25 April 2001. The law also gives works committees the right to oppose company restructuring and to call in a mediator. This is not, however, a right of veto over redundancies (www.lemonde.fr, 13 June 2001). Le Monde, 12 April 2001. European Industrial Relations Review, No. 330, July 2001, pp. 5–6. Despite Finance Minister Laurent Fabius’ previous assurances that the PPESV was not a ‘Trojan horse’ for pension funds, a government circular of 22 November 2001 stated that they could be used to ‘prepare for retirement’. See Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, Nos. 13249, 5 October 2000 and 15533, 30 November 2001. See Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13375, 4 April 2001. See Milner, S. (2001) ‘Globalisation and employment in France: between flexibility and protection?’, Modern and Contemporary France, 9: 3 (special issue on ‘France and Globalisation’), 327–37. Daley, A. (1999) op. cit., p. 180.

190 52 53 54 55

56

57 58

59

60

61

62 63

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Milner, S. (2001) op. cit., p. 332. Daley, A. (1999) op. cit., p. 180. For a full discussion of the debate, see: Tuchszirer, C. (2001) op. cit. See also Chapter 4 for further discussion of MEDEF aims. MEDEF proposals to reform the supplementary pensions system, which would have threatened the right to retire at 60 on a full pension, led to large-scale demonstrations on 25 January 2001, involving 300,000 people in many large French cities, including an estimated 80,000 in Paris (Le Monde, 27 January 2001). Confronted with trade union unity on the issue, MEDEF backed down, and on 10 February 2001 an agreement was signed between the employers and the CFDT and CFTC. The agreement renewed the arrangements for financing supplementary pensions until 31 December 2002, but called for a complete overhaul of the pensions system, including of basic state pensions, by that date. MEDEF announced on 19 June 2001 that its representatives would not be seeking re-election to the funds, and would therefore not sit on them from 1 October 2001. See Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13425, 21 July 2001. Shortly afterwards the CGPME followed MEDEF in this action. See Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13453, 1 August 2001. For details see Freyssinet, M. (1997) Le temps de travail en miettes: vingt ans de politique de l’emploi et de négociation collective, Paris: Editions de l’atelier. At the time of the announcement of the 35-hour week by Jospin, the Robien Law had led to 1442 agreements covering 154,000 employees. The effects on employment were limited, however, with only 15,000 jobs created or saved, at considerable cost to the state. See Tuchszirer, C. (1998) ‘De la loi Robien aux 35 heures’, in L’Etat de la France, 98–99, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 518–19; Boisard, B. and Dalle, B. (1997) ‘Bilan critique de la loi Robien’, Regards sur l’actualité, No. 236, pp. 29–40. Following the first Aubry Law, the number of company-level collective agreements rose from 13,328 in 1998 to 30,965 in 1999, with over 80 per cent of these dealing with the question of working time (compared with 51 per cent the previous year): Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) La négociation collective en 1999, Paris: Editions Législatives, p. 40. Employer resistance to the 35-hour week was led by the powerful Union of Mining and Metalworking Industries (UIMM) which signed an agreement with FO, the CFTC and CGC. This raised overtime to 180 hours per year, effectively maintaining the 39-hour week by paying the four extra hours as overtime and refusing to create any extra employment in a major sector. The Ministry of Employment and Solidarity refused to extend the agreement to cover the whole sector as it did not conform to the ‘spirit’ of the Law. See Huby, R. (1999) ‘Les négociations sur les 35 heures’, Regards sur l’actualité. No. spécial sur ‘La vie publique en France, août 1998–juillet 1999, No. 254, p. 119. In the second Aubry Law on the reduction of working time, recourse to overtime was limited to 120 hours per year for companies of 20 or more employees. Morin, M.-L. (1996) ‘Permanences et transformations du rôle de la négociation collective de branche’, in G. Murry, M.-L. Morin and I. Da Costa (eds) L’Etat des relations professionnelles: traditions et perspectives de recherche, Saint-Nicolas (Quebec): Presses de l’Université Laval/Octares, p. 369. Amadieu, J.-F. and Boissard, D. (2001) op. cit., pp. 13–14. In the run-up to the 2002 presidential elections, both Lionel Jospin and Jacques Chirac argued that future major reforms, such as pensions and lifelong training, should be the subject of bargaining and agreement rather than legislative prescription. They differed, however, at the level at which bargaining should take place. The liberal conceptions of the RPR favoured the company level, whereas

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the PS’s social-democratic outlook privileged national bargaining. See La Tribune, 10 April 2002. 3 Trade unions 1 See Lange, P., Ross, G. and Vannicelli, M. (1982) Unions, Change and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945–1980, London: Allen and Unwin, pp. 17–77. 2 Visser, J. (2000) ‘France’, in B. Ebbinghaus and J. Visser (eds) The Societies of Europe. Trade Unions in Western Europe since 1945, Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, p. 269. 3 See Rosanvallon, P. (1988) La question syndicale, Paris: Calman-Lévy; Landier, H. and Labbé, D. (1998) Les organisations syndicales en France: des origines aux difficultés actuelles, Paris: Editions Liaisons, pp. 32–3. 4 Freyssinet, M. (1993) ‘France: towards flexibility’, in J. Hartog and J. Theeuws (eds) Labour Market Contracts and Institutions: A Cross-National Comparison, Amsterdam: North-Holland, p. 174. 5 Daley, A. (1999) ‘The hollowing out of French unions: politics and industrial relations after 1981’, in A. Martin and G. Ross (eds) The Brave New World of European Labor: European Trade Unionism at the Millennium, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, p. 168. 6 Figures quoted in Andolfatto, D. (2000) ‘Le plus faible taux de syndicalisation des pays industrialisés’, in L’Etat de la France 2000–2001, Paris: Editions La Découverte & Syros, p. 473. 7 Ibid. 8 1975–93 figures based on Kergoat, J. and Linhart, D. (1998) Les transformations du syndicalisme en France, Problèmes économiques et sociaux, No. 801, 10 April 1998, p. 12. In 1975 the CGT claimed 1.8 million members, compared with 639,000 in 1993. The CFDT claimed 737,000 in 1975, a figure which fell to 473,000 in 1993, while FO’s membership fell from 458,000 to 370,000 over the period. The CGT claimed 650,000 members, and the CFDT 830,000 on their respective websites in 2001. Andolfatto, D. (2001) ‘Les principales organisations syndicales des salariés’, in L’Etat de la France, 2001–2002, Paris: Editions La Découverte & Syros, p. 490 (488–93) gives FO membership as 300,000. 9 Liaisons sociales. Documents, No. 94/2001, ‘Les eléctions aux comités d’entreprise en 1999’, 18 December 2001, p. 1. 10 Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13795, ‘Net recul des non-syndiqués aux élections aux CE en 2002’, 26 December 2002. 11 Liaisons sociales. Legislation sociale, No. 7777, ‘Résultats des eléctions prud’homales du 10 décembre 1997’, 23 December 1997, p. 2; Brèf social, No. 13787, ‘Abstention record et revers pour FO lors du scrutin prud’homal’, 13 December 2002. The CGT emerged as the largest trade union in both years, but its share of the vote fell from 33 per cent to 32 per cent. The CFDT won 25.2 per cent in 2002, a slight fall from 25.5 per cent in 1997, while FO’s score fell from 20.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent. Abstentions rose from 65.6 per cent in 1997 to 67.3 per cent in 2002. 12 Source: Adam, G. (2000) Les relations sociales année zéro, Paris, Bayard, p. 247. This decline is all the more striking as, before 1982, statistics did not include the fonction publique. 13 This is the translation of the title of Labbé, D. and Croisat, M. (1992) La fin des syndicats?, Paris: L’Harmattan. 14 In 2000, women represented 46.5 per cent of the active population compared to 38.5 per cent in 1975: Minni, C. (2001) ‘Les métamorphoses de l’emploi depuis

192

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17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

