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.
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