On the social front, the first months of 2023 promise to be perilous as the unions unite on pension reform and the postponement of the legal retirement age. Added to this is the unemployment insurance reform, the latest outlines of which, revealed just before Christmas, crystallized the anger of the main organizations. While the question of wages is at the heart of the concerns of the French, can the aggregation of anger and frustration lead to a social storm? Dominique Andolfatto, professor of political science at the University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and author of “Anatomy of trade unionism” fears above all violent movements of anger triggered outside any trade union framework.
Purchasing power crisis and drift of inflation, reform of pensions and unemployment insurance… the cocktail is explosive. Do you fear a social conflagration in early 2023?
It is true that, since the start of the school year in September, there has been a bulimia for social reforms, a desire on the part of the government to overhaul or “reformat” what has long been called the French social “model”. This bulimia is all the more surprising since the government does not, a priori, have a majority to have these reforms adopted. And that inflation has brought the wage question back to the fore, favoring demands, if not open conflicts, as we have seen in the energy sector. Paradoxically, this context does not slow down the reforming voluntarism of the President of the Republic. Even if the Prime Minister seems to play the role of Penelope, trying to give time to time. In short: avoid haste, by staging discussions with the social partners. In reality, all of this is just theater because the reforms end up taking place without taking these consultations into account. Look at unemployment insurance, one of whose implementing decrees, published on Christmas Eve, reduces the period of compensation, going beyond the measures that had been presented to the social partners.
Will the details of the pension reform, which should be announced on January 10, open a new conflict? In fact, it is always difficult to do social “weather”. For the time being, the concern of employees is the level of remuneration. But will the “meeting” take place between the French, with the lowest salaries, and the unions, natural vectors of this anger? Nothing is less sure. The gap tends to widen between one and the other. The representative capacity of trade unions is in crisis. As a result, a kind of non-unionism is flourishing more and more, generating outbursts of anger outside of any union framework… and therefore difficult to control.
What lessons do you draw from the recent conflict at the SNCF?
There would be a lot to say, as this movement presents so many paradoxes. It started from a simple “collective” created on social networks outside of any union framework. The unions then “hook up the wagons” by giving a legal helping hand to the strikers by filing strike notices. The strike is indeed not possible at the SNCF without notice that only representative unions can file. Still, these same organizations also indicated that they were not in favor of this movement – which they nevertheless facilitated – because it, affecting the controllers, seemed to them too corporatist! In reality, the SNCF unions only want to manage the general interest: they see themselves as a second direction and do not want to take charge of categorical problems. The unpopularity of the movement, the chin-banging of the executive, perhaps the fear of calling into question positions that had been held so hard after several reforms of the rules of social dialogue and the abandonment of the status of railway workers, clearly convinced them to take matters into their own hands and sign an agreement in one evening, on the eve of Christmas. In reality, this growing dissatisfaction of the controllers had been known for a long time but neither the “house” unions nor the management of the company wanted to take a serious interest in it until the recent conflict…which says a lot about the quality social dialogue in the company.
Precisely, the CGT Cheminots (the first house union) did not initially support this collective before finally joining the movement and filing a strike notice. Is the Montreuil power plant increasingly cut off from its base?
The CGT is first and foremost an institution, with a sort of superiority complex, in particular at the SNCF where it effectively retains the leading position among representative trade unions. With this legitimacy, the CGT has therefore resolved to help the “collective” of controllers. She probably thought she was channeling things, perhaps ultimately preventing the emergence of a new trade union organization, specific to the SNCF rolling sales staff. But, she was overtaken by this “base”. This demonstrates once again the curious relationships – if not the absence of relationships other than institutional or legal that the CGT maintains today with the staff. Like the other unions, the central is only a supplier of legal means and no longer truly embodies grassroots unionism (or “mass” as the CGT used to say), but rather a meta-unionism, a unionism of apparatus, which first works for itself… but which must nevertheless submit itself, every four years, to professional elections. As the Bertrand reform of 2008 practically prevents the emergence of new organizations, the system of representation is therefore frozen and therefore those who want to innovate, bring claims that the “cartel” organizations do not want or are wary of, must act differently, outside the legal framework of social dialogue.
Does the weakness of trade unions lead to forms of action that are more decentralized, more violent and therefore difficult to channel?
The crisis of unionism (or union representativeness) can only favor, here and there, outbreaks of anger, when there is latent discontent – or a fortiori open – and that this does not manage to expressed through institutional relays or representatives.
From this point of view, the abolition of staff delegates with the Macron-Pénicaud ordinances of 2017 and the recentralisation of social dialogue around the CSEs do not help matters either. Not only have unions disappeared from entire sections of the economic fabric, but the relays or mediators that existed have been abolished. It is true that the unions sometimes had difficulty finding candidates for all the positions to be filled.
Is France sick of its social dialogue?
Sick of the absence of social dialogue, or of an effective and good level social dialogue, yes. That said, we cannot globalize either. Every business is different. Each has its history and its practice of dialogue.
Still, according to surveys by the Ministry of Labor, if we stick to collective bargaining – the famous NAO – it only affects a minority of the companies that are nevertheless concerned. It is true that the legal framework for this dialogue is such that it discourages many business leaders. Many therefore stick to purely formal aspects to avoid any litigation or sanction. But this does not necessarily promote dialogue and even less innovation. It’s not easy to negotiate with a gun to your head.
Is parity dead?
If you use the word paritarianism to talk about the management of social security organizations by employers’ and employees’ unions, I would say yes. And that does not date from Emmanuel Macron. Since the reform of the Social Security in 1967, the joint system has been attacked by the State. The social partners have gradually lost their powers (or their authority) to retain only that of speech. And this only engages them themselves. The fall in unionization and union divisions largely explain this and, in a more muted way, the questioning of their managerial capacity. Moreover, the “Welfare” elites (the politico-administrative elites of the “French-style” welfare state) have never ceased to regain control of “paritarianism”. We can see it clearly today, the consultations between the social partners and the public authorities come to nothing. It is more a kind of game, a theatre, a ritual that allows everyone to put themselves on the stage and, in the case of the social partners, to justify their role, even the “rents”, even modest ones, which attach themselves to it.