Lhe strikes at the TotalEnergies and Esso-ExxonMobil refineries have brought to light an issue that is little discussed in public debate, but central to the course of the conflict and its difficult resolution.
Many commentators, but also political figures, seemed surprised that a wage dispute could start and continue in a company when an agreement had been signed on this subject by majority unions at group level.
These reactions first reveal a certain ignorance. The existence of a collective agreement does not entail, in French law, any obligation of social peace likely to prevent non-signatory organizations from opposing by a collective movement the measures ratified by the collective agreement. But above all, the configuration of the conflict is partly the result of the multiple reforms of collective bargaining law carried out in recent years.
Since the 1980s, the public authorities have constantly promoted the collective company agreement as a means of regulating the employment relationship. The collective company agreement first and foremost. Before the law, but also before the branch collective agreement. The latter, originally central in the conventional structure, has thus been gradually set aside, thanks to a movement to decentralize collective bargaining, orchestrated under the auspices of the promotion of the “proximity standard” in order to to allow each company to enforce its own social pact.
“The group agreement is now a powerful instrument in the hands of group leaders. This means that the so-called proximity negotiation, so much vaunted in recent years, has lost ground”
This trend took on a new dimension with the so-called “work” law of August 8, 2016, passed under the government of Manuel Valls, and the social movements that accompanied it. At the time, it was above all the suppletiveness of the law in relation to the company collective agreement (the inversion of the “hierarchy of standards”) that the opponents had identified as an issue of conflict.
But the challenge missed another major change: that concerning the collective group agreement. In 2016, this acquired the ability to impose itself in the face of the collective company agreement and to prescribe a standard applicable to all employees of companies in a group.
Such agreements were first applied when the new social and economic committees (CSE) were set up, replacing the works councils (CE). Each group management can therefore, where it finds the union majorities allowing it, conclude an agreement aimed at harmonizing the social statutes of the entire group. The group agreement is now a powerful instrument in the hands of group leaders. This means that the so-called proximity negotiation, so vaunted in recent years, has lost ground.
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