Abstract
This chapter by Rehfeldt analyzes the French system of workers’ participation. The first part deals with its historical sedimentation and explains why it has emerged so lately. The historical heritage is a model based on mistrust and conflict. The second section describes the great variety of representation bodies, most of which are limited to information and consultation. A 2017 reform will unify these bodies. Economic participation through board-level representation is very weak, initially limited to the public sector and recently extended to large private companies. A specific feature is a distinct union representation through delegates with a monopoly for collective bargaining, as long as unions are present at the workplace level. In this case, the unions coordinate the whole system of worker participation.
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- 1.
The CFDT is the new name of the CFTC since 1964 as a result of its ‘secularization’ that marks the abandonment of reference to the social doctrine of the Church in its program.
- 2.
A traditionalist split from the CFDT which wanted to maintain the reference to the social doctrine of the Church.
- 3.
This category, called ‘cadres’, is larger in France than just the executives; it includes engineers, researchers and commercial employees.
- 4.
Force Ouvrière (FO, officially CGT-FO) is the anti-communist union confederation which resulted from a split of the CGT in 1947.
- 5.
FO’s refusal, based on a syndicalist tradition, was synthesized by André Bergeron, general secretary of FO from 1963 to 1989, in the formula ‘one cannot be both governed and governing’ (CGT-FO 1986, p. 55).
- 6.
Two months later, in March 2013, the Ministry of Labour published the aggregation of the 2009–2012 workplace election results in the private sector, in application of the 2008 law on union representativeness. This aggregation confirmed the representativeness of the five confederations that had participated in the negotiation, because each of them exceeded the threshold of 8 percent of the votes. This result retrospectively legitimized the three signatories to the agreement which together represented a relative weight of 50.4 percent of the votes of the 5 representative organizations. The two non-signatory unions represented together only 49.6 percent of the votes and therefore could not challenge the validity of the agreement.
- 7.
According to the 2007 Law on ‘modernization of social dialogue’, any legislative project by the government in the field on labor law must be preceded by a consultation of the social partners which grants them the opportunity to negotiate an agreement. This must then be transposed into a bill by the government. Only in case of failure of the negotiations the government is free to develop a bill on its own. One could however argue that board-level participation is not part of the labor law, but of company law, and that the government was free in this field to develop its own ideas.
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Rehfeldt, U. (2019). Workers’ Participation at Plant Level: France. In: Berger, S., Pries, L., Wannöffel, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workers’ Participation at Plant Level. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_17
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