New York Times - March 29, 2006
Well Exercised and Supple, French Unions Flex Muscles By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, March 28 - Armed with hot dogs and baguettes, balloons, buttons, banners and, of course, gallons of red wine, France's major trade unions set out Tuesday to change the law, or to bring down a prime minister trying.
Responding to their rallying cry, more than a million people showed up in the streets, marching in the familiar protest parades that the unions sponsor from time to time. In Paris, the slow-moving street fair stretched for miles.
"The unions haven't been this united in 20 years," said Jean-Claude Mailly, general secretary of Force Ouvrière, as he prepared for the protests that are meant to force Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to withdraw a contested law giving employers the right to fire recently hired young workers without cause.
Despite one of the lowest rates of unionization - only about 8 percent of the French work force are members - the unions have enormous leverage over the government. They play a unique organizational role in France's hierarchical society, rallying the populace accustomed to a confrontational relationship with leaders considered elitist. Spark-plug unions, some people call them.
Their mobilizations have killed efforts to change France's costly, rigid social welfare system before, and have hastened the end of the careers of politicians who got in the way.
But the unions, too, have their own troubles, rent by internal political and ideological battles that have cost them membership. The French have also been losing faith in the unions' ability to stop unpopular government programs after they failed to defeat painful pension reforms three years ago. The current protests and strikes present the unions with an opportunity to recover their reputation as the protectors of workers' rights.
In 1995, the last time France's unions were so united, they forced the withdrawal of a plan to trim pensions and curb health care costs, and were widely credited with causing the conservatives to lose elections two years later that left President Jacques Chirac in an awkward power-sharing arrangement with a Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin.
French trade unions got their start in the late 1800's, about the same time as in the United States. The country's first syndicate, the Confédération Générale du Travail, was formed in 1895, not long after Samuel Gompers organized the American Federation of Labor. But the arc of the two countries' labor movements diverged after World War II.
"American politics veered right while French politics veered left," said Gerald Friedman, an economist and author of "State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1876-1914."
The French far right was discredited by its Nazi collaboration during the war, and the Communist Party emerged as a powerful force. It was able to put the right to strike into the French Constitution.
That clause makes all the difference: if workers strike in the United States, they risk losing their jobs, but strikers in France do not fear for their jobs, regardless of whether they are union members.
>From the beginning, French unions have mobilized
people to put pressure on the government instead
of simply pressing employers. They have found a
willing populace, thanks perhaps to the romantic
legacy of the French Revolution.
Because French union organizers do not need the support of a majority of workers at an enterprise to form a union, a small minority of a company's workers can call a strike. When they do, many people take the day off regardless of whether they are union members. All they lose is a day's pay.
But most important, French unions have continued to play a leading role far beyond wage negotiations, fighting to shape a sort of workers' paradise and amassing entitlements for the broader population along the way. It is primarily because of the strength of the unions that all workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks of vacation, affordable health care and a 35-hour week.
"The unions are the origin of the great social conquests, the great entitlements enjoyed by France," said André Narritsens, a historian for the C.G.T., France's largest union.
That progress has won the unions a measure of popular support far larger than that enjoyed by American unions. Many people in the United States take a jaundiced view of strikes because union members are relatively better off than many private-sector employees. But French polls consistently show strong public support for striking workers, despite the havoc they may cause.
And with strong ideological foundations, French unions have not become associated with organized crime, as has happened with some unions in the United States.