French trade unions and the mobilisation against the El Khomri law in 2016: a reconfiguration of strategies and alliances

Introduction

French trade unions are often considered an ‘atypical’ case when it comes to international comparisons due to their small number of members and their strong dependence on the state (particularly for their funding), but also, and paradoxically to the first two points, because of their ability to instigate very strong collective mobilisation. These singular characteristics invite reflection on both the links between workers and unions and the place that the latter occupy in the public space (Milner and Mathers, 2013). The movement against the El Khomri law, or the ‘loi Travail’ ¹ , which took place from March to July 2016, gives us further reason to pursue this line of inquiry. It was the strongest and longest social protest under a left-wing government under the Fifth Republic. The movement was multi-dimensional, with a predominance of ‘days of action’ and demonstrations organised across the country, but also featuring strikes that lasted several days in different sectors. It was above all marked by the emergence of a form of protest not seen before in France, named ‘Nuit Debout’ (‘Up All Night’), which involved the occupation of public spaces in a series of cities, beginning with the Place de la République in Paris.

Unlike the situation which existed in Spain in 2011 when the ‘Indignados’ contested all existing forms of representation, including that of the trade unions (Nez, 2012), there was not such a complete divide in France between the unions – at least those which were involved in leading the mobilisation – and Nuit Debout. On the contrary, a number of the organisers of Nuit Debout wanted to create a space where their struggles could converge and to help the unions to strengthen their position of power in relation to the government. For them, it was less about rejecting trade unions than about pointing out their weaknesses, in relation to the difficulties they have in reaching a whole section of the workforce, including precarious workers, and offering them an adapted framework of representation. Their criticism also focused on the forms of action chosen by unions and whether they were radical enough for opposing neoliberal and security policies.

The trade union organisations at the forefront of the mobilisation against the El Khomri law, chiefly the CGT and Solidaires ² , also found themselves at the centre of multiple tensions. They were caught between veering closer to a movement that was socio-political in character, embodied by Nuit Debout, which was completely opposed to the Socialist government but whose contours remained vague, and the necessity of staying in the strictly defined area of industrial relations in a context of strong polarisation between the trade unions (the second biggest union confederation, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT, French Democratic Confederation of Labour), being opposed to the movement), and strong electoral competition. These challenges in the industrial relations domain were actually greater from this point as French unions were very attentive to their electoral results in different workplace elections, results on which their representativeness depended (Béroud et al., 2012). By analysing these tensions, this article goes beyond an interpretation that sets ‘new’ social movements (a term sometimes given to the Indignados or Nuit Debout) against the trade union movement. In fact, in the case of a series of protests such as this, it seems to us more interesting to try to understand how the behaviour of certain trade unions is governed by different yet co-existing rationales in relation to their simultaneous presence in two social spaces, which only partly overlap and which involve different types of alliances and strategies: the space of social movements (Mathieu, 2012) on the one hand, and that which can be designated as the trade union sphere (Béroud, 2015) on the other. We first look at the conditions around the emergence of the movement against the El Khomri law, indicating the difficulties for all the trade union organisations of mobilising against a Socialist government. We next analyse the most significant dimensions of the movement, which allows us to show its limits and internal contradictions. A third part is dedicated to considering the way in which Nuit Debout, a rather nebulous movement, challenged the trade unions on their capacity for action, their form of organisation, and also their presence in company workplaces. Finally, the last part considers the importance of particular challenges in the industrial relations domain and the way in which these were taken into account by trade unionists.

