The trade unions facing up to
Mitterrand's austerity policies authorised the management to proceed with 1,905 redundancies of the 3,000 originally requested. (2)
In the name of a chauvinist campaign (save the French trademark Talbot) and the so-called defence of general interests (accept 1,905 redundancies to save the remaining 15,000 jobs), the CGT turned
Since the installation of the government headed by Socialist president Mitterrand and prime minister Mauroy in May 1981 new contradictions have affected the French workers confederations. of their direct confrontation with the major social problems engendered by the government's austerity policy and the employers' offensive. sive redundancies in shipbuilding, steel, cars and coal mines - that is, the traditional bastions of the French working class - have forced the union movement to come up with a clear response to this policy of cutting jobs. The concurrent attacks by the government and employers on the mechanisms for price indexation of wages also call for a clear response by the trade unions to defend workers' buying power.
Defending wages and jobs is surely the primary vocation of trade
But the three major union confederations in France do not even fulfil this function - neither the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) of Henri Krasucki, led by the French Communist Party, nor the Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail, formed in 1964 from a process of secularisation of the Confederation Francaise des Travailleurs Chretiens (CFTC), nor Force Ouvriere (FO), which originated in a rightwing split from the CGT in 1947.
This becomes more and more obvious as the economic crisis deepens. The battle to defend wages and jobs would entail opposition to austerity policies of the Socialist Party/Communist Party government. None of these union federations, the CGT, CFDT or FO, want to oppose this government head on. This attitude has led to a loss of credibility for trade unionism in general. It could hardly be otherwise, inasmuch as the unions are giving up the defence of the workers' immediate demands and coming to be seen by the masses as linked to the government and dependent on its policies, or ready to line up behind it to the detriment of their own traditional programme of demands.
The division between the CT and the CFDT since 1977 - the year of the rupture in the Union of the Left based on the Common Programme of the Left, between the SP and CP and also including the small bourgeois group the Left Radical Movement (MRG) - has continued, grown and hardened in the workplaces. This trade union division does not reflect any difference in debate or practice between a reformist orientation and an anticapitalist one. The CGT, CFDT and FO vie only to get into a better position to avoid defending the workers' interests and breaking with capitalism. Jean LANTIER
A growing number of workers began to get a more or less clear idea of the various factors in the crisis in the trade union movement at the point where the situation underwent a basic change. For the first time since the war, in 1983 the overall buying power of wage earners began to drop. This was the year when the government made harsh choices on the questions of closures, which were firmly applied in the following year. However, the workers' unions were not there, ready to answer these anti-worker policies.
Since that point, the opposition currents that had developed within the workers federations have found themselves confronted with some decisive events. huge responsibility now rests on their frail shoulders. These oppositions have to be able to stimulate a fighting mass trade20
These are the product unionism among the rank and file in intransigent defence of the workers demands, act as an alternative leadership in struggles, oppose the bureaucratic practice of theounion apparatuses and provide anti-capitalist breaking with reformist politics.
In December 1983 and January 1984 workers at the Talbot-Poissy car factory, belonging to the Peugeot response to the management's demand for 3,000 redundancies. nificant dispute. It was the first strike of national importance against the plans for restructuring industry and the elimination of jobs they involved. Support for this struggle determined the line of divide in the unions around the simple question that it posed: threatened redundancies be fought?
The CGT, which had recently become against the strike movement. The union chiefs thought that it would be possible to get the workers to return to work on the basis of this agreement. However, at this point the movement got out of their control, thanks to the combativity of several hundred of the immigrant workers on strike, whom the CGT leadership could not bring to heel.
For the first time, a feeling began to take form throughout the CGT that the confederation was not supporting striking workers because of its commitment to support the government's policy. Rank and file members and even local representatives and organisers, particularly members of the CP, began to get worked up. Every evening for a week the television showed CT leaders being shouted down in the mass meetings of Talbot workers that rejected the proposal to return to work. Workers struggles and divisions in the trade unions
The CGT national leadership had no hesitation in adding its voice to those of members of the government in denouncing the strike movement as irresponsible and extremist. While the CGT leadership protested half-heartedly against police action against strikers on New Year's Eve, it took a course designed to assure that the dispute would remain isolated. Not a single solidarity leaflet was distributed, nor was there a single collection for the strikers support fund.
The CGT's public desertion of the strikers, in front of millions of television viewers, gave the bosses union, the so-called Confederation of Free Trade Unions (Confederation des Syndicats Libres, CSL), the opportunity to organise an attack on the strike. This union had had overwhelming support in the factory until 1982. On January 3, 1,500 men equipped with meat hooks, slingshots and ball bearings, as well as fire arms, attacked the B3 building in the factory, the bastion of the strike. 1. In 1982 there wasa wave of activity among carworkers, particularly immigrants, against the bosses' unions and for their dignity as workers. The CGT won support in Talbot Poissy because of its role in this strike. For the Talbot strike of December/January 1983/84 see International Viewpoint, No 45, January 30, 1984. 2. Under French labour law collective re dundancies, or the sackings of elected workers representatives, have to be approved by the minister of labour for the government, whether in public or private enterprises.
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FRANCE.
Several strikers were wounded and one striker's eye was damaged. Although the that day managed to repel the fascists in the factory who attacked them, along with some elements from the New Force Party (Parti des Forces Nouvelles, PFN), this was no thanks to the CGT.
Some of the Paris CGT leaders were in the factory at that time, but they did not take charge of organising either for the physical response to the attackers or for getting effective solidarity from other
In the days that followed the CGT nationally tried to distribute to its members 7 million copies of a leaflet putting the responsibility for the confrontations at Talbot on left infiltrators' from the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR, Revolutionary Communist League), French section of the Fourth International, the CFDT and the CSL.
However, most of these leaflets stayed piled up in local union headquarters, the members not feeling very inclined
In the face of this attitude on the part of the CGT leadership in the Talbot strike, members of the union drew up an appeal, launched publicly initiative of the CGT section in RenaultSandouville, near the Channel port of Le Havre. It called for solidarity with the
C.G.T.
RENAULT
BILLANCOURT not yet ready for a public or spectacular opposition to the orientation of their national leadership.
It was quite simply a rapid shift by the CGT leadership that headed off the of this embryonic opposition The confederation leadership saw in the Talbot struggle an indication that there was a possibility that it could fail to hold workers behind its directives at the national level as well. In fact, the mobilisation that had got out of its control in this particular workplace had to an extent crystallised all the vital forces at work in the union movement, including the young immigrants of France of immigrant parents.
Once the strike mobilization in Talbot was broken, the CGT changed its tune. It began to criticise the government, and put forward a calendar of trade-union days of action, so as to avoid any risk of finding itself outflanked by sectoral strike movements that it could not control.
In other words, the CT's aim was to make sure that it would not again find itself outdistanced by a militant rank and file, as it had been at Talbot, and to carefully siphon off the workers' real discontent with the government's austerity policies through symbolic protest actions.
near Toulon on the Mediterranean coast, at Pechiney-Gardannes, at Ugine Aciers, and in the steel industry of Lorraine in north east France.
An oppositional current appeared in the CGT several years ago in the form of an upsurge of feeling against division between the CP and SP and for kicking out the right-wing president Giscard d'Estaing in the 1981 presidential elections. current had a moment of glory in the broad solidarity actions it organised for Solidarnose and the Polish workers, particularly at the time of the December 13, 1981 military crackdown.
However, today's opposition currents are different. This time they have arisen out of the workers struggles themselves, and are concentrated on the fundamental tasks of class struggle trade unionism. These militants who want a fighting union do not yet have a national structure but, from the Mediterranean to Lorraine, they know each other. In the central struggles to come they will, inevitably, grow.
The Talbot strike also had important effects within the CFDT. In fact, it was the small CFDT section in Talbot - with dedicated militants but very limited rank and file support - that issued the challenge in the struggle. When, on December 17, 1983, the CGT rallied to the side of the government and accepted the government's proposals on redundancies, the CFDT section in the factory took the leadership of the strike movement.
The national CFDT leadership approved the activity of its section, without actually supporting it, in order to make tactical gains at the expense of the CGT. It did not organise solidarity with the
The CFDT section at Talbot organised the occupation of the factory and the response to the action of the CSL thugs. It strained every nerve to keep the strike going, under the slogan of 'zero redundancies. The CFDT opposition the CFDT now for several years. It has been seen particularly in battles over policy during national congresses. It now organises some 200 union structures at
CGT support for Talbot strike before agreement with government (DR) Talbot strikers, support for their demand for 'zero redundancies' at Talbot, and for the national CGT leadership to organise a nationwide response adequate to meet the bosses attacks on jobs. The appeal also specified that this should be done in such a way as to unite the workers and various trade unions.
Support for the appeal spread rapidly in car and metalworking plants (Chausson, Gennevilliers, Renault-Cleon) and in the CGT in general. On the basis of support for the slogan 'zero redundancies' a new union opposition appeared within the CGT. This opposition had an impact on various layers, CP activists in the workplaces, as well as combative CGT militants, even though most of these were International Viewpoint 18 June 1984
Drawing the lessons of the Talbot dissuccessive demonstrations in Paris for workers on strike against redundancies in shipbuildthe coal mines and the Lorraine steel industry. These protest actions provided an outlet for the workers' fighting spirit being given a militant facade by speeches containing sharp criticisms of the austerity policy.
But as the conflicts in question have become hardened and sharper, local CGT leaderships have emerged that want to continue the struggle against redundancies to the bitter end, conscious that they have their back to the wall facing the government's and employers' offensive. This has been the case in the Seyne shipyards local, regional or sectoral level. This national grouping sells 3,000 copies of its monthly journal Alternative Syndicale (Union Alternative). The CFDT opposition played a decisive role in the organisation of active solidarity with the Talbot strike. It succeeded in organising several solidarity demonstrations at the high points of the dispute.
Despite its numerical weakness and its youth, the CFDT section in Talbot-Poissy was thrust onto the national scene by the activity of its militants, who became the leaders of the dispute. They, with the agreement of the rank and file representatives of the CGT who had broken with the line of their leadership, promoted the formation of a short-lived strike commit-s tee.
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The creation of this strike committee at least had the benefit of marking the passage of the rank and file representatives of the CGT into the camp of the workers threatened with redundancy, who constituted the nucleus of the
The activity of the CFDT section, the intransigent position that it adopted, posed for the whole confederation the central question of what attitude to adopt towards the redundancies accepted by the government. pute ended in a defeat, the CFDT national leadership turned against the demand 'No redundancies'.
Even within the CFDT opposition the debate on this question is still not closed. It is even an open question among those who were involved in the Talbot dispute. In this sort of strike should the slogan of "zero redundancies' be held to right to the end? Or should one rather put forward a perspective of the 35-hour working week, arguing that this would mean no redundancies?
Behind this debate is a different appreciation of the evolution of the masses level of consciousness. Some think that The CFDT continued to fight alongside the immigrant workers (DR) a level of awareness expressed in anticapitalist demands has to be a precondito action against redundancies. Others, like the members of the LCR, think that such anticapitalist consciousstruggles for immediate objectives.
While there is a democratic discussion in the union opposition, a paralysis is taking hold in the structures led by the union majority.
Contradictory union leaflets and tactical subtleties by the general secretary Edmond Maire, who supported the Talbot strike in contradiction to his own general orientation of getting the union to adjust to the sacrifices demanded by the austerity policies, created confusion in the minds of many activists, and this is still far from cleared up.
In the present situation then, it has to be kept in mind that the development of the elements of a class-struggle tendency in the two major workers confederations is linked to the evolution of the class struggle, and to the capacity of union opposition groupings that have taken form over the past few years to act as an
The advent of the Mitterrand government was a political event that created new contradictions in each of the workers confederations, and stimulated the activity of the opposition currents.
The ambition of the CFDT national leadership was to reproduce within the union movement what the SP had achieved on May 10, 1981. That is, it wanted to put the CGT in a minority as the CP had been. The project of the CFDT leaders was thus to make their confederation the centre of a broad recomposition of the union movement. They saw this as place around the political axis of adapting the orientation, practice and even the structure of the trade unions to the present situation marked by economic crisis and the technological changes introduced by the employers and the government to rationalise the productive plant.
The declared objective thus was to put the CGT, led by the CP, into a minority vis-a-vis a reformist trade union movement that would also intervene directly in the political arena. But for the Maire leadership this also implied that the CFDT would become a modern, dynamic confederation, supporting a new class collaborationism embroidered by talk about the necessity to change the work processes. The CFDT leader also hoped to see his confederation become a favoured adviser to the new political regime. The CFDT and the Mitterrand government
Since 1968 the CFDT had benefitted from a rise in the antibureaucratic and fighting spirit among broad sections of young workers and in the white-collar sector. This time around, the CFDT was hoping to profit not from the mobilisation of workers but from the crisis of the
The general logic of its orientation meant that the CFDT would have to make major gains in increasing its support in the working class and at the same time seize the position of recognised trade-union adviser to the government. However, the CFDT was to lose its credibility during the union elections, even dropping
FO during national social security elections in Oc-
In these elections 28 million French workers, unemployed and all those who contribute to the social representation in the local councils that administer these funds.
During 1983 the CFDT lost 10 to 20 per cent of its members, a drain that indicated the same phenomenon of discontent as could be noted in the CGT. Furthermore the national leadership of the CFDT was never really able to convince a network of union activists and local leaders of its project.
The right wing in the CFDT then emphasised a little more its class-collaborationist policy, trying to push for a process that it could not carry through. A number of union bodies confronted the leadership centrally on the question of democracy, while they were unable to oppose it politically. Local union structures, such as the Paris regional organisation, have suffered complete demobilisation, because of the inertia of their leaderships.
For the first time in the CFDT the crisis has engendered a partial demoralisation. For the national union opposition, this situation offers an opportunity for growth on the basis of campaigns around specific aspects of the central questions. The activity of the opposition has helped to slow down the drain of members out of the confederation by offering an alternative perspective.
The best example of the process of divisions going on within the CFDT is 3. The rate of unionisation in - France is around 25 per cent. However, in elections for staff representatives (delegues de personnel) and the enterprise committees (comites d'entreprise) candidates are presented on the lists of trade unions recognised as 'representative'. This includes the CGT, CFDT and FO. Everybody votes in these elections, union member or not, and thus the support for a particular union in a baruewar workplace can be measured. Those who are union members usually COLL prise the core of union activists. Union representatives on the enterprise committee and for negotiations with management are chosen by the union members only, this is sometimes in a vote of union members but often is simply a nomination of the union committee.
International Viewpoint 18 June 1984
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BIT LIP ON dict NON oux licenciemont CONTINUL •(GT CEDT.G
the wage question for government employees and workers in the public sector (transport, electricity and gas, post and telecommunications). For 1984, the government forced a wage cut on its 2.5 million employees. This served as precedent for the employers, who rushed in after the government and imposed similar cuts on private sector employees.
Despite the discontent among the government employees the CFDT agreed to capitulate. It knows that this will cost dearly in terms of membership, in- of the fluence in union elections and capacity to lead struggles. But the CFDT leadership is sticking to its stance, and thus promoting a division with the CGT and FO, which are tactically taking their distance from this aspect of the govern- unions. ment's wages policy.
The CFDT's originality in this situation is to sacrifice the defence of wages to the 'defence of jobs'. It systematically refused to associate with the days of action organised by the CGT or FO. In February and March 1984 the confed- rally them eral leadership issued threats against local CFDT sections that took a position in defence of wages and supported the action initiatives of the CGT or FO.
The systematic search for a compromise has led the CFDT leadership to sign a series of wage agreements that the workers have rejected, and it has come to be seen as a pro-government union, as much as, if not more than, the CGT. The CGT before and after Talbot its course. (4) struggles government. SP members within the CGT, the CGT leadership agreed to accept the role of keeper of the social peace. The other elements of the union opposition divided between two positions. The majority one International Viewpoint 18 June 1984
The minority whole-
For ex-
The
The price paid and
But the con-
The have ceilings imposed. ers yield on the tough talk For exwent no further. The CGT organised any follow up. (5)
This national, unified and cross-sectoral movement.
CGT leadership 4. uary 1984, the CGT then betrayed the steelworkers march in Paris on April 13, 1984, by organising different contingents for the different unions, carefully avoiding the possibility of workers from the Paris region joining the march, and planning a route 12 kilometres long to prevent the steelworkers going to demand a direct answer from the government at either the presidential palace or at the National Assembly. 5. Faced with the new threats of redundancies at Citroen, the CGT, whose militant base among carworkers is mainly immigrant, launched a strike and occupation at the Aulnaysous-Bois tactory near Paris, which spread to the Levallois and Nanterre plants in the same region. The CT leadership's objective was to avoid a new "Talbot effect' by controlling the workers reactions to redundancy threats. At the same time Krasucki's team intends to use this struggle to ensure that the CGT will be taken into account by the employers and the government during negotiations on industrial restructuring.
23
In the social security administration is a more recent creation.
committees, FO has always followed a practice of collaborating directly and openly with the employers representatives against the trade unions. The FO score (three points behind the CGT) is all the more remarkable as this confederation was opposed to universal suffrage in these elections for the social security administrators. Little change in FO
What explains such electoral gains for a union confederation where Gaullists of the Rally for the Republic (RPR) led by Jacques Chirac and activists of the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) of Pierre Lambert coexist more or less harmoniously under the leadership of SP members? The main reason is precisely that today FO presents itself as independent of the Mitterrand government, and appears in fact to be so in the eyes of a section of the workers. And, although it has never organised any significant actions, it has promoted its trademark of independence, which looks positive compared to the CGT and CFDT.
There is no union opposition as such in FO, the PCI having dissolved its revolutionary tendency' long ago. On the contrary, while FO pulls the wool over the workers eyes, the PCI is involved up to its the central apparatus, giving wholehearted political support against the CGT, and the CFDT which it denies is a workers organisation. (6)
The division between the CFDT and CGT has become well established since 1977. The 1974 agreement between the confederation leaderships in which they united to denounce the strike committees that had appeared in struggles such as the one at Lip (7), and which was also based on the project of the Common Programme of the Left, survived for a while after the break between the SP and CP. The division in the union movement, disliked by the mass of workers, did not stop with the installation of the Mitterand government. In fact, it grew in the of inter-union competition, in which the aim was to change the relationship of forces between the unions as it had been between the SP and CP.
However, this division is not inevitable. A rise in workers struggles would probforce the trade-union apparatuses once again to make a deal at the top for co-operating against the mass movement so as to be able to better channel it and then bring it under control. already happened locally, in the coal
However, the division into four main CFDT, FO and FEN - Federation de l'Education Nationale, unitary idea of a real fusion in the short term unrealistic. The division between the CGT and FO goes back to 1947. The FEN has existed since 1948 as a unitary federation independent of the CGT, it recognises the right of tendencies. The CFDT
A spirit of narrow loyalty to the individual unions is carefully nurtured. The general secretary of FO has upheld the trade union division by refusing to join in demonstrations with confederations not in agreement with his own. has a similar spirit, and the CGT applies it
There is also a movement towards bureaucratic centralisation withfinancial or union questions is left to the rank and file bodies based on a workplace or locality. (8)
This division remains one of the best methods for the union bureaucracies to control workers struggles and mobilisations. Proposing unity in action on the basis of demands put forward by the workers immediately brings you into conflict with the bureaucracies in all of the confederation.
