Home > Well Exercised and Supple, French Unions Flex Muscles
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By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, March 28 - Armed with hot dogs and baguettes,
balloons, buttons, banners and, of course, gallons of
red wine, France’s major trade unions set out Tuesday
to change the law, or to bring down a prime minister
trying.
Responding to their rallying cry, more than a million
people showed up in the streets, marching in the
familiar protest parades that the unions sponsor from
time to time. In Paris, the slow-moving street fair
stretched for miles.
"The unions haven’t been this united in 20 years," said
Jean-Claude Mailly, general secretary of Force
Ouvrière, as he prepared for the protests that are
meant to force Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to
withdraw a contested law giving employers the right to
fire recently hired young workers without cause.
Despite one of the lowest rates of unionization - only
about 8 percent of the French work force are members -
the unions have enormous leverage over the government.
They play a unique organizational role in France’s
hierarchical society, rallying the populace accustomed
to a confrontational relationship with leaders
considered elitist. Spark-plug unions, some people call
them.
Their mobilizations have killed efforts to change
France’s costly, rigid social welfare system before,
and have hastened the end of the careers of politicians
who got in the way.
But the unions, too, have their own troubles, rent by
internal political and ideological battles that have
cost them membership. The French have also been losing
faith in the unions’ ability to stop unpopular
government programs after they failed to defeat painful
pension reforms three years ago. The current protests
and strikes present the unions with an opportunity to
recover their reputation as the protectors of workers’
rights.
In 1995, the last time France’s unions were so united,
they forced the withdrawal of a plan to trim pensions
and curb health care costs, and were widely credited
with causing the conservatives to lose elections two
years later that left President Jacques Chirac in an
awkward power-sharing arrangement with a Socialist
prime minister, Lionel Jospin.
French trade unions got their start in the late 1800’s,
about the same time as in the United States. The
country’s first syndicate, the Confédération Générale
du Travail, was formed in 1895, not long after Samuel
Gompers organized the American Federation of Labor. But
the arc of the two countries’ labor movements diverged
after World War II.
"American politics veered right while French politics
veered left," said Gerald Friedman, an economist and
author of "State-Making and Labor Movements: France and
the United States, 1876-1914."
The French far right was discredited by its Nazi
collaboration during the war, and the Communist Party
emerged as a powerful force. It was able to put the
right to strike into the French Constitution.
That clause makes all the difference: if workers strike
in the United States, they risk losing their jobs, but
strikers in France do not fear for their jobs,
regardless of whether they are union members.
>From the beginning, French unions have mobilized people
to put pressure on the government instead of simply
pressing employers. They have found a willing populace,
thanks perhaps to the romantic legacy of the French
Revolution.
Because French union organizers do not need the support
of a majority of workers at an enterprise to form a
union, a small minority of a company’s workers can call
a strike. When they do, many people take the day off
regardless of whether they are union members. All they
lose is a day’s pay.
But most important, French unions have continued to
play a leading role far beyond wage negotiations,
fighting to shape a sort of workers’ paradise and
amassing entitlements for the broader population along
the way. It is primarily because of the strength of the
unions that all workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks
of vacation, affordable health care and a 35-hour week.
"The unions are the origin of the great social
conquests, the great entitlements enjoyed by France,"
said André Narritsens, a historian for the C.G.T.,
France’s largest union.
That progress has won the unions a measure of popular
support far larger than that enjoyed by American
unions. Many people in the United States take a
jaundiced view of strikes because union members are
relatively better off than many private-sector
employees. But French polls consistently show strong
public support for striking workers, despite the havoc
they may cause.
And with strong ideological foundations, French unions
have not become associated with organized crime, as has
happened with some unions in the United States.