The slow maturation of a movement rooted in the workforce

The mobilisation against the El Khomri law was the most important social conflict to take place during President Hollande’s five-year term (2012–2017). While during the first years of his mandate protests came mainly from very socially conservative groups – such as those of the ‘Manif pour tous’ (‘Demonstration for all’) in 2012–2013 against the right to marry for homosexual couples – or even groups that are more difficult to classify politically – such as the ‘bonnets rouges’ (‘red caps’) in 2013, opposed to the ecotax project (Rabier, 2015) – the rejection of the El Khomri law contributed to the remobilisation of a part of the workforce and above all to putting trade unions back centre-stage. While in this sense it fits into the tradition of big cross-sectoral movements which have shown, since the one of autumn 1995, a strong opposition to policies seeking to reform the social protection system and the labour market – this was the case in 2003, in 2006 and in 2010 (Béroud and Yon, 2012) – the mobilisation against the El Khomri law was also the first confrontation of such a size that had taken place under a Socialist government. Occurring at the end of its mandate, this movement had immediate political consequences. We could thus make the hypothesis that the unpopularity of the El Khomri law in public opinion ⁴ contributed, along with other factors, to the weakening of François Hollande’s legitimacy, but also that of his Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. The government’s management of this crisis also accentuated the ideological divisions at the heart of the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS) (Lefebvre, 2017), which were clear during the 2017 presidential election campaign. The scale of this political conflict could give the impression that the French trade unions had real power to influence the public agenda (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013: 30). In fact, the situation was far more complex. The eruption of the movement against the El Khomri law actually surprised union activists in the political context of the rise of the Front National (National Front) ⁵ and the security measures which had been reinforced following the 2015 terrorist attacks.

The economic and social choices made by the Ayrault and then Valls governments created high tensions very early on in the presidential term with a number of trade union organisations. The ‘Responsibility Pact’, proposed to businesses in December 2013 with the aim of reducing the ‘cost of labour’ in exchange for the creation of jobs, was strongly criticised by the CGT, Force Ouvrière (FO, Workers’ Force) and Solidaires, while the CFDT, the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (CFTC, French Confederation of Christian workers) and the CFE-CGC accepted the idea of compensation as part of a national, cross-sectoral ⁶ agreement. In 2015, on the other hand, the Macron Law, which allowed the generalisation of work on Sundays, significantly changed the jurisdiction of employees’ claims courts, and redefined the scope for economic redundancies, provoked criticism even from the more so-called ‘reformist’ tendency within the trade unions, that is, the CFDT, the CFTC, the CFE-CGC and the Union nationale des syndicats autonomes (UNSA). At that time, the CGT, FO and Solidaires had attempted, although with little success, to raise awareness about that law in order to mobilise workers. The El Khomri bill, presented at the beginning of 2016, was a logical continuation of the options advocated by President Hollande, and of the idea, unprecedented for a Socialist government, of a labour law adjusted to the economic objectives of business and no longer protective of workers. Several objectives were at the centre of these successive reforms: the easing of protections around permanent contracts and dismissal procedures, the role of employee-representation bodies and the place given to company-level agreements (Laulom et al., 2016).

The factors which contributed to the form that the mobilisation against the El Khomri bill took, something which the unions had not managed to achieve in the face of the ‘Responsibility Pact’ in 2014 and the Macron and Rebsamen laws in 2015, are multiple. One of them was the end of the reluctance, internalised by a number of activists, to oppose a Socialist government. It should not be forgotten that François Hollande’s victory in the 2012 presidential election had been openly wished for by the leadership of both the CFDT and the CGT, against the background of an overwhelming rejection of the political direction represented by former president Nicholas Sarkozy and after the very strong mobilisation against pension reforms in 2010. The networks that Hollande’s close advisers had in the union confederations proved to be limited (Béroud and Taiclet, 2016) and were also weakened by the decision not to upset French bosses, as had been the case between 1997 and 2002. ⁷ Nevertheless, it was still difficult for trade unionists to convince employees to oppose a government considered to be close to their interests. It is doubtless here the persistence of a high unemployment rate, the accumulation of counter-reforms over the whole of the presidential term and the inefficiency of measures which had been presented by Hollande, when he was a candidate, as key tools in his employment policy – such as the ‘generation contracts’ approved by all of the trade union organisations in 2013 – which contributed to creating conditions favourable for a large-scale social movement.

A multi-faceted movement with interweaving timelines

A more immediate, key factor, however, relates to the different types of actors that were involved in the movement and the different forms of action they carried out. We could even posit that there were many movements within a broader one, heterogeneous and partly overlapping: a young people’s movement (high school pupils and university students) which gave us an early glimpse of a large-scale social protest, but which died out quite quickly (at the beginning of April 2016); a trade union mobilisation with the call for 12 successive days of cross-sectoral action, between 9 March and 5 July, as well as prolonged sectoral-level strikes; and finally there was the social-political movement named ‘Nuit Debout’.

