Lhe remarks of the President of the Republic, on October 26 on France 2, on the need to better share value, relaunch the debate – more than 50 years old – on the “labour dividends”. Since then, the government has strongly indicated its intention to move forward quickly on strengthening the mechanisms concerned. These positions represent a major step towards the realization of a structural reform of the labor dividend.
To clarify the debate, it is first necessary to recall the distinction between profit-sharing and participation, the bringing together of which in the speeches sometimes adds to incomprehension.
– Profit-sharing is a salary, regardless of its mode of evaluation and distribution, possibly deferred over time. It is directly deductible from the company’s income and contributes to the determination of its gross profit.
– The financial participation, it is based on the net profit, which, in itself, makes it a “dividend”, even if its calculation formula differentiates it from the payments linked to capital dividends.
A confusion between profit-sharing and participation
More fundamentally, and beyond the legal formulas which position the debate on a technical aspect, it is indeed the Gaullist idea of association labor capital which encourages to qualify the financial participation as “dividends of work”. General de Gaulle saw in it the means of reducing the negative effects of pure and hard capitalism on the rights and statutes of the workers, and undoubtedly above all an obstacle to the expansion of communism.
Most of the caciques of the Gaullist party were however hostile to it, on the more or less avowed ground that it affected the sovereign character of the executive power. We remember the sentence of Georges Pompidou, then Prime Minister, responding, at the exit of the Elysée on the day of the adoption of the 1967 ordinance [créant la participation financière]to the question of a journalist “What does the General think? » : “You know, the General has never set foot on a board of directors! ».
From then on, the debate never ceased to maintain confusion between profit-sharing and participation, in order to avoid taking the step towards “the company-institution” dear to law professor Paul Durand (1908-1960), one of the founding fathers of the societal approach to business, in which employees are not third parties. Jacques Chaban-Delmas was one of the rare Gaullists to defend the “outright participation” in the name of economic and social progress through consideration of the working community.
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