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un quart de siècle’, in L’Etat de la France, 2001–2002, Paris: La Découverte & Syros, p. 439. In comparison, 27 per cent of CGT members were women in 1998. The CFDT fares much better, with nearly 40 per cent female members in 1995, a figure that has probably increased since: Andolfatto, D. (2001) ‘L’Univers syndical: étude comparée de la CGT et de la CFDT’, in D. Labbé et S. Courtois (eds) Regards sur la crise du syndicalisme, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 64–5. Daley, A. (1999) op. cit., p. 176. Eyraud, F. and Tchobanian, R. (1985) ‘The Auroux reforms and company level industrial relations in France’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 23, 241–58; Chouraqui, A. (1987) ‘L’expérience syndicale de l’expression dans les entreprises: vrais enjeux de pouvoir ou simples jeux des acteurs?’, Droit social, No. 12, pp. 857–63. See also Chapter 7. See Adam, G. (1983) Le pouvoir syndical, Paris: Dunod; Rosanvallon, P. (1988) La question syndicale, Paris: Hachette; Labbé, D. (1996) Syndicats et syndiqués en France depuis 1945, Paris: L’Harmattan. Donnadieu, G. (1998) ‘Où va le syndicalisme français?’, Futuribles, No. 234, p. 50. Bernoux describes the 1980s as ‘the period of the rehabilitation of the firm and of profit’. Bernoux, P. (1989) ‘Firms in transition: towards industrial democracy? The case of reforms in France since the end of the Second World War’, in C. J. Lammers and G. Széll, International Handbook of Participation in Organizations, Volume 1. Organizational Democracy: Taking Stock, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 263. Donnadieu, G. (1998) op. cit. Andolfatto, D. (2001) op. cit., p. 76. Ibid., p. 77. Decaillon, J. (2001) ‘Les enjeux syndicaux en Europe et dans le monde: Ccn, 23 et 24 janvier 2001’, Le Peuple, No. 1536HS, 7 février 2001, p. 6. Donnadieu, G. (1998) op. cit., p. 46. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., pp. 42–3. Ibid., pp. 39–40. See also Chapter 6. Rand Smith, W. (1984) ‘The dynamics of plural unionism in France’, British Journal of Industrial Relations 22, 30. For details of the development of SUD, see Labbé, D. and Landier, H. (2001) L’entreprise face au nouveau radicalisme syndical: les nouvelles formes d’action militante, Paris: Editions Liaisons, pp. 49–65. The CGT won 28.25 per cent of votes and SUD-PTT 28.02 per cent. Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13269, 3 October 2000. For details see Labbé, D. and Landier, H. (2001) op. cit., pp. 55–65. Le Monde, 24 January 2001. Andolfatto, D. and Labbé, D. (2000) Sociologie des syndicats, Paris: La Découverte, p. 43. Labbé, D. and Landier, H. (2001) op. cit., p. 35. Landier, H. and Labbé, D. (1998) op. cit., p. 153; Labbé, D. and Landier, H. (2001) op. cit., p. 44. Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13787, op. cit. Andolfatto, D. (2000) op. cit. For comparison, as we have seen, the CGT claims 650,000 members, and the CFDT 830,000 on their respective websites. Andolfatto (ibid.) gives FO membership as 300,000, CFTC and CFE-CGC as 80,000 respectively. UNSA would therefore be the third largest union organisation in France, and the FSU the fifth largest. Adam, G. (2000) op. cit., p. 213.

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40 Le Monde, 8–9 April 2001 and 12 April 2001. 41 More than 60 per cent of trade unionists are in the fonction publique or work for protected nationalised companies such as the SNCF or EDF. Andolfatto, D. (2000) op. cit., p. 473. 42 The trade unions estimate that 20 per cent of those working for the French civil service are on ‘atypical’ contracts and do not benefit from civil service status: Kulakowska, E. (2003) ‘L’intérim dans la fonction publique’, Le Monde Initiatives, April 2003, p. 3. 43 Capdevielle, J. (2001) Modernité du corporatisme, Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques. This argument will be treated more fully in Chapter 8. 44 See Pernot, J.-M. (2001) ‘Les syndicats français et l’Europe’, in D. Labbé and S. Courtois (eds) op. cit., pp. 160–1. 45 Nezosi, G. (2001) ‘La CGT et l’Europe: l’exemple du Pôle Européen de Développement de Longwy’, in D. Labbé and S. Courtois (eds) op. cit., pp. 183–98. 46 Pernot, J.-M. (2001) op. cit., pp. 162–5; Daley, A. (1999) op. cit., p. 191. 47 Notat, N. (2000) ‘Le syndicalisme: une utopie pleine d’avenir’, CFDT magazine, No. 255, janvier 2000, p. 25. 48 European Works Council Bulletin, May/June 1996, p. 5. 49 See Croissandeau, M., ‘La gauche face aux charettes de la croissance’, Nouvel Observateur, 12–18 April 2001, pp. 74–6; Le Monde, 7 April 2001. 50 Decaillon, J. (2001) op. cit., p. 7. 51 Le Monde, 8 December 2000. 52 Le Monde, 3–4 December 2000. 53 Landier, H. and Labbé, D. (1998) op. cit., p. 181. 54 Libération, 18 May 2001. 55 Dorbais, A. (2001) ‘L’action syndicale europeén: L’exemple d’Aventis’, Libéralisme où étatisme, sommes-nous condamnés à choisir? La Revue de la CFDT, No. 37–8, janvier-février 2001, p. 24. 56 On procedures for social dialogue in the EU, see Carley, M. (1993) ‘Social dialogue’, in M. Gold (ed.) The Social Dimension: Employment Policy in the European Community, London: Macmillan, pp. 103–34. European Works Councils are discussed in Chapter 7. 57 Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13150, 4 May 2000; No. 13151, 5 May 2000. 58 See Chapter 6 and Le Monde Initiatives, April 2003. 59 Howell, C. (1992) op. cit. 4 Employer organisations: from the CNPF to MEDEF 1 For a more complete list of employer organisations that cannot be dealt with here for reasons of space, see Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) Les clés du social en France, Paris: Editions Liaisons, pp. 37–8. 2 Ibid., p. 38. 3 For details of CNPF structures see Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) Les syndicats en France. Tome 1, Paris: Editions du Seuil, pp. 37–40; Tome 2, pp. 156–65. 4 Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) ‘De la Libération aux événements de Mai-Juin 68: le refus d’entrer dans une logique keynésienne et un rapport salarial fordiste’, in M. Parodi, P. Langevin, J.-P. Oppenheim and N. Richez-Battesti, La question sociale en France depuis 1945, Paris: Armand Colin, p. 19. 5 Szarka, J. (1992) Business in France: An Introduction to the Economic and Social Context, London: Pitman, p. 171. 6 Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 28.

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7 See Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) op. cit., Tome 2, pp. 167–70. 8 Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 34. 9 Howell, C. (1992) Regulating Labor: the State and Industrial Relations Reform in Postwar France, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 62–72. 10 Ibid., p. 71. 11 Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 49. 12 See Adam, G. (2000) Les relations sociales année zéro, Paris: Bayard, p. 247. 13 Ceyrac, F. (1975) ‘L’après-crise’, Expansion, November 1975, cited in Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 58. 14 For details of legislation following the Sudreau Report, see Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., pp. 123–4. 15 Howell, C. (1992) op. cit., p. 116. 16 Ibid., pp. 132–40. 17 Bernoux, P. (1989) ‘Firms in transition: towards industrial democracy? The case of reforms in France since the end of the Second World War’, in C. J. Lammers and G. Széll (eds) International Handbook of Participation in Organizations. Vol. 1: Organizational Democracy: Taking Stock, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 263. 18 Szarka, J. (1992) op. cit., p. 174. 19 Jones, G. (1989) ‘Business as usual: the employers’, in J. Gaffney (ed.) The French Presidential Elections of 1988, Aldershot: Dartmouth, pp. 186–210. 20 Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 69. 21 Jones, G. (1989) op. cit., p. 201. 22 According to Anthony Daley, ‘French companies were [. . .] among the most profitable in the world by the early 1990s’: (1999) ‘The hollowing out of French unions: politics and industrial relations after 1981’, in A. Martin and G. Ross (eds) The Brave New World of European Labor: European Trade Unions at the Millennium, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, p. 183. 23 Adam, G. (2000) op. cit., pp. 146–7. 24 Cited in Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 69. 25 Cited by Adam, G. (2000) op. cit., p. 146. 26 Ibid., pp. 182–3. 27 Ibid., pp. 185–6. 28 Monnot, C. (1999) ‘La mue de l’ex-CNPF’, Bilan du Monde 1999, p. 144. 29 Ibid. 30 For more details of organisational reform in the MEDEF see Les Echos, 28 October 1998 and 16 December 1998; Monier, Y. (1998) ‘Subsidiarité, légitimité, efficacité’, La revue des entreprises, No. 605, November 1998, 60–1; Seillière, E.-A. (1998) ‘Une nouvelle organisation pour une nouvelle action’, La revue des entreprises, No. 607, December 1998–January 1999, 20–1. 31 Le Monde, 28 October 1998. 32 Quoted in Les Echos, 28 October 1998. 33 Jacot, H. (2001) ‘La “refondation sociale” n’est pas une longe fleuve tranquille’, Mouvements, No. 14, March–April, pp. 8–9. 34 Kessler, D. (1999) ‘L’avenir de la protection sociale’, La revue des entreprises, No. 616, November–December, pp. 31–9. 35 Ibid., p. 37. 36 Seillière, E.-A. (2000) ‘Indispensable et fragile refondation sociale’, Le Monde, 6 December 2002. 37 Discussions for reform along these lines were taking place between the government and the social partners in early 2003. See Le Monde Initiatives, April 2003, pp. 22–3. 38 Kessler, D. (1999) op. cit., p. 37.