The fact that these three movements were not chronologically concurrent explains to a great degree the duration of the conflict over the El Khomri law, but it also resulted in tensions. Three phases can be distinguished. The first began in mid-February when a petition entitled ‘Loi travail: non merci!’ (‘El Khomri law: no thank you!’) was launched by political and trade union activists and obtained more than a million signatures in two weeks (Binet, 2017). A group of videographers also posted a series of testimonies on YouTube, titled ‘On vaut mieux que ça!’ (‘We’re worth more than that!’), on the different types of precarity that workers experience, which was widely broadcasted with huge success. This intensive information spreading and awareness raising which was carried out externally to the trade union organisations contributed to the surprisingly large turnout at the first protest, held on 9 March 2016 (between 250,000 and 500,000 participants across France, according to the figures provided by the newspaper Le Monde). Above all, the fact that a number of school youth organisations (FIDL, SGL, Unef and UNIL) ⁸ came out against the bill suggested a scenario comparable to what had happened in 2006 when the Villepin government had wanted to reform the labour market by creating a specific contract for young people: the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE, First Employment Contract). The determination of youth organisations to fight the Valls government on this issue is all the more striking considering the fact that a number of them had developed in orbit around the PS. The major role played by Unef in particular must here again be understood in relation to the internal divisions of this party. ⁹ However, the mobilisation of high school and university students was far from having caught on in all the cities: the general assemblies in the universities were often not very highly attended, and the dynamics remained limited. This first significant phase of the conflict around the El Khomri law ran out of steam, to a certain extent, by mid-April, firstly because of the school holidays but secondly due to a series of measures announced by the government to satisfy the youth organisations and defuse the tensions in this section of the protest. ¹⁰

A second phase emerged when protesters, responding to the call from the newspaper Fakir ¹¹ but also from the Housing Rights Association (l’association Droit au logement, DAL), decided to remain at the Place de la République after the end of a demonstration on 31 March 2016 and to occupy it (Farbiaz, 2016: 36–37). The originality of this type of action and the success that it very quickly had, the occupation being repeated every night afterwards, evoked the spirit of the Indignados movement, which unfolded in Spain in 2011, particularly in light of the fact that previous attempts to create a movement of the same kind had not had much success in France (Chabanet and Lacheret, 2016). The space opened up by Nuit Debout resulted in a broadening of the movement, as much in terms of the diversity of the participants as of their demands. From the Place de la République in Paris, the calls multiplied for the trade union organisations opposed to the El Khomri law to call a general, indefinite strike. But the dynamics within the labour movement did not follow the same rhythm as this new movement established by Nuit Debout, which symbolically created a new calendar for itself. In a cross-union alliance, smaller than that at the demonstration against the pension reforms in 2010, the CGT played a major role. Yet it was only following the confederation’s congress, held in Marseilles between 18 and 22 April 2016, that CGT trade unionists, in different sectors, attempted to organise indefinite strike action: in the refineries, on the roads, at the SNCF (the French national railway corporation) and even in the cleaning sector of urban communities.

A third and last phase took shape from the end of April to the end of June. It was characterised by the multiplying of blockade actions (of the road networks and ports) and sector-wide strikes, but also the intensification of police repression at the demonstrations. The expectations, including from Nuit Debout, of the trade union movement were high; at the meetings held at the Place de la République around 1 May, hopes were expressed of turning the strikes into a general one, and of making sure that the demonstration organised for 14 June in Paris would be a huge one (more than a million people), but also of directly confronting the government on the issue of civil liberties. Indeed, the government decided to ban a demonstration planned for 23 June and wanted to allow only a static gathering. The trade unions, which appeared once again as central actors in the conflict as the participation in Nuit Debout was beginning to dwindle in different cities, were thus confronted with many problems at once. First of all, they did not have the overall control of the demonstrations, the leading groups in the processions being dominated by ‘autonomous’ activists and other libertarian groups, but also by protesters (sometimes trade unionists) infuriated by the repression tactics of the police (Kokoreff, 2016: 168–172). Secondly, they were leading protesters against a Socialist government in a context of significant weakening and division of the parliamentary left. Finally, the trade union front was far from being united. While, for example, an organisation of managers and executives such as the CFE-CGC did not participate in the cross-union alliance which was driving the movement, it did voice strong criticism of the El Khomri law. This, however, was not the case with the CFDT, the biggest confederation in terms of members but also electoral results in the private sector, as proved by the measure of union representativeness at the national and cross-sectoral levels published by the Ministry of Employment in spring 2017 (see below). After having opposed several articles in the first draft of the bill, the CFDT leadership actually declared itself in favour of the reform and disapproved of any further mobilisation. This division between the trade unions made it more difficult to organise strikes in companies and public administrations, but, on the other hand, it pushed a number of organisations invested in the struggle (the CGT, Solidaires) to be more attentive to the discourse of other kinds of actors, outside of the trade union sphere.

