ATfter unemployment insurance, pensions: social protection reforms are now being carried out without, and even against, the unions, which were nevertheless the main managers for decades. And even the architects: the general system of Social Security was brought to the baptismal font in 1945 by Ambroise Croizat, secretary general of the CGT federation of metallurgy who became a communist minister; unemployment insurance was born in 1958 from joint negotiations between employers and the “free” unions, FO and CFTC. Despite various and often opposing union positions on the subject of these institutions, Emmanuel Macron will have accomplished this feat of reunifying the union camp in the refusal of his reforms: union unanimity against the reduction of unemployment benefits at the end of 2022 continued in an equally clear rejection of raising the retirement age.
Committed to a forced march by the government, these reforms do not only degrade the rights of employees and the unemployed. They attack the very legitimacy of trade union organizations to participate in the management of social protection. They have gone hand in hand, for about twenty years, with transformations of labor law which began by fragmenting collective bargaining before openly reducing the means of action of the unions, sometimes even creating the conditions for their circumvention, the all in the name of “social dialogue”. There too, unanimous observation: far fewer elected officials, overloaded and inevitably more distant from employees, a considerable weakening of the bodies responsible for working conditions… Even the unions which had not spoken out against the 2017 ordinances are now denouncing their catastrophic effects for the collective defense of employees.
In Macron’s “revolution” project, unions are only tolerated if they agree to support employers’ competitiveness policies through “social dialogue”. They are not intended to exist beyond companies and even less to carry counter-proposals of general interest. Their refusal of the pension reform is welcomed as a respectable but unfounded protest by the government, which is betting on resignation. He plays the carrot and the stick, congratulating the unions here for their dignity in the demonstrations, threatening there to frame a little more the right to strike, while asserting that there is no alternative.
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