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39 Tuchszirer, C. (2001) ‘La nouvelle convention d’assurance chômage: la PARE qui cache le forêt’, Mouvements, No. 14, March–April, pp. 15–24. 40 Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13824, ‘Réforme des retraites: les précisions de François Fillon’, 6 February 2003, p. 1. See also: Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13823, ‘Le plan Raffarin pour les retraites’, 5 February 2003, p. 1; Le Monde, pp. 20–1, April 2003. 41 Jacot, H. (2001) op. cit., p. 13. 42 Le Monde, supplément Economie, 3 April 2001. 43 Ibid. 5 The organisation of work: from an authoritarian to a democratic workplace? 1 See for example, Parsons, N. (1997) Employee Participation in Europe: A Case Study in the British and French Gas Industries, Aldershot: Avebury. 2 Thus, for example the replacement of the ‘putting out’ system by the generalisation of the factory system at the end of the eighteenth century in Great Britain preceded the application of newly emerging technologies. Gathering workers together under one roof did not obey any technical imperative, but translated the desire of employers to exercise a greater control over their workers, the quantity and quality of their work, and to ensure a greater return on their capital through the intensification of work. See Braverman, H. (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York and London: Monthly Review Press. 3 Groetschy, J. and Rozenblatt, P. (1992) ‘France: the industrial relations system at a turning point?’ in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Industrial Relations in the New Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 420. 4 Lane, C. (1989) Management and Labour in Europe, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, pp. 104–7. 5 See Magraw, R. (1992) A History of the French Working Class, Vol. 2: Workers and the Bourgeois Republic, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 36–46. 6 Lane, C. (1989) op. cit., p. 103; Magraw, R. (1992) op. cit. 7 Magraw, R. (1992) op. cit., pp. 36–49. 8 Lane, C. (1989) op. cit., pp. 89–107; see also Gallie, D. (1978) In Search of the New Working Class: Automation and Integration within the Capitalist Enterprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9 Charles, J., Girault, J. and Willard, C. (1995) ‘Les années vingt’, in C. Willard (ed.) La France ouvrière, Tome 2: 1920–1968, Paris: Les Editions de l’Atelier/Les Editions Ouvrières, pp. 16–17. 10 Tchobanian, R. (1995) ‘France: from conflict to social dialogue?’ in J. Rogers and W. Streek (eds) Works Councils: Consultation, Representation and Cooperation in Industrial Relations, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, p. 120. 11 Lane, C. (1989) op. cit., p. 105; Gallie, D. (1978) op. cit. 12 Eck, J.-F. (1990) Histoire de l’Economie Française depuis 1945, Paris: Armand Colin, pp. 10 and 43. 13 See Chapter 7 and Coutrot, T. (1999) Critique de l’organization du travail, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 90–1. 14 Bernoux, P. (1989) ‘Firms in transition: towards industrial democracy? The case of reforms in France since the end of the Second World War’, in C. J. Lammers and G. Széll (eds) International Handbook of Participation in Organizations, Vol. 1. Organizational Democracy: Taking Stock, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 254. Absenteeism rates of up to 25 per cent were recorded in many workplaces, with 425 million working days lost annually in France due to absenteeism in

196

15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

Notes

1970–3, compared with 150 million days lost due to the May–June 1968 strike wave. In some workplaces, staff turnover reached 100 per cent per year. Lane, C. (1988) op. cit., p. 146. Capdevielle, J. and Mouriaux, R. (1988) ‘Mai 1968: La dernière des grèves générales’, Politis, 5 May, reproduced in J. Forbes and N. Hewlett (1994) Contemporary France: Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society, Harlow: Longman, pp. 71–6. Whereas in 1953, 21 per cent of French households owned a car, 7.5 per cent a fridge and 1 per cent a television, by the mid-1970s these figures had risen to over 70 per cent for a car, over 80 per cent for a television and over 90 per cent for a fridge: Brémond, J. and Brémond, G. (1990) L’économie française face aux défis mondiaux, Paris: Hatier, p. 10. Coutrot, T. (1999) op. cit., p. 19. Piore, M. J. and Sabel, C. (1984) The Second Industrial Divide, New York: Basic Books. Lane, C. (1988) op. cit., p. 160. Ibid., p. 161. Piore, M. J. and Sabel, C. (1984) op. cit. Ibid. Piore and Sabel effectively predicted that the destruction of the craft tradition in France would prove an obstacle to the adoption of flexible specialisation as a production model (ibid., p. 17f). Maurice, M., Eyraud, F., d’Iribarne, A. and Rychener, F. (1986) Des entreprises en mutation dans la crise. Apprentissage des outils flexibles et émergence de nouveaux acteurs, Aix-en-Provence: LEST. On the use of robots, see Berry, M. (1988) ‘Taylor et les robots’, in Pour une Automatisation Raisonnable de l’Industrie, Special issue of Annales des Mines, January 1988; for the automobile industry see Freyssinet, J. (1984) ‘La qualification des opérateurs et la forme sociale actuelle d’automatisation’, Sociologie du travail, No. 4, 422–34; and for the cement industry, Chaigneau, Y. and Piotet, F. (1984) ‘Automation and working conditions in France’, in F. Butera and J. Thurman (eds) Automation and Work Design, ILO Study, Amsterdam/New York/Oxford: North-Holland, pp. 236–88. Durand, J.-P. (1990) ‘Information technology and the legacy of Taylorism in France’, Work, Employment and Society, 4: 3, 407–27. Ibid., p. 417. Ibid., p. 421. Ibid., p. 422. Ibid., p. 426. Monnin, I. (1998) ‘Un chrono dans la tête’, Le Nouvel observateur, 5–11 February, 80–2. Petitjean, G. (1998) ‘Caissières: une vie en tranches’, Le Nouvel observateur, 5–11 February, 82. Pichault, F. (2000) ‘Call-centres, hiéarchie virtuelle et gestion des ressources humaines’, Revue française de gestion, No. 130, p. 9. Bue, J. and Rougerie, C. (2000) ‘L’organisation du travail: entre contrainte et initiative. Résultats de l’enquête Conditions de travail’, in DARES, L’Organization du travail: Résultats des enquêtes Conditions de travail de 1984, 1991 et 1998. Les Dossiers de la DARES, No. 4/2000, Paris: La Documentation Française, pp. 9–10. Coutrot, T. (1998) L’entreprise néo-libérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste? Paris: La Découverte. Coutrot, T. (2000) ‘Innovations dans le travail: la pression de la concurrence

Notes

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39

40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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internationale, l’atout des qualifications’, Premières synthèses, No. 09.2, DARES. Ibid., p. 2. In 1998, 30 per cent of establishments of 20 or more employees belonging to companies employing 50 or more employees had reduced their number of hierarchical levels compared to 29.7 per cent in 1992. Amongst all establishments of 20 or more employees, the figure is 28.9 per cent for 1998, and 55 per cent for establishments of over 500 employees (p. 4). Bue, J. and Rougerie, C. (2000) op. cit., p. 13. A further aspect of rigid work organisation associated with the French variant of Fordism – that of the recourse to shift work in order to maximise the utilisation of machinery – has also been on the increase since the early 1980s. See Le Corre, V. (1999) ‘Le travail en équipes successives en 1994: recours accru et diversification’, Premières synthèses, No. 04.1, DARES. Bue, J. and Rougerie, C. (2000) op. cit., pp. 13–14. Coutrot, T. (2000) op. cit. These figures apply to establishments of 20 or more employees that belong to companies of 50 or more. Bue, J. and Rougerie, C. (2000) op. cit., p. 13. Ibid., p. 11. The Japanese model was seen to be based on four pillars: (1) the decentralisation of production, (2) the pooling of expertise, (3) qualified and flexible workforces, and (4) cooperative workplace relationships favouring innovation. Underpinning this was a long-term compromise between workers and management in which competence and loyalty were exchanged for employment security and/or a share in company profits. See Boyer, R. and Durand, J.-P. (1997) After Fordism, London: Macmillan. Salemohamed, G. (1994) ‘Japanese management and French company reforms: the post-Taylorist organisation deferred’, Journal of Area Studies: Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in Europe in the 1990s, No. 5, pp. 90–101. Ibid. Coutrot, T. (2000) op. cit. These figures apply to establishments of 20 or more employees that belong to companies of 50 or more. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Middle managers are also suspicious of quality circles, seeing in them a threat to their status through the loss of control of their expertise and the creation of an alternative hierarchy. See Salemohamed, G. (1994) op. cit. See Linhart, D. (1994) La Modernisation des entreprises, Paris: La Découverte. The author also argues that the same is true for quality assurance procedures (see later in this chapter), the codification of which is also designed to tap employees’ informal, or covert, knowledge and bring it out into the open, thereby reinforcing management control of the work process. Coutrot, T. (2000) op. cit., p. 2. Again this applies to those establishments of 20 or more employees belonging to companies of 50 or more. For all establishments of 20 or more employees the proportion is 29.1 per cent (p. 4). Coutrot, T. (1999) op. cit., pp. 14–15. Ibid., p. 55. Coutrot, T. (1999) op. cit., pp. 51–2. Parsons, N. (1997) op. cit., pp. 102–3. Brizard, A. (2000) ‘Les hausses de salaires sont moins fréquentes et plus individualisées en 1998’, Premières synthèses, No. 10.3, DARES. Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (1998) La Participation financière. Rapport annuel du Conseil supérieur de la participation pour 1997, Paris: La Documentation française, p. 31.