Trade unions challenged by Nuit Debout

From the beginning of the occupation of the Place de la République in Paris by Nuit Debout, journalists provided a particular reading of this movement that set its spontaneity, its ‘citizen’ dimension and its open character, against the more traditional types of mobilisation proposed by the trade unions, meaning demonstrations, work stoppages and strike days. This was a certain way of resuscitating the old division between the labour movement and new social movements, long defended by the school of sociology influenced by Alain Touraine. However, this interpretation did not prove to be a very relevant one, as the issue of establishing relations between Nuit Debout and the unions was at the centre of the discussions led within certain committees or assemblies, as much at the Place de la République as in other places, in many cities where the movement took off. These discussions were also presented at the CGT’s 51st confederal congress in April 2016. In the debates on trade union strategies for mobilising against the El Khomri law, a number of delegates referred to Nuit Debout, calling for closer relations and the organisation of ‘Jours Debout’ in workplaces. The idea of inviting the editor-in-chief of Fakir and director of the film Merci Patron!, François Ruffin, to speak before the congress was even put forward by the journalists’ union of the CGT. The fact that a movement such as Nuit Debout was alluded to in a sympathetic way is no small thing in a confederation like the CGT where the relationship with activist groups or associations, foreign to the trade union sphere, often gives rise to fears, or even hostility. This desire to develop closer relations resulted in two public appeals, drawn up following a debate organised, along with others, by the newspaper Fakir, at the Bourse du Travail (labour exchange) in Paris on 20 April 2016. One of them was approved by Nuit Debout’s general assembly and signed, notably, by its ‘Action’ committee and by the ‘Convergence of Struggles’ committee (Farbiaz, 2016: 47–48). The other was launched by a group of trade unionists, members of the CGT, Fédération Syndicale Unitaire (FSU, Unitary Trade Union Federation) and Solidaires. The two appeals demonstrated that there was a concern with not getting caught in false oppositions. However, the fact that it was not possible to draw up one single text also showed the difficulty in achieving a consensus on the choice of terms and on how to describe the issues and consider the central focuses of each of both Nuit Debout and the labour struggles, without undermining the specific nature of either.

This desire for closer relations also resulted in the presence of prominent trade union officials at the Place de la République in Paris. Some of them were involved in the launch of Nuit Debout, one example being a national leader of the SUD-PTT (SUD-Postes, Télégraphes et Télécommunications). The trade union Solidaires provided the movement with logistical support from the start, helping in particular to notify the authorities of the occupation. On 9 April one of the two national spokespersons of Solidaires, Eric Beynel, spoke at Nuit Debout’s general assembly in order to dismantle the ‘trade union bureaucrat’ image, calling for a huge turnout at the demonstrations but also at the occupations of public spaces. Almost a month after the first Nuit Debout, on 28 April 2016 the presence and the speech of Philippe Martinez, General Secretary of the CGT, at this same general assembly were widely broadcast in the media. He asserted the determination of his organisation to lead the strongest possible fight against the bill, while repeating that he was not in a position to call for a general strike. Although he spoke in the name of the most important trade union organisation leading the struggle against the El Khomri law, his speaking time was limited to several minutes, just like the other speakers. The fact that he obeyed the collective rules of the debates as they were decided on within Nuit Debout, in itself had symbolic significance. Finally, on 1 May, a debate on work was organised as part of Nuit Debout’s activities, with the participation, notably, of Catherine Perret, confederal board member of the CGT. Other initiatives, which received far less media attention, also existed at the local level or in trade union federations.

