Transformer le dialogue social pour accompagner la bifurcaton écologique

This paper presents and discusses the idea that political democracy and social democracy must be coupled in order to successufully deal with the challenges of a necessarily radical ecological turning point. We face a double paradox here, because social dialogue nowadays is patchy and weakened, and because unions mainly relay the legitimate concerns of the workers, fearing the job losses and improverishment risks stemming from the ecological crisis as well as from the measures implemented to address it. However it is more than ever necessary to actively involve all the stakeholders, especially the workers. The paper argues that in order to do so, social dialogue must be enlarged and renewed. We proceed in four steps. First, we analyse the present difficulties of the political process and suggest that overcoming them implies among others to set out a new social contract, replacing the previous fordist one. Second, we examine the concrete ways through which the actors and stakes of environment are currently introduced in the social dialogue as it is practiced in Europe, and we show that such an introduction does not come up to the challenge. Third, we introduce a theoretical perspective, enlarging the picture and focussing on workers' "real freedom" and on the old and new forms of scarcities that our societies confront. Fourth and last, we go back to social dialogue and discuss the important transformations it needs in order to simultaneously foster workers' emancipation and the ecological turning point