INSIDE TRACK: France's far left keeps the revolution alive: TRADE UNIONS: Sud, a network of radical trade unions, is giving both employers and traditional unions sleepless nights.
Financial Times, Oct 15, 2001 By VICTOR MALLET
Dominique Malvaud, a railway signalman and Trotskyite trade unionist, looks with satisfaction out of his office window at the river Seine and the Ile St Denis, a Paris suburb where radical ecologists won control in this year's French municipal elections.
>From the Sud Rail union headquarters on the grim northern periphery of
Paris, Mr Malvaud is helping to build a workers' movement that is giving
employers sleepless nights, challenging established trade union
federations and forging links with Greens, anti-globalisation protesters
and extreme leftists across the world.
"The bosses are beginning to be afraid of us. That's good," says Mr Malvaud, a member of Sud Rail's federal office and a militant of the LCR, the Revolutionary Communist League.
This is no idle boast. A loosely connected network of unions calling themselves Sud - it means "south" in French but was in fact launched in Paris and stands for solidaires, unitaires et democratiques - has grown rapidly since the first of the kind was formed at the Post Office by strikers expelled from a more moderate trade union in 1988.
French chief executives generally loathe Sud and everything it stands for. But they are reluctant to say so in public and in the meantime the phenomenon is spreading from its public sector strongholds in telecommunications, health and railways into banks and industrial groups in the private sector.
"They are afraid," confirms Jean Dubois, a labour consultant and researcher for Entreprises et Personnel, a think-tank funded by employers. "They are panicking. For them, it's the Revolution and all that."
France Telecom, which is partly privatised and has had Sud PTT, the post and telecommunications union, as its second biggest union since last year, has been affected. So too have private sector groups as varied as Michelin, the tyre-maker, FNAC, the retailer, and Aventis, the pharmaceuticals company.
The tiny number of paid-up members of Sud unions - 40,000 or so - suggests that the Sud image is considerably more impressive than the movement's real strength.
This is true, however, of all French trade unions. Only a tenth of the country's labour force is unionised. However, the role of organised labour in large public sector organisations, in wage bargaining and in upholding France's tradition of taking protests on to the streets, gives the trade unions an influence and a public profile out of proportion to their size.
The media-conscious organisers of Sud unions, furthermore, have deliberately adopted a confrontational and therefore highly visible approach to labour disputes. Now in their forties, many of the anarchists and extreme leftists who lead the movement spent their student years striking in schools and demonstrating in the military against national service and against US intervention in Vietnam and Chile.
Annick Coupe, a Maoist and Sud PTT stalwart, once described herself and her colleagues as "radical, combative, brawling" and likened them to "a dog at a game of skittles" - a French idiom equivalent to the English "bull in a china shop".
Sud activists relish protests, work stoppages, sympathy strikes and consumer boycotts. They like to publish strategy documents that big companies in the throes of restructuring would rather keep secret. They are, in a word, contestataire, or anti-establishment.
"It's very French," says Mr Dubois. "Sud is 'against'. It's a union of systematic opposition. It throws itself into any dispute, which earns it support from the shop floor."
The movement has thus filled a vacuum left by the evolution of other union groups - such as the Communist Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) and the Socialist Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail (CFDT) - into more moderate bodies that are prepared to negotiate with employers. Mr Malvaud and his Sud colleagues believe that the CFDT and the CGT have joined the establishment.
There are no lifelong union officials in the ranks of Sud. Office holders are few in number and are soon sent back to their old jobs. Mr Malvaud, for example, can serve a maximum of six years at Sud Rail before returning to his work as a signalman.
Perhaps the greatest peculiarity of the Sud network is its overlapping membership with radical organisations outside the labour sphere. They include Attac, the anti-globalisation group, AC!, which fights for the rights of the unemployed, and the French rural traditionalist Confederation Paysanne, whose leader Jose Bove was convicted of destroying a McDonald's fast-food outlet.
The intellectuals running Sud believe these disparate groups can all benefit each other in the battle against social democracy and economic liberalism. And they say French radicalism is seen as a successful experiment that has aroused interest among like-minded people in Germany, the US, the UK and elsewhere. "We don't want to replace political parties," says Mr Malvaud, "but we want to intervene across the political field."
Yet just when Sud unions are causing consternation in boardrooms and trade unions alike, their era of rapid expansion in France may be nearing its end. Labour analysts such as Mr Dubois predict that Sud unions will continue to spread sporadically to new factories and offices around the country but the movement will never dominate the labour market and may already have peaked in some state- owned companies.
"It makes a lot of noise and creates a big impression," says Mr Dubois. "But in my opinion they are reaching a plateau. One can't see how they are going to develop or go far in the private sector. They have no programme; no alternative solutions."
Sud's leaders do not deny that they are more enthusiastic about asking provocative questions than about providing answers and they accept that the movement's lack of structure is another potential weakness. The various branches using the Sud name are not linked by any central organisation.
Sud activists - who support not just nationalisation at home but also the creation of pan-European state monopolies - are operating in a thoroughly hostile economic and political environment. The European Commission frowns on monopolies or near-monopolies such as the French state electricity and railway companies and even France's Socialist-led government has embarked on a vigorous privatisation programme.
Events at France Telecom in the 1990s showed how hard the going would be for Sud. In a referendum organised by Sud PTT most of the company's employees voted against privatisation but when the state went ahead a few months later and sold part of the company in 1997, two- thirds of the staff decided to buy France Telecom shares. Today the company says 92 per cent of employees are in its share scheme.
The problem for the Sud movement is that the arcane interests of intellectual Sud trade union leaders do not always coincide with the bread-and-butter demands of working-class members.
"Railway workers don't vote for us because we are anti-globalisation," concedes Mr Malvaud.
Take the issue of immigration. French workers wary of losing their jobs typically regard immigrants with thinly disguised hostility. But Sud militants have staged demonstrations in favour of the sans papiers - illegal immigrants without residence permits.
Surely support for freer international movement of labour amounts to support for some form of globalisation? Mr Malvaud explains that Sud supporters do not espouse the narrow nationalism of the French Communist party or Jean-Pierre Cheve`nement, the leftwing politician, and are not opposed to globalisation itself.
"We are for globalisation," says Mr Malvaud. "But we are against the laws of the market. It's the economic system we contest."
France is one of the few places in the industrialised world where such a message can be guaranteed a serious hearing. But even in France, it is the kind of unconventional view that could keep Sud unions in the minority for years to come.
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited