Unions, Change and Crisis

French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945-1980

Peter Lange, George Ross, Maurizio Vannicelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317230878
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1982, Unions, Change and Crisis represents the first detailed, comparative, historical and theoretically grounded study of two of the major trade union movements of Europe. It brings together the results of the first part of the first major study from Harvard University's Centre for European Studies.

The book explores, first individually and then comparatively, the evolution of the French and Italian Union movements through the end of the 1970s. It will be of particular interest for students of trade unions, industrial relations and political economy in France and Italy, but also those interested in the comparative analysis of advanced industrial democracies more generally.

1 The Perils of Politics: French Unions and the Crisis of the 1970s

George Ross

DOI: 10.4324/9781315625065-2

Part 1 Introduction

France’s two major trade union organizations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) responded to the arrival of economic crisis in the 1970s from within economic perspectives and strategies which both had evolved in the very different economic surroundings of the 1960s. Moreover, it was not until 1978, prompted by a political event, the French elections of 1978, that both began to reconsider their earlier positions. The circumstances surrounding these belated union reevaluations of their economic world provided a striking summary of the general dilemmas of organized labor in modern France.

French labor has, historically, tended to divide into separate and competing organizations, each with its own specific outlook on desirable goals in the labor market and on the proper mix between labor market and political action to achieve trade union objectives. Partly because of such divisive tendencies, French unions have also been consistently weak, both organizationally and in terms of shopfloor mobilizing capacities. Because of such weakness—which has both been enhanced by, and encouraged the perpetuation of, strong anti-union inclinations in the French employer class—French unions have been unusually ‘political,’ in several different ways. They have regularly sought state intervention in terms of regulation and legislation as a substitute for labor market victories which they have been unable to win on their own—a search which has contributed powerfully to the politicization of industrial conflict in France. Such politicization, given the power of the French Communist Party over major segments of the union movement plus the desire of other political forces to enlist trade union allies for their own political goals, has usually included a substantial component of partisan mobilization. Past a certain point of partisan intensity, trade union politicization has, in turn, contributed to the union movement’s schismatic tendencies and, hence, to labor’s weakness.

What happened to the CGT and CFDT in 1978 well illustrated the difficulties which French unions have faced in navigating through this sea of contradictions. From a point of very great weakness in the 1950s, the CGT and CFDT took important new measures in the 1960s to unify their action goals. An increase in union strength and mobilizing power followed in the later 1960s and early 1970s. Economic crisis hit, however, at almost exactly the moment when the French political Left unified, for the first time in twenty-five years, around the 1972 Common Program in order to challenge the Right–Center political majority which ran Fifth Republic France. In this context, the CGT and CFDT, each in its own particular way, chose to use most of their energy to promote the political success of the Left, to the neglect of their labor market activities. When Union de la Gauche split apart into partisan conflict and then failed to win the 1978 elections, the CGT and CFDT found themselves at loggerheads politically, newly divided in terms of labor market action, and greatly weakened. Both Confederations then drew back to reassess their positions on France’s economic difficulties in the worst conceivable circumstances.

The essay which follows will discuss the origins, nature and implications of CGT and CFDT responses to the contemporary economic crisis. It will attempt to do so by setting such responses in the broader context of the turbulent cycle of contradictions (division → weakness → unity-in-action → growing strength → politicization division → weakness) which has characterized French trade union life in the modern period. Thus Part 2 of this Chapter will examine the positions of French trade unionism in the ‘labor excluded’ French postwar settlement. We will then turn in Part 3 to the processes of change in the 1960s which led the CGT and CFDT to develop the positions with which they were later to analyze changing economic circumstances. Part 4 will review the early crisis period itself, stressing union responses to changing economic fortunes before the critically important electoral period of 1977–8. Part 5 will describe the contradictory reevaluations of both Confederations in the aftermath of the 1978 elections.