This concern that a number of trade union organisations involved in the conflict had with proving their links to Nuit Debout – the confederation Force Ouvrière remaining on the other hand very distant from what was happening in the public spaces – can be understood more clearly by looking at both the trajectory of some of the initiators of Nuit Debout and the different ideas that already existed within the movement. The original group behind the initiative brought together activists involved in political protest groups such as ‘Jeudi Noir’ (‘Black Thursday’) or anti-globalisation groups such as Attac, activists in the struggle of intermittent workers in the arts sector and in political theatre (the Jolie Môme company), and journalists from Fakir, as well as some trade unionists present in an individual capacity. These activists had rubbed shoulders during other political disputes; they did not harbour any resentment against trade union organisations. In launching Nuit Debout, the idea was to create a space where the different ongoing sector-specific struggles could come together to intensify the conflict. However, the success encountered by Nuit Debout contributed to the development of other ideas about the purpose of this movement, in particular the idea of establishing an autonomous space for discussion, politicisation, learning and other social practices. This tension between autonomy and organisation was therefore very present within Nuit Debout (Cukier and Gallo Lassere, 2016): the first dimension was closely associated with the experiences of zones autonomes à défendre (ZAD, ‘autonomous zones to defend’), like at the site of a proposed new airport at Notre Dame des Landes, and very distant from organisations such as political parties or trade unions; the second dimension (linked most notably to Fakir), on the other hand, adhered to the concept of class warfare, something which in the eyes of these activists had to be reinforced and broadened.

Therefore, far from representing a break with the trade unions, the existence of Nuit Debout rather served to question their limits and weaknesses. Challenges were posed in many different areas. The first source of tension concerned the temporality of the movement. For example, while Nuit Debout experienced a high degree of success in digital participation over the month of April, the actual mobilisation against the El Khomri law slowed down somewhat due to the school holidays (and the weakening of the high school and university student movement which had partly contributed to the occupation of the public squares). The expectations of the trade union movement, engaged in a power struggle with the government, were therefore very high: to call for a general strike. The response from the trade unions and particularly from the CGT and Solidaires was to point out the difficulties of organising sector-wide strikes and articulating employee demands related to challenges in the specific company or sector – as could be seen from the example of the French Railways SNCF where a united trade union front (including the CFDT) negotiated a new company-level agreement and a new branch agreement – while also leading the more general protest against the bill.

For a number of the Nuit Debout participants, the fact that the trade unions did not have the capacity to set in motion a general and indefinite strike could be interpreted at best as an admission of weakness, and at worst as proof of their renounciation as effective mobilising machines. This was also the vision that provoked a group such as ‘on bloque tout’ (‘we block everything’) which attempted to bring grass-roots trade unionists to the foreground, in a critical position against the federal or confederal leaderships. We can find here a classical political vision, present in libertarian and far-left thinking, that sets the militant and supposedly radical base against the bureaucratic management (Darlington, 2013). However, this critique did not carry much weight during the fight against the El Khomri law, given the obvious efforts deployed by the cross-union alliance and primarily by the CGT to organise sectoral strikes.

For the Nuit Debout participants, there was sometimes the temptation of going in the place of trade unions to meet workers in companies. When such steps were taken, they helped to enlighten these activists on the reality of work-related situations and the effects of the managerial pressures exercised on employees. This was important because these tensions around the timeframe of the movement also came from a lack of knowledge of the concrete conditions around trade union action, of the difficulties of promoting participation in general assemblies and convincing employees to go beyond one day of protest. This ignorance should also be analysed with regard to the employment and work experiences of some of the Nuit Debout participants, a large number of them being higher education graduates, unemployed or in precarious employment ¹² , with an over-representation of the cultural sectors and temporary workers in the fields of events organisation and education.