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59 Ibid., p. 18. 60 Ibid., p. 22. For 1997, 19,000 companies employing 4.9 million employees had an agreement on participation; three million employees in 14,600 companies were covered by an agreement on intéressement. As some companies used both schemes, in total, 5.5 million employees in 27,500 companies were covered, with coverage being positively related to size of company. See Fagnot, O. (1999) ‘De bons résultats pour la participation et l’intéressement versés en 1998’, Premières synthèses, No. 34.2, DARES. 61 Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13249, 5 October 2000. The quote is from Marc Blondel, General Secretary of FO. See also Pernot, J.-M. and Sauviat, C. (2001) ‘L’épargne salariale, un substitut aux augmentations de salaires?’, in L’Etat de la France, 2001–2002, Paris: La Découverte & Syros, pp. 432–3. 62 Coutrot, T. (1999) op. cit., p. 37. 63 Ibid., p. 38. 64 Individual pay rises depend on the formalised evaluation of individual performance in half of the cases where it is practised. See Brizard, A. (2000) op. cit. 65 Coutrot, T. (1999) op. cit., p. 85. 66 Ibid., p. 50. 67 Coutrot, T. (2000) op. cit., p. 2. 68 L’Horty, Y. (1999) ‘L’emploi précaire en France’, Regards sur l’actualité, March 1999, p. 17. 69 Bernard, M.-P. (1987) ‘L’adjustement des effectifs’, Les Cahiers français: La flexibilité du travail, No. 231, p. 8. 70 Abowd, J., Corbel, P. and Kramarz, F. (1995) The Entry and Exits of Workers and Employment: an Analysis of French Establishments, Document de travail no. 9542. CREST-INSEE. 71 Minni, C. (2000) ‘Les métamorphoses de l’emploi depuis un quart de siècle’, L’Etat de la France, 2000–2001, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 428–35. 72 Gaye, M. and Le Corre, V. (1999) ‘Les incitations en faveur du travail à temps partiel en 1998’, Premières synthèses, No. 43.2, DARES. 73 Ibid., pp. 1–2. Overall in 1997, 40 per cent of part-time workers wished to work more, a rise from 30 per cent in 1992: L’Horty, Y. (1999) op. cit., p. 19. 74 Minni, C. (2000) op. cit., p. 433. This does represent a fall of nearly ten points from 1982, however (95 per cent). 75 Cézard, M. and Hamon-Cholet, S. (1999) ‘Efforts et risques au travail en 1998’, Premières synthèses, No. 16.1, DARES. 76 Cézard, M. and Hamon-Cholet, S. (1999) ‘Travail et charge mentale’, Premières synthèses, No. 27.1, DARES. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Coutrot, T. (1999) op. cit., p. 85. 80 Dejours, C. (1998) Souffrance en France: La banalisation de l’injustice sociale, Paris: Seuil, p. 68. 81 See Le Monde, 1 March 2000. 82 Péléraux, H. (2001) ‘L’investissement des entreprises’, in OFCE, L’économie française 2001, Paris: La Découverte, p. 38. 83 Milewski, F. (2001) ‘L’histoire conflictuelle de la répartition du revenu national’, in L’Etat de la France, 2001–2002, Paris: La Découverte, p. 388. 6 Collective bargaining 1 Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) Les Clés du Social en France, Paris: Les Editions Liaisons, pp. 77–8.

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2 This translates, the French notion of an ordre public social. 3 Jacquier, J.-P. (2000) ‘Un pays qui n’aime pas négocier’, in A. Giraud-Héraud and C. Thuderoz (eds) La négociation sociale, Paris: Editions du CNRS, pp. 199–208. 4 Sellier, F. (1984) La confrontation en France, 1936–1981, Paris: Armand Colin. 5 Previous social and legal practice had already designated the branch as the main level for negotiation, although bargaining had been marginal. See Morin, M.-L. (1996) ‘Permanences et transformations du rôle de la négociation collective de branche’, in G. Murray, M.-L. Morin and I. Da Costa (eds) L’Etat des relations professionnelles: traditions et perspectives de recherche, Saint-Nicolas (Quebec): Presses de l’Université Laval/Octares, p. 537. 6 Membership numbers were one of the criteria retained when representative status was granted to the major trade union confederations in 1946. However, as this status was granted once and for all by the 1966 decree, in these cases, membership has ceased to be linked to the notion of representativeness. See Chapter 3. 7 Souriac-Rotschild, M.-A. (1996) ‘Droit de la négociation collective et relations professionnelles: quelques regards’, in G. Murray, M.-L. Morin and I. Da Costa (eds) op. cit., p. 446. 8 Supiot, A. (1994) Critique du droit du travail, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; Mériaux, O. (2000) ‘Eléments d’un régime post-fordiste de la négociation collective en France’, Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, 55: 4, 610. 9 Goetschy, J. and Rozenblatt, P. (1992) ‘France: the industrial relations system at a turning point?’, in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Industrial Relations in the New Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 430. 10 Sellier, F. (1984) op. cit. 11 van Ruysseveldt, J. and Visser, J. (1996) ‘Contestation and state intervention forever? Industrial relations in France’, in J. van Ruysseveldt and J. Visser (eds) Industrial Relations in Europe: Traditions and Transitions, London: Sage, p. 107. 12 Morin, M.-L. (1996) op. cit., p. 531. 13 Ibid., pp. 353–4. 14 van Russeveldt, J. and Visser, J. (1996) op. cit., p. 109. 15 Goetschy, J. and Rozenblatt, P. (1992) op. cit., p. 430. 16 Boyer, R. (1998) La théorie de la régulation: une analyse critique, Paris: La Découverte, p. 30. 17 Jobert, A. (2000) Les espaces de la negociation collectives, branches et territoires, Paris: Editions Octares, p. 47. 18 See Merlin, L. (1993) ‘Les accords de GPE: une coopération ambivalente’, Travail et emploi, No. 57, 33–48. 19 Morin, M.-L. (1996) op. cit., p. 351. 20 Eyraud, F. and Tchobanian, R. (1985) ‘The Auroux reforms and company level industrial relations in France’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 23, 242. 21 van Ruysseveldt, J. and Visser, J. (1996) op. cit., p. 110. 22 Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) La Négociation Collective en 1999. Tome 1: La Tendance, Paris: Editions Législatives, p. 40 23 Ibid. 24 Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., p. 40. See also Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 51; Mériaux, O. (2000) op. cit., p. 619. 25 See Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., pp. 41–2. 26 Ray, J.-E. (1999) ‘Les grands manœuvres du droit de la négociation collective’, Droit social, No. 12, 1018–25. 27 Mériaux, O. (2000) op. cit., p. 615.

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28 Ibid., p. 616. 29 Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) op. cit., p. 78; Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., p. 25. 30 Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 57. 31 Combault, P. (1999) ‘La couverture conventionnelle à la fin 1997’, Premières synthèses, No. 29.2, DARES. 32 See van Russeveldt, J. and Visser, J. (1996) op. cit., p. 106. 33 Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 58. Literally this covers linen cutters and dyers. 34 Ibid., p. 63. 35 Ibid., p. 62. 36 Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) op. cit., p. 82. 37 Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 65. 38 See, for example, Thuderoz, C. and Trompette, P. (1999) ‘Régulation sociale et action collective pour l’emploi en France’, Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations, 54: 4, 759. 39 Yvon Chotard, Vice-President of the CNPF, in Le Monde, 9 February 1982; cited by Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 50. 40 Ministère de l’Emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., p. 45; Ministère du travail et des affaires sociales (1997) La négociation collective en 1996. Tome 1: Les tendences, les dossiers, Paris: La Documentation française, p. 42. 41 Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 50. 42 Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., p. 36. 43 Morin, M.-L. (1996) op. cit., pp. 371–2. 44 Ibid., p. 371. 45 See Chapter 4 and Le Monde Initiatives, April 2003, 22–3. 46 Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., pp. 42–3. 47 Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 56. 48 Coutrot, T. (1998) L’Entreprise néo-libérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste? Paris: La Découverte. 49 Mériaux, O. (1999) Négocier l’emploi et la competitivité: Etudes pour le projet ‘Collective Bargaining on Employment and Competitiveness’, Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions; Mériaux, O. and Trompette, P. (1997) ‘Les accords d’entreprise sur l’emploi: quels processus de change?’ La revue de l’IRES, No. 57, 119–48. See also Amadieu, J.-F. (1999) Les syndicats en miettes, Paris: Seuil. 50 Supiot, A. (1994) op. cit., pp. 174–5. 51 Souriac-Rotschild, M.-A. (1996) op. cit., p. 447. 52 Mériaux, O. (2000) op. cit., p. 616; (1999) op. cit.; Mériaux, O. and Trompette, P. (1997) op. cit. 53 Morin, M.-L. (1996) op. cit., p. 373. 54 Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 51. 55 Coutrot, T. and Boulin, J.-Y. (1994) ‘Les accords de réduction du coût du travail et de partage de travail’, Premières synthèses, 16 February, DARES. 56 Mériaux, O. (2000) op. cit., p. 626. 57 Ibid., p. 627. 58 Jobert, A. (2000) op. cit., p. 71. 59 Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13818, ‘Fillon propose de réformer les règles de validité des accords’, 19 January 2003, p. 1. 7 Workplace representation 1 Tchobanian, R. (1996) ‘La représentation des salariés dans l’entreprise: entre participation et action syndicale’, in G. Murray, M.-L. Morin and I. Da Costa