Part 2 French Unions in the Postwar Settlement

In France, as in most other advanced capitalist countries, major political and social change occurred in the immediate postwar period. Moreover, again as in other societies, this period of major reform came to an end with the arrival of the Cold War. From this point the French version of a welfare state began to be consolidated. It was from within the institutional/political context of this ‘postwar settlement’ that France’s postwar economic boom emerged, lasting for nearly three decades. The specifics of the sociopolitical equilibrium struck in France in its postwar settlement, in particular the relationships between French organized labor and the broader political economy, were substantially different from those of Northern Europe in particular. Since these differences created important preconditions for the later response of French trade unions to the economic crisis of the 1970s, it will be worth our time to review a brief outline of them.

The Period of Reform: 1994–7

Events surrounding the war—the decline of the Popular Front, Munich, the Spanish Civil War—and those of the war period itself—the defeat of 1940, Vichy and the Resistance—created a large bloc of political and social forces committed to reform at Liberation. The size of this bloc could not conceal, however, its internal divisions around the desirable extent and nature of such change. Gaullists wanted primarily to set up new presidentialist political institutions. Christian Democrats and, to a greater degree, Socialists, wanted a number of ‘welfare state’ type changes. Communists, whose power vastly increased in the Resistance and Liberation period, wanted to forge a new United Front with the Socialists for the dual, ultimately conflicting, purposes of promoting waves of social reform (nationalization, economic planning, income redistribution) to push France towards popular democracy and of keeping France on amicable terms with the Soviet Union. At the war’s end the task of governing France fell to governments formed from this heterogeneous, reform-oriented and ultimately unstable national Resistance coalition.

Organized labor in France was an important component of this broad Resistance-Liberation bloc. The CGT, by far the most significant labor organization, had reunified during the war (PCF-oriented and more moderate ‘reformist’ elements having divided under the pressures of political disagreement in the late 1930s) and a massive influx of new members after 1944 brought CGT membership levels to an historic high point of 6 million in 1946. At the same time as the CGT itself gained in strength, Communist power within the Confederation grew to the point where PCF control over most parts of the organization became unassailable.¹ The CGT had traditionally been a ‘class oriented’ union movement in which strong efforts to shape labor market and other action to achieve broad ‘class’—as opposed to category and particularistic—goals had always been made. New PCF power in the Confederation ensured that this orientation would continue, with, in addition, the PCF using its power to shape the CGT’s class goals to conform, in general ways, to PCF political objectives. In time the PCF’s shaping power over CGT class goals was bound to pose problems. The CGT had committed itself as early as the Amiens Charter in 1906 to partisan neutrality. The Confederation had always conceived of itself as a component of the French Left, but one whose positions were based on the generalized objectives of a politically pluralistic class rather than those of any specific partisan family within this class. The Catholic CFTC (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens) held very different orientations, refusing class struggle perspectives in deference to the Church’s doctrines of social harmony.² The CFTC emerged from the war with reformist intentions and increased membership as well, but it remained a weak trade union sister in terms of mobilizational and organizational power compared to the CGT.³

Installed in power at the war’s end, the Resistance coalition promoted extensive changes in a very short time. A new social security program was legislated. Several industrial sectors were nationalized, mainly, but not exclusively, public utilities. Works councils for employee representation in the firm were set up in all companies above a certain size. New measures of statutory job security protection in the civil service were enacted. The health care and educational systems were reconstructed. An economic planning apparatus was established. Finally, after painful and difficult national debates, the new political institutions of the Fourth Republic were put into place. The period of energetic postwar reformism proved short-lived, however. Tensions between different components of the Resistance coalition proved impossible to contain once the unifying influence of the war was removed. First the Gaullists left the government, creating a new reduced governing bloc composed of Christian Democrats, Socialists and Communists. Then as a result both of the emerging Cold War and of conflicting domestic objectives in this bloc, the Communists were forced out of power in Spring 1947, leaving government in the hands of the Socialists and Christian Democrats. From this point onwards no further reforms were forthcoming. Government alliances of the Center-Left and Center-Right either had no interest in reform or could not generate the political resources for it.

