Joanna
Doug Henwood wrote:
> [This is pretty funny - they're soooo rigid, but they're also
> immensely popular. And all without gangsters. I wonder if anyone at
> the AFL-CIO is asking how the French unions can cause such trouble
> with just 8% density. Maybe it's all that red wine.]
>
> 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.
>
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