British European Union referendum

I couldn’t not comment on this referendum. The country is split in two with 1.3 million votes separating them. The leave-supporters are pleased and the remain-supporters are desperately unhappy. Most people expected the result to be the other way round. Another group which is hugely discontented is that of the Brits who have been resident in Europe for more than fifteen years, and have been disenfranchised by Mr Cameron. The reason for this is not clear and seems difficult to defend since these Brits are in the front line, living and working in countries of the EU. There are said to be some two to three million of us and if this is the case and we had been able to vote, then the referendum result would have been reversed. This is therefore a vote which leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. It is not ‘job well done’.

There is a petition which is trying to influence this result, called: EU Referendum Rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum. The head is: We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based on a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum. When I looked a few minutes ago, there were 3.75 million signatures; it will therefore have to be debated by Parliament. The Scottish government says it is trying to block the Brexit. Others are saying that a referendum is only consultative, that Parliament is not obliged to heed the result. Britain is held by most to be the home of parliamentary democracy; it would be extremely malodorous if our legislators chose to override the vox populi. It looks very much as if out is out, as the European Commission likes to put it.

Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty is the mechanism for leaving the EU; unfortunately, there are no explanatory details in the treaty. Despite Mr Juncker and others saying that Article 50 must be invoked without delay, it remains Britain’s decision when to announce that she is leaving. There is nothing to be gained by doing things precipitately. These are uncharted waters and Britain has chosen to be the guinea-pig. Before formally invoking Article 50, the Tory party has to choose a new leader and the Labour party will very likely have to do as much.

Immigration is said to have been the main theme of this referendum, the power behind Brexit. But I think that an even more powerful factor was the unelected nature of the European Commission, that unelected functionaries can tell elected members of Parliament what their laws must be, what they can and cannot do, whom they can or cannot extradite –  this has always been a major sticking point. When Katya Adler, the BBC’s European editor, asked Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president, if this were the end of the EU, he growled “No” and with a scowl left the press conference. This was exactly the kind of arrogance that the British abhor in an unelected representative. Other Europeans are even blaming him for Brexit as he pushes for “more Europe” including a European army which Britain is dead-set against. Juncker is a divisive force; his election was opposed by Cameron and he is on record as saying that Brexit will not be an amicable divorce.

Of course, it didn’t help the Remain cause that the world and his wife were telling the British voters that if they voted to leave, World War Three would start the following day. President Obama, Christine Lagarde and the hundreds of eminent scientists, economists, church leaders, Nobel Prize winners, blue-chip company bosses all saying sign here, not there, doubtless provoked a backlash.

Sovereignty and take back control are powerful concepts in a campaign. They won the day. Now, cool heads and time are needed. Festina lente.

France, its companies and its trade unions

The unions are still putting the French government under pressure and when I say unions, I’m referring mainly to the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). The CGT wants to hold a full-blooded march in Paris this Thursday. The authorities say that given the current state of emergency they will only allow an assembly and not a march of protestors. The CGT rejects this idea, so there is stalemate. Given that all public demonstrations attract ultras, what the French call casseurs, they are high-risk events. A nationally known childrens’ hospital was damaged by ultras last week, to public outcry, yet given the terrorist threat and the football crowd control, the police are stretched to the limit and still the government does not dare forbid outright the CGT’s march with the risk that they might have to prosecute the organisers and impose fines or imprisonment as laid down by law.

The French public are greatly inconvenienced but there is still this feeling that the CGT has a right to strike, that’s the way things are. They forget that the union represents a small minority, is defending the privileges of a few and does not have the right to stop others from working.

The French are still very much ambivalent about trade unions and the companies they work for. There is still a very strong them and us culture. The patrons (bosses) are still seen as exploitative and the lines of cleavage are everywhere. Who will protect the worker against the patron? Yes, there are bosses who exploit workers, but certainly not all of them do. Yet the French give this impression that a patron is by definition an exploiter of employees. This belief has been underpinned by the Code du Travail, the code of labour law which exists to protect the employee against the employer’s excesses and is very often an administrative nightmare for the employer. The bigger the company gets, the more time and money it has to devote to making sure it is not infringing any of its articles of law. The number of employees determines the level of complexity: 10, 20 and 50 being critical. For example, if a company employs 11 people, it has to organise elections for representatives of the workforce (délégués du personnel); if it employs 51 people it must set up a works council (comité d'entreprise). These are significant additional changes to the workload and responsibilities of the owner or manager, to such a degree that the owner of a small company will often refuse to employ that eleventh person. This is a considerable obstacle to national growth and one of the reasons why French unemployment figures have been above 10% for the last 35 years or so.