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16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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(eds) L’Etat des relations professionnelles: Traditions et perspectives de recherche, SaintNicolas (Quebec): Les Presses de l’Université de Laval/Octares, p. 261. INSEE (2000) Annuaire statistique de la France, Table C.02–15, p. 169. Whereas 29.6 per cent of workplaces of 11–49 employees were covered in 1994, this proportion rose to 96.7 per cent for those of over 1000. Ibid., Table C.02–16. Tchobanian, R. (1996) op. cit., p. 260. Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) Les syndicats en France. Tome 1. Paris: Seuil, p. 239. Coutrot, T. (2001) ‘Où sont les CHSCT?’, Premières synthèses, No. 16.2, DARES, p. 1. Liaisons sociales. Documents, No. 94/2001, ‘Les élections aux comités d’entreprise en 1999’, 18 December 2001, p. 6. Liaisons sociales, Documents, No. 102/2000, ‘La présence syndicale s’accroît dans les entreprises d’au moins 50 salariés’, 14 December 2000. Liaisons sociales, Brèf social, No. 13257, ‘Les délégués syndicaux sont présents dans 37 pour cent des établissements’, 17 October 2000. Ibid. Coutrot, T. (2001) op. cit., p. 1. Liaisons sociales. Documents, No. 94/2001, ‘Les élections aux comités d’entreprise en 1999’, 18 December 2001, p. 6. Tchobanian, R. (1995) ‘France: from conflict to social dialogue?’, in J. Rogers and W. Streek (eds) Works Councils: Consultation, Representation, and Cooperation in Industrial Relations, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, p. 118. Tchobanian, R. (1995) op. cit., p. 116. It is more accurate to say reintroduced as employee delegates were first legislated for in 1919. Faced with employer opposition, a reduced need for the cooperation of the working classes with the end of war, and the return of conservative government following the cessation of hostilities, the law was never fully implemented and quickly fell into abeyance. Tchobanian, R. (1996) op. cit., p. 263. Ibid. Ibid., p. 125. For a recent example of how unions use the information provided by works committees to mobilise workers, see Parsons, N. (1997) Employee Participation in Europe: a Case Study in the British and French Gas Industries, Aldershot: Avebury. Eyraud, F. and Tchobanian, R. (1985) ‘The Auroux reforms and company level industrial relations in France’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 23, 246. Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) op. cit., pp. 248–9. Martin, D. (1976) ‘Les systèmes de négociation et de représentation dans l’entreprise’, Droit social, 3, 99–101. For a more detailed treatment of this argument, see Parsons, N. (1995) ‘Works committees and the regulation of workplace conflict in France’, in J. Windebank and R. Gunther (eds) Violence and Conflict in the Politics and Society of Modern France, Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 84–7. Delamotte, Y., cited in Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) op. cit., p. 242. Tchobanian, R. (1996) op. cit., p. 266. Tchobanian, R. (1995) op. cit., p. 127. Bunel, J. and Saglio, J. (1979) L’action patronale: du CNPF au petit patronat, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Tchobanian, R. (1996) op. cit., p. 273. Ibid., p. 267. Ministère du travail, de l’emploi et de la formation professionnelle (1993)

202

31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Notes

‘L’expression des salariés au 30 avril 1991’, Dossiers statistiques du travail et de l’emploi, No. 103. For a good early overview of the problems posed for trade unions by ‘selfexpression groups’, see Chouraqui, A. (1987) ‘L’expérience syndicale de l’expression dans les entreprises: vrais enjeux de pouvoir ou simple jeux des acteurs?’ Droit social, No. 12, 857–63. Tchobanian, R. (1996) op. cit., pp. 268–9. Coutrot, T. (2000) ‘Innovations dans le travail: la pression de la concurrence internationale, l’atout des qualifications’, Premières synthèses, No. 09.2, DARES, p. 2. The precise figures for the presence of self-expression groups in establishments are 32.9 per cent in 1992 and 21.5 per cent in 1998. These figures apply to establishments employing 20 or more people and which belong to companies employing 50 or more. See ibid. and Chapter Five. See Chouraqui, A. (1987) op. cit. Cam, P. (1991) ‘Le droit à la lumière ou les ambivalences du savoir’, Travail et Emploi, No. 43, 9–21; Parsons, N. (1995) op. cit., pp. 95–6. Harff, Y. and Henriet, B. (1988) ‘Evolution du rôle des interventions économiques du comité d’entreprise’, Droit Social, No. 2, 166–74. Parsons, N. (1994) ‘Trade union and management strategies towards employee participation and consultation in Britain and France: an international comparative case study’, Journal of Area Studies, 5, 153–74; (1997) op. cit. Foucher, C. (1983) ‘L’information et la consultation du comité d’entreprise dans le domaine économique’, Travail et Emploi, No. 15, p. 93. Cézard, M. and Malan, A. (1995) ‘Relations sociales en entreprise: le point de vue des employeurs’, Travail et emploi, No. 62, 76–82. Calandra, P. (1992) ‘Les attributions d’ordre économique des institutions de représentation du personnel dans l’entreprise’, Journal Officiel de la République Française (Avis et rapports du CES), No. 18. Le Maître, A. and Tchobanian, R. (1992) Les institutions représentatives du personnel dans l’entreprise, Paris: La Documentation Française. Ibid. Lane, C. (1989) Management and Labour in Europe: the Industrial Enterprise in Germany, Britain and France, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, p. 240. Goetschy, J. and Rozenblatt, P. (1992) ‘France: the industrial relations system at a turning point?’ in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Industrial Relations in the New Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 436–7. Parsons, N. (1995) op. cit., pp. 92–3. Rosanvallon, P. (1988) La question syndicale, Paris: Hachette; Labbé, D. (1996) Syndicats et syndiqués en France depuis 1945, Paris: L’Harmattan. Tchobanian, R. (1996) op. cit., p. 280. Adam, G. (1983) Le pouvoir syndical, Paris: Dunod; Rosanvallon, P. (1988) op. cit.; Labbé, D. (1996) op. cit. Howell, C. (1992) Regulating Labor: The State and Industrial Relations Reform in Postwar France, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 166–85. Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, Nos. 13532, 29 November 2001; 13533, 30 November 2001; 13535, 4 December 2001. For details see Parsons, N. (1997) op. cit., pp. 14–30. Gold, M. and Hall, M. (1994) ‘Statutory European works councils: the final countdown?’ Industrial Relations Journal, 25: 3, 178. These countries are 14 member states of the EU – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden – plus three states from the European Economic

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Area: Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. The UK was not covered as the Directive was adopted via the Social Protocol of the Maastricht Treaty, which it did not sign. It is now covered by a directive of 15 December 1997 (Liaisons sociales. Conventions et Accords, No. 134, ‘Les comités d’entreprise européens’, 13 October 2000, p. 2). In addition, subsidiaries of EU companies in countries that are candidates for membership are now covered (Liaisons sociales. Conventions et Accords, No. 194, ‘EDF-GDF: comité d’entreprise européen’, 2 January 2002, p. 1). European Works Council Bulletin (1995) Preview Issue, Winter, pp. 5–7; (1996) May/June, pp. 8–9; Incomes Data Services (1995) Employment Europe, Issue 401, p. 17; (1996) European Works Councils, IDS Study No. 600, April, p. 20. Lallement, M. (2001) ‘Action syndicale et relations professionnelles: une double mise en perspective’, in D. Labbé and S. Courtois (eds) Regards sur la crise du syndicalisme, Paris: L’Harmattan, p. 120. Cited in Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13030, ‘Rapport sur le CE européen’, 16 November 1999, p. 1. Ibid. Liaisons sociales. Conventions et Accords, No. 134, op. cit., p. 3. La lettre de l’Ires, No. 40, July 1999. Study cited in Lallement, M. (2001) op. cit., p. 120. Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13270, 6 November 2000. Liaisons sociales. Brèf social, No. 13380, 11 April 2001. Tchobanian, R. (1996) op. cit., p. 278. Ibid., p. 269.

