Those radical trade unionists of the extreme left who dragged an oh-so-patient and reasonable French President into the gutter of violent protest have marked “the bitter triumph of confrontation over reason”, haven’t they? The phrase comes from a trade union confederation that has scored hardly a mention in any of the British – or indeed the French – coverage of the four months of strikes, rallies and petitions against the new employment law of President François Hollande.
At its congress just this June, François Hommeril was elected to lead the union confederation based among managers and technicians, the CFE-CGC. The words are his. And his target was the French Premier, Manuel Valls. They came in the wake of the decision by Hollande and Valls on July 5 to impose the law by decree rather than lose a vote in the French National Assembly.
Their action means that the whole structure of French employment law is now going to be turned on its head without a proper vote in the legislature. It was quite contradictory, Hommeril argued, to use these unique constitutional powers to by-pass any parliamentary agreement and negotiation when the opening article of
the law talks about the importance of agreement and negotiation.
“We did not join the marches,” Hommeril explained. “But we did ask that the whole debate be re-opened by the government withdrawing the Bill. The 49.3 [the section of the French constitution used by Hollande and Valls] means there is no dialogue.”
For Valls, speaking before the National Assembly as he announced the use of the powers, people like Hommeril were part of “an alliance of conservatism and immobilism”. The new law would mean “more dialogue”. What was crucial were the three words he then added: “in the enterprise”. The formula is important because of the way France’s trade unions work and how the system of negotiation around pay and conditions has been structured for the last 80 years.
There has never been anything like the British closed shop, nor the single union for a trade. Union membership has been the expression of a person’s political views and their approach to shop floor and national militancy. There are no advantages in being a union member, so membership is small. The influence of the different federations is expressed in terms of the number of votes they get in regular workplace council elections. At the workplace level, French unions can be weak. What the Popular Front in the 1930s gave them was the compensating power of the need for employers to deal with the unions through sector and national structures.
Article 2 of the new law seeks to invert this pyramid: if the law sticks, then a company level deal will take priority over the sector and the national. There are not many in France who have not understood immediately how drastically this will change things. That politicians on the right, more than likely to be the new government after next year’s elections, want to reduce shop floor power even further, does not change that understanding.
Of the four main national federations, the largest, the CGT was for decades linked with the Communist Party. The government and the media have tried to paint it as the only opponent of the change. The second in size, the CFDT, is the one federation of any importance to have supported the law. Force Ouvriere, or FO, is next in line and has been the mainstay alongside the CGT of the 12 days of national rallies, protests and strikes against the law since 9 March. Hommeril’s CFE-CGC is fourth, claiming some 8% of all the votes cast in workplaces across France in the last round of company council elections.
As he has pointed out, it is not just a strong majority of those who pay a union membership subscription who are against the law. He reminded Hollande that an opinion poll published just before he spoke gave 75% against among the French public. Which means that, despite all the media and political attention given to the supposed violence of the CGT and FO demonstrators, Hollande and Valls have not managed to reduce the opposition.
The CGT and FO have already announced their next day of national mobilisation as 15 September. Before then there will be all sorts of things happening, activities designed not to annoy the public, but to make the point forcibly enough: there may be days when you pay nothing to drive on the expensive French motorways or to take a train. And President Hollande – to whom it appears one can post a letter for free – is likely to receive an unusually large volume of correspondence.
Hollande and Valls won’t be idle either. Early next summer there is a Presidential election followed by the election of a new National Assembly. As it stands, both
will be catastrophic for their Parti Socialiste. So university fees have been frozen for a year, civil servants and teachers are getting a pay rise, budget cuts are being eased and the middle class is getting a small tax reduction – the list of little presents in Hollande’s electoral boutique seems to lengthen by the day.
One problem for him is how to ensure he becomes the presidential candidate for the Parti Socialiste in the election now some 10 months away. Hence an increasingly nasty
fight within the PS.
After a 49.3 decree, the French parliament waits for 24 hours to see whether or not 58 deputies are prepared to put their name to a motion of censure. It the motion passes, the law falls ands there is probably a general election. If the figure of 58 is not reached, the law stands. The right wing Les Republicains of Nicolas Sarkozy do not want an election at the moment. They have their own internal disputes to sort out, so they did not move a censure motion.
And the left opponents of the employment law? They managed 56 signatures on a motion, the same as they achieved in the spring when Hollande and Valls first used their 49.3 power over the employment Bill. Why not 58? Because in mid-June the PS national council voted unanimously to support the principle that PS Deputies signing a notion of censure against government could be expelled from the party.
Hollande’s opponents dream of standing against him
in a primary next January to choose the PS presidential candidate. One on the national council said that, in such a vote, ‘even a goat’ could beat Hollande. To move a censure motion that was never going to be passed would only be
to hand over the party to Valls and Hollande, said one left wing deputy.
The president and his prime minister would like it that way. So watch out for more provocations against their opponents in the next few months. The one thing that won’t go away is the opposition to the new law. Out on Twitter a couple of weeks ago was a picture from St-Cirq-Lapopie, a tourist treasure of a village in the rural south of France with
a population of little more than 200. The title said it all: “In May ’68 we did not demonstrate in St-Cirq-Lapopie.”
