Less than a month before the election of the new boss of the Medef, a question torments the ranks of French employers: is the Medef still useful? Loss of influence, funding, representativeness, Michel Offerlé*, professor emeritus at the ENS, paints an uncompromising portrait of the organization chaired by Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux.
L’Express: How has the role of Medef – formerly CNPF – changed over time? Is the organization still as influential?
The Medef is both a brand, a label, a symbol: the voice of companies and/or bosses. And ultimately quite a few. It is a modernized structure but still resembles the CNPF in certain respects. It does not really represent the current economic reality. In addition, it is a very inclusive structure, which must manage social dialogue and joint action, but also do economics, with a relatively light infrastructure. Its permanent staff, more than a hundred, cannot do everything and its commissions are sometimes empty shells.
Indeed, since the controversial and ultimately unproductive social reorganization of 2000, even in the attempts of Laurence Parisot (Changer d’air, Changer d’ère), we have been looking for truly new ideas on the major issues of the moment: business and work, environmental transitions, social inequalities, the meaning of globalization, and even why not, democracy. And we cannot say that the proposals of the two current candidates for the presidency of Medef are really “disruptive”.
Did the Medef also suffer, like the trade unions, from an assumed disaffection of the intermediary bodies by the executive?
The Medef was put on the corner like many other intermediate bodies. However, this circumvention by the Macronian power, which played alone in the adoption of a very liberal agenda economically, is perhaps a way out for the Medef. The joint system, very controversial at the start of the mandate of Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, has recently regained some color, and the virtue of national negotiation, however usually vilified at the Medef, has been rediscovered. But we cannot say that the autonomous “social and economic agenda” that Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux had proposed to the trade union organizations in February 2021, was followed by many effects, apart from the ANI of February 10, 2023 which showed a desire for the existence of Medef, allied to the social partners, alongside a very solitary political power.
Is the reinvestment of a political place through social work a good way, when we know that many bosses rightly criticize the Medef for making too much room for social work in its agenda, and that they expect it to do more strong investment in economic issues? To be more one”trade organization“only one”employers’ organization“, as they say in other foreign employers.
Afep – the club of very large companies – is it not the heart of the real power of employers in France?
Afep emerged very delicately from anonymity. But his interest is to remain discreet. The big bosses sit there in person, even if some are beginning to find it a little too hexagonal. Afep is a small structure, around forty permanent, but considered – rightly or wrongly – as leading experts. We listen to Afep, outside of public forums, and we solicit it. It is not a lobby like the others. We are there in one of the nodes of the complex relations between high economy, high administration, and high politics.
What is your judgment on the balance sheet of Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux at the head of Medef?
It is an insoluble question. The so-called “boss of bosses” is held by a role imposed on him by the very structure of a confederal organization, within which the components want to keep their hands free. Attempts to step out of this role and transform the position into a kind of political mandate are rare: Ernest-Antoine Seillière, in a particular situation, or Laurence Parisot. It cannot be said that under the mandate of Roux de Bézieux, the Medef innovated a great deal from the point of view of the representation of French economic reality. The cartography of the organization has not changed, the weight of the territories has been reinforced, a few more federations have joined the string of confederate organizations. This did not prevent the Medef, formerly self-credited with 750,000 contributors, from pointing to third place among employers’ organizations with 125,929 “members”, if we are to believe the very opaque audience measurement for 2021. ‘It is still largely in the lead in terms of employees attached to these companies. Finally, the institution of a Comex40, reserved for entrepreneurs under 40, did not really have any impact.
Outwardly, the harvest appears larger. Since 2018, pro-business measures have flourished, and those considered harmful have been discarded. Is this due to the activism of Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux’s team? At the fruit of a “cultural fight” that employers have been leading for a long time on the need in particular to lighten the tax burden which weighs on companies? To some sort of slow infusion of pro-business solutions? Or to the very committed orientation of the current President of the Republic who has endorsed, assumed or reinterpreted many employers’ demands? In any case, the Medef was little associated with it.
Is there a form of opacity in the financing of Medef?
When I investigated for several years on the Medef, I received a fairly good reception, and I was able to carry out several dozen interviews. But when it came to finances or membership, the doors closed.
In 2013, I showed that the figure of 750,000 “members” of Medef was highly fanciful. To study employers’ organisations, one should not count on the organization’s archives, which are either non-existent – employers’ organizations have little appetite for their history – or difficult to access: financial documents, when they are not were not destroyed, are disclosed very late. In principle, at the confederal level and at the level of the federations, there are no longer any slush funds intended to “fluidify” social dialogue or to help certain friendly political parties. Some wonder, however, what covers the huge misappropriations that have recently taken place in the AGS, the wage guarantee.
As for certifying that the joint system no longer allows opaque funding, I cannot say. As for the unions for which union time credits are not taken into account in their budget, the Medef is also supplemented by free work from a large number of executives who work during their working time for internal reflections at the employers’ organization. .
Is Medef a victim like other unions of chapel wars?
Chapel wars I don’t know. The left/right or religious opposition no longer makes sense. Divisions without a doubt. And there again during my investigations, when I mentioned the dividing lines that could make sense within employers, I was told that I was asking “journalists’ questions”!
In fact, the Medef is a confederation and yet the employers’ group is often presented as monolithic: “Le Patronat”. However, it is a very diverse group in terms of levels of income, wealth or qualifications. The interests of its members are in competitive opposition.
The Medef is a confederation which must be the spokesperson for the common interests of all business leaders in the market economy: creation of a “favorable environment” for freedom of enterprise, recurring requests for lower costs , reduction of constraints and controls, claiming the bosses’ capacity for autonomy by themselves (“let us do it”, “we know how to do better than the politicians who have never set foot in a company” ), less state, even exaltation of the company (“the only institution that currently holds”) and the role of its leaders (“You are heroes”, said Pierre Gattaz).
But beyond that, what divisions! Between small and very large, Parisians and provincials, industry and services, mass distribution and agri-food, banking and insurance, small bosses and bankers, “green” sectors and large carbon consumers , start-ups and old-fashioned capitalism… To say nothing of the hatred between very big bosses and exacerbated competition in the same sector of activity. The president of Medef, an “integrator” said Seillière, must hold all this together and prevent quarrels from being unpacked in the public square. We work by consensus, which means that thorny issues are ruled out.
Why does the Medef still embody so much “big capital”, when it mainly represents SMEs-ETIs.
The Medef is a symbol and a convenient lightning rod for caricaturists – top hats and cigars since the end of the 19th century – and for demonstrators who chant “There is money in the employers’ coffers”. The bosses most invested in the national or territorial bodies of the Medef are, in fact, most often bosses of SMEs-ETIs. The big bosses have long since deserted the Medef where they are bored. Ernest-Antoine Seillière, Michel Pébereau or especially Pierre Bellon – more than 30 years of employer mandates – have not been replaced. Large companies send senior executives, N-3s or apparatchiks, the permanent employers in the indigenous language, to represent them.
* Michel Offerlé is the author of numerous books and articles on employers, and in particular Les patrons des patrons. History of Medef (Odile Jacob, 2013) and What a boss can do. A political sociology of employers (Gallimard, 2021).