Abstract
A return trip to Paris and Grenoble during the summer of 1985 permitted a reassessment of this research in the light of over four years of Socialist government under François Mitterrand. This epilogue analyses the impact of two major policy changes of this government on the labour movement both at the national level and within our four Grenoble firms. The first change is the ‘Auroux laws’, a set of industrial relations reforms which attempts to transform labour—management relations at the firm level. The second is Socialist economic policy, which after 1982 turned increasingly toward austerity and ‘modernisation’. In different ways these two changes have deepened the strategic crisis of the labour movement.
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Notes and References
Guy Caire, ‘Les Lois Auroux’, Relations industrielles, 39:2 (1984) p. 242.
For example, in its Project socialiste adopted in 1980, the PS declared: ‘[Autogestion] is the social state that will allow responsible men and women to decide whatever they please for themselves and the collectivity where they live and work, and with every form of centralism and gigantism broken.’ Quoted in Bernard E. Brown, Socialism of a Different Kind (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982) p. 46.
Three decrees (ordonnances) that sought to ‘reconstitute the work collectivity’ by placing various constraints on temporary and part-time work, also accompanied these four laws. For explanations of the laws and decrees see: Ibid., Caire (1984), op. cit., Michel Beaud, La Politique économique de la Gauche: le grand Ecart (Paris: Syros, 1985) pp. 193–208; 1982 L’Année sociale (Paris: Syros, 1983), pp. 71–92; Le Monde, 9 Oct 1981; Quotidien de Paris 21 Dec 1982.
Dominique Chetail, Droit d’Expression des Salariés (Lyon: Direction Régionale du Travail et de l’Emploi, 1985) p. 1.
François Eyraud and Robert Tchobanian, ‘The Auroux Reforms and Company-Level Industrial Relations in France’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 23:2 (July 1985) p. 241.
Michel Crozier’s well-known phrase; see his The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Eyraud and Tchobanian, op. cit. pp. 243–4; Christian Morel, La Grève froide (Paris: Editions d’Organisations, 1981).
Le Monde, 9 Feb 1982. On the positive side employers were relieved that the government did not include an earlier Socialist electoral promise to give the Plant Committee veto power over hiring and firing decisions. The law does require management to ‘alert’ the Committee in cases of collective layoffs, but management’s ultimate rights in these respects are not affected. In addition, the decision to deny political organisations the right to operate within the enterprise met with patronal approval. See Janine Goetschy, ‘A New Future for Industrial Democracy in France?’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 4:1 (Feb 1983) p. 95.
BRAEC, ‘Les Autres Organisations syndicales et les Droits nouveaux’, Notes et Documents du B.R.A.E.C. (CFDT), 22 (Oct–Dec 1982) p. 6.
Pierre Belleville, Une Nouvelle Classe ouvrière (Paris: René Julliard, 1963) p. 276.
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© 1987 W. Rand Smith
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Smith, W.R. (1987). Epilogue. In: Crisis in the French Labour Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08556-9_9
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