Union perspectives and action during this tumultuous post-Liberation period are what interest us most. The CGT had firm goals for restructuring France’s economic order in these years and used its considerable organizational power to advance them. It desired to see an extended public sector both for reasons of principle and to give governments major new sources of leverage, through economic planning, over the course of capital accumulation. It advocated tripartite administration over newly nationalized firms, with unions, the government and ‘consumers’ forming boards of directors. It hoped to see works committees assume a degree of decisionmaking power in all firms, its way of establishing a new union presence on the shop floor (in fact, works committees were established, but rapidly relegated to peripheral tasks, such as recreation and vacation programs, away from any role in administration). And, of course, it backed the creation of new social security and welfare bodies, preferably with strong union representation in their operations. In order to obtain such changes, the CGT acted in two major ways. Whenever and wherever possible, it intervened in the political process, either by direct organizational pressure on government or by indirect mass mobilizational efforts, to see that such changes were legislated and in the ways desired by the Confederation. Moreover, it was also willing to enter into quasi-’corporatist’ arrangements with governments as long as reforms were forthcoming.⁴ It quite energetically fought what it labelled the ‘battle for production,’ actively prevented strikes and participated in wage control programs. The CFTC, much weaker and smaller, went along with such trade union productivism and self-control in much the same spirit.

It is important to underline here that the CGT’s goals in the immediate postwar period were informed less by any coherent desire to set up a mixed economy along the lines which did ultimately emerge than by a transformative political logic. The PCF, which by 1945 had won a dominant position within the Confederation, was attempting to use the postwar months of reconstruction and reform by a national Resistance coalition to lay the political groundwork for a new Popular Front alliance of the Left which would initiate a further period of more thorough-going change. Its goal was to set in motion processes which might again begin transforming the accumulation process, and the social relationships underlying it, away from capitalism altogether. To get to such a point it was necessary for PCF and CGT, first of all, to devote their efforts and energies to postwar reconstruction, for only through successful reconstruction could French society establish the economic independence necessary for further change.

The PCF’s general strategy failed in 1946–7 for want of willing United Front political allies—the Socialists chose to ally to their Right rather than to their Left—and the Cold War. Ironically, certain of the postwar reforms enacted, in large part because of PCF and CGT insistence, provided the most important instrumentalities for the later postwar boom in France. And the CGT’s momentary corporatism, productivism and devotion to labor discipline helped to reestablish the French capitalism which the Confederation, in theory, desired to transcend.⁵ Perhaps more important, the unravelling of general PCF–CGT strategy occurred at great organizational cost to the CGT, and ultimately to French unionism as a whole. Conflict within the Confederation, fueled both by efforts by Communist-oriented trade unionists to consolidate their hold over the bulk of the CGT, and by simultaneous attempts by these same unionists to prod the CGT to pursue pro-PCF policies, finally led, in the early Cold War, to organizational schism. Almost all of the CGT’s industrial federations and thus most of the CGT’s membership stayed in the CGT, which PCF unionists operated as a classic Leninist ‘transmission belt’ until the later 1950s. But a minority of members, plus a few federations (mainly in the public service area of the public sector) split to form the Social Democratic CGT-Force Ouvrière, while the very large teachers’ Federation (FEN) became autonomous.

The Postwar Settlement

The consolidation of postwar change and the turn towards postwar economic expansion in France coincided with a dramatic downturn in the fortunes of French trade unionism. Despite the split of 1948, the CGT remained the most powerful segment of the French labor movement, but its strength and mobilizing power declined significantly. The split ushered in a new era of trade union organizational pluralism in France and created a situation in which agreements for unified action between different union organizations became essential for any trade union success. Despite this, the CGT proved generally unwilling to take the steps necessary on its part to generate unity in action with its counterpart and rival organizations, Force Ouvrière and the CFTC. Force Ouvrière, although much weaker than the CGT, categorically refused even to contemplate unified action with the CGT. The CFTC hid its own refusal ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Original Page
• Copyright Original Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 The Perils of Politics: French Unions and the Crisis of the 1970s
• 2 Strategy under Stress: The Italian Union Movement and the Italian Crisis in Developmental Perspective
• 3 Conclusions: French and Italian Union Development in Comparative Perspective
• Index