8 Conflict 1 Adam, G. (2000) Les relations sociales année zéro, Paris: Bayard, p. 72. 2 Trempé, R. (1995) ‘La “Belle Epoque”, 1895–1914’, in C. Willard (ed.) La France Ouvrière. Tome 1: des origines à 1920, Paris: Editions de l’Atelier/Editions Ouvrières, pp. 319–78. 3 Groux, G. (1998) Vers un renouveau du conflit social? Paris: Bayard, p. 10. 4 Lallement, M. (1996) Sociologie des relations professionnelles, Paris: La Découverte, pp. 74–5; Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) Les syndicats en France. Tome 1, Paris: Editions du Seuil, pp. 150–1. 5 Quoted in Julliard, J. (1988) L’autonomie ouvrière, Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, p. 222. 6 Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) op. cit., p. 164. 7 Ibid., pp. 150–3. 8 Borrel, M. (1996) Conflits du travail, changement social et politique en France depuis 1950, Paris: L’Harmattan. 9 Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) op. cit., pp. 166–7. 10 Ibid., p. 159. 11 Dubois, P., Durand, C. and Erbes-Séguin, S. (1978) ‘The contradictions of French trade unionism’, in C. Crouch and A. Pizzorno (eds) The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe since 1968, Vol. 1, London: Macmillan, p. 61. 12 Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) ‘Après Mai 68: la quête d’un nouveau modèle de relations sociales adapté à une économie ouverte’, in M. Parodi, P. Langevin, J.-P. Oppenheim and N. Richez-Battesti, La question sociale en France depuis 1945, Paris: Armand Colin/HER, p. 45. 13 Crouch, C. and Pizzorno, A. (eds) (1978) op. cit. 14 Dubois et al. (1978) op. cit., p. 68. 15 Oppenhheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 42. 16 Ibid., p. 49.

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17 Vacquin, H. (1999) ‘Mutations du syndicalisme français’, Esprit, No. 251, March–April, p. 221. 18 Reynaud, J.-D. (1975) op. cit., p. 167. 19 Source: Adam, G. (2000) op. cit., p. 247. This decline is all the more striking as, before 1982, statistics did not include the fonction publique. 20 Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) La Négociation Collective en 1999. Tome 1: La Tendance, Paris: Editions Législatives, p. 222. 21 Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) Les Clés du Social en France: Manuel d’initiation sociale, Paris: Editions Liaisons, p. 96. 22 Borrel, M. (1996) op. cit., pp. 40–3. 23 Landier, H. and Labbé, D. (1998) Les organisations syndicales en France: des origines aux difficultés actuelles, Paris: Editions Liaisons, p. 95. 24 See ibid., p. 96, and Jacquier, J.-P. (1998) op. cit., p. 96. 25 Landier, H. and Labbé, D. (1998) op. cit., p. 96. 26 Ibid. 27 Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., p. 224; Ministère du travail et des affaires sociales (1997) La Négociation Collective en 1996. Tome 1: La Tendance, Paris: Editions Législatives, p. 194. 28 See Parsons, N. (2002) ‘Trade unions and social democracy in France’, paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association Labour Movements Group, Bristol, 4–5 July. 29 For an excellent analysis of generational and ethnic divisions, see Beaud, S. and Pialoux, S. (1999) Retour sur la condition ouvrière: Enquête aux unsines Peugeot de Sochaux-Montbéliard, Paris: Fayard. 30 Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 31 Reynaud, J.-D. (1982) Sociologie des conflits du travail, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, p. 94. 32 Capdevielle, J. (2001) La modernité du corporatisme, Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques. 33 Le Monde, 29–30 April 2001. 34 For more detail on the points made in this paragraph, see Capdevielle, J. (2001) op. cit., pp. 74–95. 35 Ibid., pp. 109–10. Madelin was forced to resign on 25 August, the day after making these remarks, although Juppé took up the same point in a meeting with trade unions just a few days later, on 4 September. 36 Louis-Harris poll, conducted on 8 and 9 January for L’Evènement du jeudi, cited in Capdevielle, J. (2001) op. cit., p. 85. 37 Ibid., p. 87. 68 per cent of public sector workers supported the railway strike, citing pay, working conditions and the threat to public services as the most important reasons. 38 Ibid., p. 113. 39 See Mouriaux, R. and Subileau, F. (1996) ‘Les grèves françaises de l’automne 1995: défense des acquis ou mouvement social?’, Modern and Contemporary France, NS4 (3), p. 302. 40 For a detailed chronology of the events, see Vacquin, H. and Minvielle, Y. (1996) Le sens d’une colère: chances et perspectives. Novembre–décembre 1995, Paris: Stock, pp. 48–129. 41 Ibid., p. 104. 42 Perrrineau, P. and Wieviorka, M. (1995) ‘De la nature du movement social’, Le Monde, 20 December 1995. 43 Ibid. 44 See Le Monde, 15 December 1995, in which Bordieu launched a petition to

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45 46

47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

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call on intellectuals to support the strike. In the same vein, see also Baudelot, C. and Israel, S. (1995) ‘Le bel avenir de la grève’, Le Monde, 28 December 1995. Mouriaux, R. and Subileau, F. (1996) op. cit., p. 301. See also Capdevielle, J. (2001) op. cit., p. 127. Different opinion polls over the period estimated public support for the strikers at between 54 per cent and 62 per cent over the period. Support remained strongest among Parisians and inhabitants of other large towns. Capdevielle, J. (2001) op. cit., p. 123. Capdevielle, J. (2001) op. cit., pp. 99–123. See for example Vacquin, H. and Minvielle, Y. (1996) op. cit., p. 174. Groux, G. (1998) op. cit., p. 196. Ibid., pp. 195–6. Le Monde, 18 April 2001, pp. 18–19, lists 12 companies that had recently announced such plans, as well as containing articles on redundancies at Phillips and Moulinex-Brandt. In total, well over 10,000 jobs were under threat. See also European Industrial Relations Review, No. 329, June 2001, p. 7. Libération, 18 May 2002 See Chapter 7 and European Industrial Relations Review, No. 328, May 2001, p. 5; No. 329, July 2001, pp. 15–18. See Croissandeau, M. (2001) ‘La gauche face aux charettes de la croissance’, Nouvel Observateur, 12–18 April, pp. 74–6; Belot, L. (2001) ‘Cible des élus politiques, Danone est confrontée à une crise inédite’, Le Monde, 7 April 2001. According to Frédéric Lemaître, the management of Danone saw this as ‘indispensable’ because the operating profit of the biscuits operation was ‘only’ 7.9 per cent compared with 10.5 per cent for the group as a whole, and this was seen to affect share prices (F. Lemaître, ‘Danone s’apprête à supprimer 3000 emplois en Europe dont 1700 en France’, Le Monde, 11 January 2001). The figure of 1700 jobs was later reduced to 570 when the official announcement was made on 29 March. See Le Monde, 7 April 2001 and 22–23 April 2002. Unemployment averaged 4.2 per cent between 1971 and 1980, 9.3 per cent from 1981–90 and 11.4 per cent from 1991–2000. Source: OFCE (2001) L’économie française 2001, Paris: La Découverte, p. 117. European Industrial Relations Review, No. 324, January 2001, p. 6 Le Monde, 14–15 January 2001. Andolfatto, D. and Labbé, D. (2000) Sociologie des syndicats, Paris: La Découverte, p. 93. Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., p. 224. See Le Monde, 8–9 April 2001; 12 April 2001. Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité (2000) op. cit., p. 224. Le Monde, 24 April 2001. Le Monde, 27 January 2001. The CFDT and UNSA disagreed with inviting public sector employees to join the January 25 demonstration, preferring to keep the issue limited to the MEDEF’s proposals for private sector pension reform. See Le Monde, 21–22 January 2001. Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 49. See Le Monde, 8 December 2000. Groux, G. (1998) op. cit. Oppenheim, J.-P. (2000) op. cit., p. 50.

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Conclusion 1 Panitch, L. (1996) ‘Rethinking the role of the state’, in J. H. Mitttelman (ed.) Globalization: Critical Reflections, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, pp. 83–113. 2 Cerny, P. (1997) ‘Paradoxes of the competition state: the dynamics of political globalisation’, Government and Opposition, No. 32, 251–74. 3 Howell, C. (1992) Regulating Labor: The State and Industrial Relations Reform in Postwar France, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 213–14. 4 At the branch and multi-industry levels, this would not apply. Only a majority of representative unions, i.e. three out of five, and not those gaining a majority of votes, would need to sign an agreement for it to be valid at these levels. This is a main point of contention between the CGT and CFDT on the one hand, and the MEDEF on the other. See Le Monde Initiatives, April 2003, 22–3. 5 See Amadieu, J.-F. and Boisard, P. (2001) La démocratie sociale en danger. Laissons vivre les partenaires sociaux!, Paris: Editions Liaisons, pp. 37–41. 6 See the following articles in Liaisons Sociales Magazine, December 2001: Landré, M., ‘Notre arsenal social fait peur aux investisseurs’, 14–18; Devillechabrolle, V., ‘Les délocalisations gagnent le tertiaire’, 20–5. 7 Rozès, S. (2002) ‘Les Français attendaient un retour du politique et de l’Etat’, in L’Etat de la France, 2002, Paris: La Découverte & Syros, pp. 24–8.

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Index

35-hour week 44–5, 82, 88, 121, 131; see also working time, reduction of active social policy 77–9, 102, 140 AFEP (Association française des entreprises privées) 72 AGIRC (Association générale des institutions de retraite des cadres) 27 Aglietta, M. 2, 19, 21–2 ANACT (Agence nationale pour l’amélioration des conditions de travail) 157 Andolfatto, D. 56 arbitration, state role in 34–5, 45–6 ARRCO (Association pour le régime des retraites complémentaires des salariés) 27 Arthuis Report (1993) 18 ASSEDIC-UNIDEC (Association pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce) 27 Aubry Laws 40, 42, 45, 121–2, 128, 135, 178 Aubry, Martine 44, 84 Auroux Laws 38–9, 40–1, 42, 45, 47, 53–4, 66, 78–9, 81, 113, 115, 120, 124–5, 126, 131, 134, 141–8, 151, 152, 161, 177 austerity policy 36–7, 54 autogestion 11, 57, 125, 140, 157 Balladur, Edouard 39 Barre Plan 35–6, 38, 46 Barre, Raymond 35, 46, 78 Belier Report (1990) 146 Bloch-Lainé, François 74 Blondel, Marc 57 Borrel, Monique 159 Bourdieu, Pierre 165 Boyer, R. 12, 20

branch-level bargaining: conflictual practices 117–18; framework agreements 116; levels, of bargaining 113–14, 131; as pivotal 126; principles established 115; wages, concentration on 116–17; see also collective bargaining Buguet, Robert 88 Bunel, J. 141 capitalism, structural changes in 19–22, 174–5; see also globalisation Capdevielle, Jacques 62, 162, 164 Ceyrac, François 76 CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail) 7, 8, 9, 11, 26, 33, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57–8, 60, 61, 62, 63–4, 65, 66, 67, 117, 125, 129, 134, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 156, 157, 158, 163, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176 CFE-CGC (Confédération française de l’encadrement-Confédération générale des cadres) 81 CFTC (Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens) 7, 8, 26, 48, 49, 63, 82, 118, 170 CGC (Confédération générale des cadres) 7, 8, 26, 82 CGPF (Confédération générale de la production française/Confédération générale du patronat français) 73 CGPME (Confédération générale des petites et moyennes entreprises) 72, 73, 88 CGT (Confédération générale du travail) 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13–14, 23, 26, 31, 33, 34, 42, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56–7, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 74, 116, 117, 125, 134, 136,

218

Index

CGT – contd. 138, 139, 143, 144, 155, 156, 157, 161, 163, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176, 179 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques 31, 76 Chapelier Law (1791) 48 Chaponnière, J.-R. 18 Charter of Fundamental Rights 64–5, 171, 181 Chirac, Jacques 35, 37, 40, 46, 79, 164 CHSCT (Comité d’hygiène, de sécurité et des conditions de travail) 136, 141 CJD (Centre des jeunes dirigeants) 72, 73 CJP (Centre des jeunes patrons) 73 class antagonism 8–9, 35, 49, 162, 168 Clemental, Etienne 72 CNNC (Conseil national de la négociation collective) 115 CNPF (Conseil national du patronat français) 44, 71, 95; active social policy 77–9, 102, 140; Auroux laws, opposition to 78–9, 124–5; company reform proposals 74–5; divisions within 73; French economy, structural changes in 75–6; oil crises of 1970s, and slowdown in growth 76; and Popular Front 72–3; role of 73–4; social and economic conservatism 74; state, lobbying of 74, 79–80, 89; Sudreau Report 77 collective bargaining: bargaining levels 113–14; CNPF opposition 80–2; common position 84, 131–2; cooperation, structural bias towards 23; employment relationship 119; global competition, effects of 119, 130–1; ideological conflict 8–9; legal framework for 27–8, 114; ‘New Society’ reforms 32–3, 38; social demands 119–20; state intervention 29–30, 126–7, 131–2, 178–9; underdevelopment of 116–17; see also Auroux Laws; branch-level bargaining; decentralisation, of collective bargaining; multi-industry bargaining Collective Bargaining Acts 114–18, 120 communications revolution 22 communism, and CGT 56–7, 63; see also PCF company-level bargaining: autonomous unions, development of 128; company-level agreements 118–19, 122, 123–4; consequences of

development of 122–4; employer attitudes 124–5; employment relationship 122–3, 131; legislation for 121–2; levels, of bargaining 113–14, 131; majority consent, principle of 123; state intervention 40–41, 45, 126–7, 131–2; trade union weakness 125, 128–31 Constitution of the Fourth Republic (1946) 6 contrats de progrès (Delors) 30, 31–2 coordination movements 60, 68, 154, 163–4, 166–7, 168, 172–3 Coutrot, T. 107, 109, 128, 129 CRDS (Contribution au remboursement de la dette sociale) 43, 165 Croisat, Maurice 52 Crouch, C. 156 CSG (Contribution sociale généralisé) 43 Daley, A. 43 Danone dispute 41–2, 168, 170, 174, 178 DARES (Direction de l’animation de la recherche, des études et des statistiques) 98, 101 de Gaulle, Charles 12, 33, 74, 75 Decaillon, Joel 56 decentralisation, of collective bargaining: active social policy 77–9, 102, 140; Auroux Laws 38–9, 40–1, 42, 45, 47, 53–4, 161; microcorporatism 178–9; New Society reforms 31–2; see also company-level bargaining Delors, Jacques 30, 31–2, 64 Dockès, Pierre 21–2 Donnadieu, G. 57, 58 Dorbais, Alain 65 Durand, J.-P. 98 economic indicators 1960–85 14–15 employee delegates 133–4, 137, 138–9 employee representation see workplace representation employer organisations: company, and social relations 80–4; employers, divisions among 72–3; see also CNPF; MEDEF entreprise-citoyenne 80 ESC (Economic and Social Council) 26, 27, 28–9 ETUC (European Trade Confederation) 56, 63, 64, 150, 167, 171

Index 219 European Coal and Steel Community 74 European construction, and trade unions 62–9 European Economic Community 28, 75 European Monetary System, establishment of 36, 64 European social model 1–2, 3 EWCs (European Works Councils) 64, 65, 136, 148–50, 152, 180 FDI (Foreign direct investment) 17–19 FEN (Fédération de l’Education nationale) 61 FGAAC (Fédération générale autonome des agents de conduite) 61, 163, 169 Fillon, François 131 Five Year Employment Plan (1993) 39–40, 79, 121 FO (Force ouvrière) 6, 7, 8, 26, 48, 49, 50, 57, 60, 63, 82, 118, 125, 136, 143, 167, 171 Fordism 12, 14–19, 35–8, 86, 156 Fordist compromise 1–2, 3, 11–14, 25, 49, 111, 112, 133, 181 Foucher, C. 145 Freyssinet, M. 12 FSU (Fédération syndicale unitaire) 60, 61, 64, 171 G10 (Groupe des dix) 60–1, 64, 171 Gandois, Jean 44, 80–2 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 17 de Gaulle, Charles 12, 33, 74, 75 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 77 globalisation: competition, effects of 119, 130–1, 140–1; economic interdependence 17; exogenous pressures 16–19; FDI, development of 17–19; global economy, postition of France in 18–19; labour regulation 2, 174–5; neo-liberalism, refusal of 165–8, 171–2; productive systems, changes to 2, 16–17, 95–6; profit margins, squeezing of 15–16; trade unions, decline of 3, 66–7, 68; workers, effects on 1–2 grandes écoles 33, 93 Grenelle Accords 34, 118, 156 Harff, Y. 145 Harris, N. 1 health and safety committees 136 Henriet, B. 145