A second form of challenge, linked to the first, concerned the actual ability of the trade unions to reach large numbers of employees. The French unions, as a whole, are mainly established in the big companies, both public and private. Their membership base remains very much linked to employment status, with workers in precarious employment being under-represented (Pignoni, 2016). How is it possible to communicate, therefore, with the ‘unorganised’ or with the workers in small and medium enterprises? This was a concern at the launch of the petition ‘Loi travail, non merci’ (‘El Khomri law, no thank you’), in which the general secretary of the CGT general federation of engineers, executives and technicians (UGICT) was heavily involved (Binet, 2017). Likewise, the ‘On vaut mieux que ça’ video testimonies posted on Youtube also helped to show to what extent the trade unions were a very distant reality for many workers subject to different types of precarity. Nuit Debout participants were able to feed their hopes that the use of the most modern communication technologies (such as the video streaming of debates on Instagram), just like the kinds of organisation and discussion proposed in the public spaces – horizontal, open to all, and leaderless – would help to attract workers that were resistant to the more traditional operating methods of trade unions. It is undeniable that these different ways of organising and debating enticed people that the unions did not manage to interest in collective action in their workplace. When we were doing our field research, union activists from the company Alstom told us how workers from their workplace in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, came with Nuit Debout to distribute leaflets, without establishing links with the union representatives there even though the latter were very mobilised and regularly called for strike days. These divisions sometimes exacerbated an already existing distance between different grades of staff, such as engineers and workers; the engineers being attracted to Nuit Debout, while the trade unions in the company (CFDT and CGT) were more established amongst the manual workers and technicians. They also showed the difficulty trade unions had in distancing themselves from an image of being institutionalised organisations within the company.

For all that, participation in Nuit Debout was also demanding; the fact that most of the activities took place evening after evening over several weeks did not favour, for example, the involvement of workers obliged to work difficult hours and with family responsibilities. ¹³ Furthermore, the stop-start nature of the debates – each new participant could call into question the work done in a previous committee – sometimes tired out the more regular participants (Kokoreff, 2016: 166).

Although they were expecting a decisive contribution from the trade unions in terms of mass mobilisation, a number of Nuit Debout participants discovered that the organisational power (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013) of the French unions was limited. There was a marked contrast between the capacity of the unions to take over the streets during big social movements – by creating the conditions for non-unionised workers to be able to participate, although not consistently – and their actual base in the workplaces. Trade union officials from the intermediary union structures, particularly territorial structures (local and regional unions), were thus struck by the rotation of protesters on days of action, with a considerable involvement of workers from the private sector (Le Pichon, 2017). However, a substantial number of these protesters were not on strike, but taking hours off work or recuperating them from over-time. This practice has spread since the beginning of the 2000s: the demonstration has established itself as the central tactic in the trade unions’ repertoire of protest actions, due to them not being able to organise strikes in workplaces (Pernot, 2010: 50). Strike action also remained weak, including in the sectors which still constituted strongholds for unions like the CGT and Solidaires (such as public hospitals and the French national post office). According to trade union officials from different organisations (CGT, FO, Solidaires), the fight against the El Khomri law was led in a voluntarist way in different sectors, above all by groups of activists. These struggled to widen the participation to ordinary members and above all to organise general assemblies in workplaces. In a sector like the refinery sector, as a leading sector in the conflict as in 2010, the action of several very determined groups can also be enough (as explained by the chemical sector federal union leaders of FO) to block production and the exit of lorries loaded with fuel. This kind of tactic can be very effective because the blockade of refineries receives immediate media attention; however, the action depends more on activist minorities than on a widespread mobilisation of workers.

The strategic power of trade unions was also questioned within Nuit Debout and at the local initiatives such as the cross-sectoral general assembly of Saint-Denis. The traditional forms of union action – the day of demonstration being an obvious example – could appear too moderate or far removed to really harm the operation of the production machinery. Blockade operations were thus carried out to affect the movement of goods, targeting the nerve centres, like refineries, ports and bridges. This reflection on the necessity of adapting the forms of struggle to the morphology of neoliberal capitalism is very present in the theoretical elaborations of autonomous movements (Cukier and Gallo Lassere, 2016: 136). This is much less the case within trade unions such as the CGT or Solidaires where the central concern is expanding the movement and establishing contacts for unionising workers; this was even more the case if the government refused to amend its bill.

A series of partial victories were certainly won in different occupational sectors in spring 2016, including the mobilisation of workers in the entertainment industry, lorry drivers and railway workers. The Valls government chose to concede to a certain number of sectoral demands in order to defuse the situation and prevent social protest groups joining forces. There were therefore a series of small successes for the trade unions. For all that, however, the bill was not amended – the parliamentary debates were even reduced to a minimum via the use of Article 49(3) of the Constitution – and it was not withdrawn. For the organisations involved in leading the movement, the question of ‘after’ the mobilisation was even stronger because they were caught in internal competitive relationships within the trade union movement.