The present union oppositions have made the least progress on the field of united trade-union action in struggles, and trade-union unity based on workers democracy. They are still fundamentally the result of the internal contradictions within each confederation, rather than the product of a social movement that would impel them inexorably towards
Certainly, the fact that the CFDT opposition demonstrated on the national day of action for government employees on March 8, called by the CGT and the FEN, was a step forward towards united action. But the small number of unitary recent workers demonstrations indicates how long a way the union opposition currents still have to go before they can become a real opposition force on the level of the trade-union movement as a whole that could stimulate a dynamic toward trade-union unity. a broad opposition with a journal, and the experience of battles over policy and direction at the last two confederation congresses, which is preparing actively for the next congress in 1985.
There is not at the moment a national centralised opposition within the CGT. Because of the bureaucratic control exercised by the CP over the CGT, the opposition can hardly take the same public and legal forms as that in the CFDT.
It would be difficult to build a left opposition within the FO in the short term. And in the FEN, the Ecole Emancipee (Free School) tendency which has a
The PCI members who were active in the FEN have recently left to join FO and build a teachers federation within it.
The Lip strike broke out in a watch factory threatened with closure in • early 1973. The workers occupied the factory and conducted an active and democratic struggle. There was a unitary, democratically elected action committee and important involvement of the women workers. The striking workers first took the stock of the factory to sell to pay themselves, and then decided to produce to sell to raise money to pay themselves. Having first kept to the traditional wage differentials they then decided to pay a flat wage. They were evicted from the factory and abandoned by the union leaderships although the struggle status is now running up against some barriers to the extension of
Above and beyond the specific characteristics of the opposition groupings in each confederation, there are two factors operating that tend to make the union oppositions turn around the same major
The first is the evolution of the government's austerity policies. forces hundreds of workplace unions to fight together with the workers to defend jobs, or to disappear with the closure of
The increase in central attacks on jobs is forcing the trade unions into a defensive position.
The second factor is the politicisation of debates in the trade unions. the result of having a government that was brought into office by an upsurge of workers' determination to put an end to the crisis, unemployment and inflation. When this government, following Mitterrand's orders, makes 20,000 steelworkers redundant and when the SP and CP representatives in parliament ratify such austerity measures. The problem of a central political focus for struggles and mobilizations remains constantly on the
In the same way, anti-capitalist answers are needed in every confederation to respond to the way union bureaucracies are directing workers towards making sacrifices, regardless of how the various bureaucracies express their particular conceptions of class collaboration
Two thirds of the members of the LCR are active in the CGT or CFDT. Thus trade-union activity is a decisive question for the French section of the Fourth International. Despite this, and even though the trade union is the only permanent form of workers organisation workplace, the members of the LCR also fight consistently for the unions responsibility for organising unitary, democratic and sovereign mass meetings during struggles and strikes.
The LCR activists also argue that the unions should actively work to bring todemocratically elected strike committees. Moreover, building a class struggle tendency in each confederation is closely linked to the LCR's ability to get its members to become worker militants in sectors of production so that their trade-union and political activity will be anchored in the key sectors of the working class. continued at a lower level until 1977. 8. The French trade union movement is based on the trade union (syndicat) composed of several workplace based union sections (section syndicale) in the same industry in one city or locality. All the unions of the same industry are in the industrial federation eg Metalworkers, Print, Dockers, or Bank workers etc. The federations affiliate to one central national confederation, the CGT, CFDT or FO. The decision as to which federation the workplace union will belong to is based on the main line of business of the workplace as a whole. Office workers are in the same union. Technicians, supervisors and management staff may be the same union. Structures based on where members live exist but have little weight.
International Viewpoint 18 June 1984