Hewlett, N. 12 Howell, C. 12, 23, 26, 86, 147 individualisation, of employment contract 105, 161–2 industrial relations: capital–labour relations 7, 25–8; cooperation, structural bias towards 23; decentralisation of 2, 69; Fordist compromise 11–14; ideological conflict 8–9; labour exclusionary settlement 9–11; labour regulation 6–7, 22–3, 24; meaning of 3; nationalisations 7–8; patrimonial economy 19–22; state, role of 38–41; ‘thirty glorious years’, of growth 9, 10; see also collective bargaining; trade unions industry-level bargaining see branchlevel bargaining inflation 14, 16, 36 INSEE (Institut national des statistiques et études économiques) 50 institutional investment 20–2 international regulation, need for 180–2 IRES (Institut de recherches économiques et sociales) 149–50 ISO (International Standards Organisation) 104 Jacot, Henri 83, 87 Jacquier, J.-P. 113–14, 160 Japanese model, of industrial organisation 17, 102 Jobert, A. 123–4, 125, 129, 131 Jospin, Lionel 37, 44, 47, 82, 88, 89, 180 Juppé, Alain 43, 165 Juppé Plan (1995) 37, 43, 58, 60, 165, 166 Kessler, Dennis 82, 83, 85–6 Keynesian policies 2, 26, 36, 86, 89 Labbé, D. 51, 159 labour regulation: and globalisation 2, 174–5; industrial relations 6–7, 22–23, 24; Labour Code 29–30, 178; microcorporatism 179–80, 181; new forms of 22–3, 24; state, role of 3, 44–5 Landier, H. 159 Lane, C. 93, 146 Lange, P. 10

220

Index

Law on Social Modernisation (2001) 41, 42, 168, 180 Liberal Charter (1965) 75, 85, 89 Loi Delebarre 39 Maastricht Treaty 15, 37, 63, 64, 149, 165–6 Madelin, Alain 164 mandatement 39–40, 129 Marks and Spencer dispute 41–2, 167–8, 170, 174, 178 Matignon Agreement 11, 73, 137 Maurice, M. 97 May 1968 strikes: company reform proposals 74–5; humanisation of work 11, 16; labour movement, contradictions of 156–7; multiindustry level agreements 118; revolutionary strikes 154; state response to 31–2; Taylorism, resistance to 95; trade union workplace branches, recognition of 135, 138; of unskilled and semiskilled workers 157–8; MEDEF (Mouvement des entreprises de France) 43, 44, 45, 58, 62, 69, 70, 82–6, 84, 131–2, 170, 179, 181 Mériaux, O. 123, 128 microcorporatism 86, 147; collective bargaining, decentralisation of 178–9; Constitutional change, requirement for 179; industrial relations, pre-existing configuration of 176–7; labour regulation 179–80, 181; sectional interests, and wider social concerns 177–8; state intervention 175–6; trade union weakness 176, 177, 179 Milner, S. 27, 43 minimum wage 45, 74 Mitterrand, François 10, 36, 44 Morin, M.-L. 120 multi-industry bargaining 32, 113–14, 118, 126; see also collective bargaining National Planning Commissariat 26 nationalisations 7–8, 30 neo-liberalism: of CNPF 76–80; of MEDEF 83–4; refusal of 165–8, 171–2; shift to 1, 2–3, 37 New Society reforms 31–5, 76 Nice summit (2000) 64 Nixon, Richard 19 November–December 1995 strikes 46, 57, 60, 62, 164–8

OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) 18 oil crises, of 1970s 14, 35, 52, 76 Olson, M. 162 OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) 52 Oppenheim, Jean-Pierre 75, 156, 171, 173 PARE (Plan d’aide au retour à l’emploi) 43, 84, 87 Parodi–Croizot decrees 6 part-time work 40 patrimonial economy 19–22 PCF (Parti communiste français) 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 42, 48, 54, 56, 63, 155, 170 PDG (Président-directeur générale) 93 Perrineau, Pascal 164 Piore, M. J. 22, 97 Pizzorno , A. 156 Planning Commissions 7, 8, 28 Pompidou, Georges 34 Popular Front government (1936) 72, 114, 133, 154 PPESV (Plan partenarial d’épargne salariale volontaire) 42, 106 private sector 30–1, 62, 68, 69 product diversification, and internationalisation 2, 16–17, 95–6 PTT (Administration des postes et télécommunications et de la télédiffusion) 60 quality assurance 104, 144 quality order 53, 103, 143, 144 Rand Smith, W. 59 RATP (Régie autonomes des transports parisiens) 159, 163 Ray, J.-E. 122 reflationary policies 36 refondation sociale (MEDEF) 44, 69, 83–4, 126, 181 Regulation School 11–12, 19, 24 Renault dispute 6, 7–8, 30, 150, 167 representation see workplace representation Reynaud, J.-D. 162 Robien Law 44, 121, 128 Ross, G. 10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 33 van Ruysseveldt, J. 117 Sabel, C.F. 22

Index 221 Saglio, J. 141 Séguin Law 39 Seillière, E.-A. 44, 81–2, 88 self-expression groups 136, 141–2, 143–5, 152 Single European Act (1987) 148 skills, of labour force 16–17, 22, 91, 94–6, 97–102, 157–8 SMIC (Salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance) 45 SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer) 60, 159, 163, 164 Social Contract (Rousseau) 33 social security system 1–2, 7, 10–11, 27, 29, 37, 43, 58, 60, 165, 166 Souriac-Rothschild, M.-A. 128 state, role of: capital–labour relations 25–8; collective bargaining 29–30, 40–1, 45, 126–7, 131–2, 178–9; conflict arbitration 34–5, 45–6; industrial relations policy 38–43; labour regulation 3, 44–5; macroeconomic policy 35–8; microcorporatism 175–6; New Society reforms, failure of 31–5; planning process 7, 8, 28; redundancies, legislation on 41–2; social regulation 25, 43–4; state dominance, failure of 28–31; trade unions 69–70; see also social security system Statut de la fonction publique (1946) 7 strikes: corporatiste strikes 163–4, 165, 170; eurostrikes 167, 169; Fordism, challenge to 158; globalisation, and labour movement 171–2; legal framework 153–4; national days of action 159, 162, 169–70; neo-liberal globalisation, refusal of 165–8, 171–2; political 154, 155; revolutionary 154–5; sectional interests 164–5, 166, 167, 169, 170–1, 172, 173; strike rates, decline in 3, 51–2, 158–62, 169, 177–8; trade union weakness 155–6, 169; wage demands 156; see also May 1968 strikes; November–December 1995 strikes SUD (Solidaires, unitaires, démocratiques) 61, 169, 181 Sudreau Report (1975) 77 Taylorist work practices 2, 11, 13, 16, 17, 78, 93–5, 97–101, 139–40, 171, 176

Tchobanian, R. 138, 147, 152 temporary contracts 107–8, 109–10 Thatcherism 46, 69 Thibault, Bernard 64 ‘thirty glorious years’ 9, 10 trade unions: autonomous 60–2, 128; and base, relations between 147; decline of 3, 50–5, 66–7, 68; donnantdonnant strategy 67–8, 69, 125; fragmentation of 48–9, 59–61; future of 23–4, 66–70; and international political economy 3, 62–9; labour force divisions 52–3, 55; legalisation of 48; mediatory role of 2; membership figures 50; and ‘new economy’ 21; ‘opposition force’ strategy of 56–7, 58; organisational change, influences on 58–9; public versus private sector 62, 69; reformist stance of 57–8; state, role of 69–70; weakness of 125, 128–31, 146–7, 155–6, 169, 176, 177, 179; in workplace 135–9; see also collective bargaining; industrial relations training: and new technology 97; and qualifications 106–7; and redundancy 40, 42-3; of state elites 33, 93 transnational bodies 149–50 Treaty of Rome (1957) 28, 63, 75 TUC (Trades Union Congress) 167 UIMM (Union des industries métallurgiques et minières) 81, 82 UK (United Kingdom) 19–20 UNEDIC (Union pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce) 7, 43, 58, 74, 87, 90 UNSA (Union nationale des syndicats autonomes) 60, 61, 67, 171 UPA (Union professionnelle artisanale) 72, 88 US (United States) 6, 12, 19–20, 63 Vannicelli, M. 10 Viannet, Louis 56, 57 Vichy regime 72, 73 Villiers, Georges 74 Visser, J. 117 welfare system see social security system Wieviorka, Michel 165

222

Index

work, organisation of: authoritarianism 92, 93; de-Taylorised workplace 96–101; degradation, of work 108–10; experimental reforms 96–7; external flexibility 107–8; individualised pay schemes 105; internationalisation, and product diversification 95–6; just-in-time production 101; management control 93–4, 111–12; new technologies, and Taylorist practices 97–101; participative management 101–4; paternalism 92, 93; profit sharing 105–6; qualifications, and evaluation 106–7; wages/productivity link, break down of 111 working time, reduction of 39–40, 40, 42, 44–5, 45, 82, 121–2, 128, 135, 178

workplace representation: Auroux Laws 141–8, 151, 152; conflictual cooperation 136–9, 150–1; and decision-making powers 151; employee representation structures 133–6; employee rights 147–8; microcorporatism 147; rationalisation of 142–3; self-expression groups 141–2, 143–5, 152; trade union weakness, context of 146–7; trade unions, workplace role of 135–9, 141, 142 works committees 6, 134–5, 136, 137, 138–9, 141, 145–8 WTO (World Trade Organisation) 17, 171, 181

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