The significance of challenges specific to the industrial relations field

Some writers today put forward the hypothesis that the space available for reformist or social democratic trade unionism has diminished considerably, due to the transformations of collective bargaining frameworks and more broadly of industrial relations systems (Upchurch et al., 2014). The dismantling of the protective dimension of labour law and the localisation of bargaining practices to just the company level, to the detriment of branch or cross-sectoral solidarity, shows the small hold that reformist trade unions have today, faced with employers who are in no way compelled to engage in any kind of political exchange. The result has been a polarisation between a trade union movement that has incorporated the ideology of ‘social partnership’ (and the idea of a community of interest between a company’s workers and its management in a globalised and highly competitive economy) and a ‘radical’ trade union movement (in the sense that it continues to try to mobilise workers in the face of neoliberal policies).

The dynamics of the struggle against the El Khomri law can give the impression that this polarisation in the labour movement is at work in France. The idea of ‘syndicalisme rassemblé’ (meaning an inter-union alliance, as broad as possible) championed by the CGT leadership since the mid-1990s, came up against the CFDT’s support of the reform, despite its criticism of the first draft. What had been possible in 2010 at the time of the reform of the pension system and when faced with President Nicolas Sarkozy was no longer so in a different political context. It would, however, be misleading to talk about the subsequent development of two trade union poles, one reformist and the other radical, the latter possibly being reinforced by its openness to alliances with other types of social movements. In our opinion, many elements give us reason to question this reading.

On the one hand, there is no longer a homogenous reformist bloc. The CFE-CGC, for example, a confederation of higher-grade professionals, adopted a very critical position on the El Khomri law in 2016, at the risk of distancing its relations with a number of employers’ representatives, a position that the leadership maintained on the measures proposed by Macron in 2017. This development must be understood in relation to the social base of the confederation, its strong roots in industry and the experience of its teams with company restructuring plans (Béthoux et al., 2013). On the CFDT’s side, the union teams also demonstrated their opposition to the contents of the El Khomri law and consequently criticised the confederal leadership. This was the case in the CFDT metallurgical federation which held its congress in May 2016. Departmental trade unions, following the Rhône Departmental union (Symetal) whose representatives we met with, led a battle at the congress to get the federation to refuse to sign derogation agreements in companies. They supported an amendment, which was adopted, against the wider use of the referendum provided by the El Khomri law. The activity report promoted by the leadership was finally approved by only 60 per cent, a low score in a congress union in France. The activists of this departmental union explained to us that they participated in demonstrations against the El Khomri law, ‘but without carrying the CFDT colours’ (meaning the orange tunics and flags). Here again, the disagreements regarding the confederal line of the CFDT were based on the experience that these workplace activists had of the concrete conditions of negotiation. These were their daily means of action which were being targeted by reforms aiming deeply to transform social relations within companies. However, and despite the internal pressures that these activists sometimes endured due to their diverging positions – having, for example, a mandate at the employees’ claims court – they did not imagine leaving the CFDT in the near future, as could have been the case after the 2003 pension disputes.

As regards the forces grouped together against the El Khomri law – the CGT, FO, the FSU and Solidaires – there were also many problems and contradictions. Some of these organisations, such as the FSU, struggled to mobilise on cross-sectoral issues. Others, such as Solidaires, encountered a relative stagnation of their influence, notably electorally, in the sectors where their biggest trade unions were present, like the post office and the telecommunications industry (Beynel, 2017). Trade unions linked to Solidaires were still not established enough in the private sector (commerce and industry) to play much of a role in driving disputes forward. At the inter-union meetings organised during the mobilisation against the El Khomri law, areas of common ground could be found between the CGT, the FSU, Solidaires and FO on the refusal of the text. On the other hand, counter-proposals for another reform of the labour code were refused by the FO leadership, who intended to pursue its own agenda and did not develop a common dynamic with the other organisations.