It often seems as if salaried employees don’t see the relationship between their company, their customers and their monthly payslip. The company owes them employment and a living and these rights are enshrined in law, everything the patron does has to be measured against the Code du Travail and if somebody spots that something is not being done by the book, there may well be an outcry. This does not make for company loyalty. The owner often feels alone, without support. The workforce forgets that the patron who started the company and created employment probably had to get a bank loan or re-mortgage his home to do it; the element of risk-taking is often unknown or forgotten.

Because of this, it often seems that doing business in France is extremely difficult, but let’s not forget that France manages with this system and so do many foreign companies which set up businesses here. This doesn’t mean that things would not be better if this legal strangle-hold were not eased. This strangle-hold is partly applied by the unions. What would happen, I wonder, if the trade unions had to function within the constraints of their own finances, that is that they were responsible for their own income, with no subsidies from public funds? I haven’t heard the government suggest that, or perhaps I missed it.

Mrs Thatcher, Monsieur Hollande and the unions

When observing the current difficulties that President Hollande and his socialist government are experiencing with their labour unions, mainly the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), it’s difficult not to think back to Margaret Thatcher’s world-famous battle with the unions in the 1980s which followed her world-famous victory in the Falklands war in 1982. Those were indeed heady times with strong, decisive political leadership.

In 1974, Ted Heath, the Conservative Prime Minister fought an election with the slogan: "Who governs Britain?" The result was that Labour's Harold Wilson became prime minister. It’s this kind of question that many people are asking in France today.

Those of us who were around at the time still remember names like Vic Feather, Joe Gormley, Jack Jones, trade union leaders who had great power and influence. Today, it is difficult to understand just how powerful they were. The strikes were never-ending, all sectors were affected: the steel industry, the car industry, the Post Office, the ferries, transport, power generation, and most famously or infamously, the coal industry. There was also Derek Robinson, known as "Red Robbo", who regularly brought the production lines at British Leyland to a standstill.

The Labour party had traditionally always been close to the unions, claiming that these good relations enabled it to keep them in line. The Conservatives, on the other hand, constantly suffered at the unions’ hand. But the unions, with such repeated strike action, now became an embarrassment to the Labour party.

In the first three months of 1979, the then Labour government ran slap-bang into the "winter of discontent". Public sector workers went on strike, chaos ensued and the effects are remembered to this day. Labour couldn’t handle their union “allies”. At the General Election in May 1979, Mrs Thatcher was returned to power with a majority of just 30. It is fair to say that the unions loathed Mrs Thatcher, but she was on a mission: the "British disease", strike fever, had to be cured and she had the treatment.

She appointed Norman Tebbit as Employment Secretary. Norman Tebbit is now Lord Tebbit, and still a force to be reckoned with. Before becoming a politician, he was an airline pilot and used to be leader of BALPA, the pilots' union. In 1978, Michael Foot, at the time deputy leader of the Labour Party, famously called Norman Tebbit in Parliament a "semi-house-trained polecat". Just the man for the job.

He began by removing legal protection from the unions. “Flying pickets” described at the time as “the shock troops of industrial warfare” were banned; they could no longer blockade factories, fuel depots, refineries, ports, railway stations, public buildings and more. Strike ballots were made compulsory. “The closed shop” was made illegal; this forced anyone trying to get a job to join a specific trade union.

It is a matter of history that the final “battle” was with the miners’ union, led by Arthur Scargill. Large numbers of police officers were brought in to ensure that the pits remained open and there were many very violent clashes, but the miners were finally beaten. By 1985, it was all over. The unions went into a steep decline. Power, influence, membership, much of their legal protection, melted away.

Mr Sarkozy said yesterday that he would make the unions liable for any damage caused during demonstrations organised by them. Mr Hollande said he might go so far as to ban union marches during the state of emergency. It will take more than that to bring about the worthwhile and lasting changes in labour relations that France so desperately needs.

French unions and the CGT

The French CGT union (Confédération Générale du Travail) is seriously slowing the country down, disrupting daily life and calling into question who really runs the country. To say it has almost brought the country to a standstill is a bit of an exaggeration but it’s moving that way. The leader of the public service section of the CGT was interviewed on radio this morning by a polite and knowledgeable presenter, Jean-Michel Abatie; the union man kept referring to the majority of the French public who supported them. This is what they do, keep repeating the same thing over and over until they acquire a kind of legitimacy. The one thing the interviewer didn’t point out was that the CGT represents 3% of workers and should then have asked him to justify his claim to have the support of the French public. The interviewer suggested that the Union considered itself to be stronger, more representative, more legitimate than the democratically elected government, to which the union man said that the current mess was all the government’s fault.

