Égalité: Trade Unions on the Defensive

Facing France’s increasingly focused employers is a divided and much less focused trade union movement. It is a movement that was born later than in Britain and Germany. It was and remains weaker in numbers, in terms of union density and in its degree of feminisation. Whereas 21 per cent of the active working population were union members in 1978 that figure today is about eight per cent. Nor has it ever known organic unity: it is more heterogeneous than the trade union ideological maps of Italy, Britain and Germany presented by Hyman (1996; 2001). The cleavages between the struggle, market and societal poles in trade union thought go deep. These divisions were to some extent frozen in place by the powerful presence of the Communist Party and its rigid concept of class struggle. But they were institutionalised by the state’s decrees of 1948 and 1966 that gave state recognition and privileges to certain targeted confederation centres. The decrees were fashioned to overcome the problem that from 1947 to about 1990 the communist-led CGT usually represented the majority of French trade unionists. The state’s solution to this tricky democratic obstacle was to elevate the status of the minority unions so they could sign agreements the CGT would not. These decrees therefore effectively rewarded ideological distinctiveness rather than size. Each pole was occupied by a different and competing trade union confederation.