The movement against the El Khomri law constituted an important process of legitimation for the new CGT leader, Philippe Martinez (previously the secretary of the metallurgical federation). Martinez took over the post of general secretary following an intense period of internal crisis in 2014–2015. This leadership crisis, which revealed the very severe tensions that existed in the confederation between different tendencies – on the weight to be given, notably, to the federations – was far from being over in 2016. However, taking on the leadership of a strong social protest movement allowed the CGT to project an externally positive image and, internally, to convince union activists of the organisation’s combativeness, proved by their determination to organise strikes. At the confederal congress, which was held in the middle of this period of mobilisation, in April 2016, the new CGT leadership built a majority that was likely to back it for the 2016–2019 mandate, by obtaining, notably, the support of sectoral federations considered to be ‘orthodox’, like the agri-food and chemical federations. This meant promoting a CGT identity associated with ‘class struggle’ (which is partly explained by the influence within these organisations of a Trotskyist tendency, linked to the Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (Independent Workers’ Party). Conversely, the new leadership maintained very tense relations with the management teams of the two most important sectoral federations: the public services (local authorities) and health federations. For their part, these two federations had more of a critical discourse on the necessity of adapting trade union structures to transformations in the workforce. The internal alliances made within the CGT by the new leadership therefore led it to take on a very aggressive and hostile discourse against the CFDT, a discourse which was perceived from the outside as positive by other actors in the dispute, such as a number of activists involved in Nuit Debout. However, the activists in the ‘orthodox’ sectors were not the most open to building relations with this type of movement, seen as emerging from the middle classes, insofar as they maintained a relatively ‘worker’-oriented conception of the struggle. While the radicalness declared by the CGT leadership could give the impression to the Nuit Debout leaders that convergences were possible, the internal balances existing in the confederation were an impediment to the construction of sustainable relationships.

Therefore, while the most engaged activists in Nuit Debout were hoping for a repeat of the activities in public spaces that had taken place in autumn 2016, the situation ended up being quite different. Issues related to the presidential election campaign in May 2017, as well as the labour movement’s own concerns, took priority. On 31 March 2017, the Ministry of Labour published a new measure of representativeness for all French trade union organisations. The CFDT became the first organisation in terms of electoral turnout in the private sector, with 26.37 per cent of votes cast. The CGT had 24.85 per cent and FO, the third organisation, 15.59 per cent. This periodic revision of unions’ representativeness was established by the law of 20 August 2008 (Béroud et al., 2012). The measure of the turnout was based on the aggregation of several electoral ballots: the elections for the works councils (or failing that for the employee representatives), which took place between 2013 and 2016, and the elections for workers in very small businesses (VSB), which were held at the end of 2016. All the trade union organisations – including those which are sometimes labelled as ‘radical’ such as SUD/Solidaires – made these last elections a priority in their agenda in autumn 2016 for several reasons. For the CGT, it was already known that the CFDT were getting better results in the works council elections, and so gathering as many votes as possible in the VSB ballots appeared to be crucial. For the other organisations, including Solidaires, the representativeness measure at the national and cross-sectoral level, but also at the sectoral level, was decisive for having access to financial resources, but also for carrying influence in negotiations and, more generally, with the wider public. Finally, despite union activists being absorbed by the VSB elections for several months, they still had a very low participation rate, with only 7.35 per cent out of the 4.4 million eligible workers voting. The CGT stayed in the lead with 25.12 per cent of votes, the CFDT in second position with 15.49 per cent and FO in third position with 13 per cent. ¹⁴

This importance given to the measure of trade union representativeness shows to what extent a confederation like the CGT finds itself caught in a dual, sometimes contradictory rationale. A central actor in a period of dispute with the government, as it was during the mobilisation against the El Khomri law, it has evolved within a space which hosts other actors as part of the social movement, some of which expect a more political position from the organisation. This involvement in a protest movement – which also resulted in an alliance on the ground with unionists from Solidaires – carries a symbolic significance for a large number of its activists who are sometimes involved in an individual capacity in different collective struggles, in a ZAD or in Nuit Debout. The biggest French trade union confederation (if measured by its influence in both the public services and the private sector), the CGT’s leading role is however very threatened by the CFDT. Its leadership must also take certain industrial relations issues into account in its strategy and cannot be too public about alliances which would end up marginalising it in this field. It also has to integrate the imperative of trade union development, meaning the redeployment and reinforcement of its forces in non- or very weakly unionised sectors. This is a prerequisite for its capacity to carry influence in both spaces: social movements and industrial relations.

Translation from the French by Bethany Staunton