Not only is the fuel supply disrupted, so are the nuclear power stations, the national rail company (SNCF), the Paris underground, airport services, domestic waste collection in Marseille and Paris is affected with rubbish bags beginning to appear on the streets, all of this against the background of torrential downpours and flooding in many parts of the country.

Tomorrow, the Euro 2016 football competition begins. Hundreds of thousands of people will be trying to travel to the different venues and the police, security and other emergency services will be doing their best to make sure that everybody is kept safe. The CGT says this is all the fault of the government for not backing down on their recent watered-down employment legislation initiative.

The government has not exactly got a lot to be proud of in its handling of this situation. Not only has it eviscerated the original employment law, trying to pacify the unions, but it also intervened behind the scenes with the SNCF management’s plan to get its own specific reforms accepted by the unions. The SNCF is a publicly owned enterprise and the government forced the chairman, Guillaume Pépy, to give way to the unions in the hope that this would defuse the industrial action against the new employment law. It didn’t. Monsieur Pépy threatened to resign. He didn’t.

How are unions financed in France? That’s a very simple question which has no simple answer. Union finances are best described as complex or opaque in the sense of not transparent. Only since 2008 has it been a legal requirement for unions to produce certified accounts and to publish them. Statistics are difficult to find and not up-to-date. According to figures on Wikipedia, only 8% of people in France are paid-up members of a union compared to 29% in Britain and Germany, 65% in Belgium and 83% in Sweden. Given this very low membership rate, it is surprising that France has the highest number of union officials as a percentage of union membership. Its subscription income is quite modest and thus inadequate to meet its needs.

Where then does the money come from? The government website Vie Publique, lists them as being: subscriptions, company funding (legal requirement), local authority funding (public and company money), public subsidy. Certain taxes levied on companies by local authorities go towards financing union activities. Most small companies don’t realise this and they would be galled to know that they are footing part of the bill for unions to strike with the ensuing disruption often causing their own businesses to fail. If French unions had to exist on their membership subscription income alone, they would all fail. As it is, they are financially well-endowed, enjoy many privileges and are well protected by law. Why on earth should they put up with any government which attempts to take any of this away from them?

National Curriculum SATs, French labour relations

Given my proclivity to criticise standards of spoken English and to reminisce about the Universities’ Test of English taken by students applying for a university place in the 1960s, I thought I’d look at what was being tested in the SATs tests in England and Wales. I did a short sample paper entitled: “KS2 English Tests - Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation - level 3-5, Short”, which happened to be the grammatical section. This test is the Standard Assessment Test used in the National Curriculum. It covers the period from age 7 to 11 in junior school.

I must say that I found the questions far more taxing than I anticipated. This is, in my opinion, a very good standard indeed to face at age 11. I hope English teaching maintains the same high standards throughout secondary education. Here are the questions:

.What does the word others refer to in the passage below?

.Tick one box to show how the modal verb affects the meaning of the sentence.

.Find the adverb in the sentence below.

.In this sentence, is the word after being used as a subordinating conjunction or as a preposition?

.Which sentence uses the past progressive?

.Tick the option that shows how the underlined words are used in the sentence. (My baby brother was born in the hospital where my father works.)

.Tick all the sentences that contain a preposition.

.Tick all the determiners in the sentence below.

The UEFA Euro 2016 football championship begins in France on June 10^th. At the moment, France is still in turmoil owing to the continuing labour disputes between unions and the government about changes to employment law which have recently been forced through the National Assembly without a vote. Will the Euro have to be cancelled? Good question. In an editorial in Le Figaro on 27th May, a number of points were made. Public sector workers work fewer hours than the private sector. A good percentage work less than the official 35 hours. This has been shown in numerous official reports over the years and nothing has ever been done. The government has just voted an increase in public sector pay. How can the national budget ever be balanced? Whose interests are best served by the current social upheaval, by trying to stop all reform of employment law? Answer: those who work less than the others, have a job for life and generous pensions. These people fight tooth and nail for the status quo. The irony is that these people are not in the least affected by the recent changes in employment law. It affects the private sector.

The union which is leading the fight is the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). It is a left-wing union which goes back a long way (1895). It’s something of a union dinosaur whose preferred method of negotiation is conflict. In the current stand-off, union representatives can be heard claiming legitimacy by saying that the majority of the French people support their stance. According to the Le Monde newspaper, the CGT represents as at April 2016 less than 3% of French employees. Another major union, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), founded in 1919, is the largest in membership terms. Nowadays, it is less conflictual than the CGT and is beginning to view labour relations more in the British or German way, change through debate, discussion and by offering alternative solutions to the resolving of disputes.

Membership of unions is nowadays very low, which leads to the question of how they are financed. Union finances in France are opaque, not to say a bit of a mystery. More on this next time.