Dn his inauguration speech, the re-elected president said on May 7 that he wanted to share “the objectives, the ambitions, the responsibilities at the national level, by making the government, the administration, the Parliament, the social partners work together”. The question of real consultation between the public authorities and the social partners on the reforms that the former would like to undertake in the social field, such as that of pensions, does indeed arise.
However, social dialogue has undergone profound changes over the past two decades. At the interprofessional level first. The Larcher law of January 31, 2007 stipulates that any reform affecting labor relations, employment or professional training must be the subject of consultation with the social partners with a view to national interprofessional negotiation. This development has transformed the social partners into pre-legislators, via national interprofessional agreements (ANI). Ambitious ANI have thus been concluded, then transposed into positive law, such as that of January 11, 2008 creating the conventional break or that of January 11, 2013 creating the personal training account. But the ambition and normative force of the ANIs then diminished, due to the difficulties in bringing together a sufficient number of signatories among the trade unions, as evidenced by the failure of the negotiations on social dialogue in January 2015. The CGT is also illustrated by its frequent absence of a signature. The ANI on teleworking of November 26, 2020 or on occupational health of December 10, 2020 follow this logic and appear above all as a statement of principles.
New decision-making spaces
At branch and company level, the place left to the social partners to decide on standards in many areas has been extended by successive reforms. The last of importance was operated by the work orders of September 2017 and the Pénicaud law of March 2018, establishing a double suppletiveness, in other words a reversal of the hierarchy of standards. Supplementality of the rules enshrined in the labor code in relation to those resulting from collective bargaining, within the limits of fundamental rights and supranational law. And suppletiveness of the standards resulting from branch agreements vis-à-vis those resulting from company agreements, within the limits of “professional public order” defined by the former. These developments have been made possible by the transformations of the criteria for the representativeness of unions, initiated by the common position signed on April 9, 2008 by the CFDT and CGT alone, on the side of the employee unions, which replaces representativeness by law with representativeness based on the professional election results.
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