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?
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