OIt is customary to present tripartite social dialogue as a solution. Nothing seems more efficient, in fact, than to invite employers, trade unionists and representatives of the central administration to a negotiating table, so that they can together invent solutions to socio-productive problems, after a methodical confrontation of arguments, and negotiate reasonable compromises.
But this three-way game is dysfunctional: French social dialogue – both in its design and in its organization – seems to have become the problem itself, for at least three reasons.
First, the confusion between social time and political time. That the temporalities are different between a government executive which no longer has a majority in the National Assembly, but wishes at all costs to appear as a Stakhanovist legislator, and a conglomerate of union and employer forces which must come to an agreement in their own camp before claiming to agree on common themes, this seems obvious. Why, then – and this scenario repeats itself every year – impose draconian deadlines on union and employer negotiators by threatening them to take control, that is to say, to legislate or regulate in their place?
Missed opportunity
The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, declared, at the beginning of November, to renounce imposing on the social partners managing the Agirc-Arrco supplementary pension fund the drain of a part of its surpluses, resulting from rigorous, but united, joint management. However, she took up this old government refrain: telling the social partners to quickly open negotiations to finance the measures announced by the executive in favor of “small pensions”, under penalty of the State itself confiscating these surpluses. The maneuver is clumsy: the autonomy of the social partners is not variable.
Secondly, there is no permanent space for political exchange and consultation between unions, employers and the State where the issues of employment, quality of life at work and social relations would be defined, scenarios discussed, experiments decided. It is not “social conferences”, convened when the government’s agenda allows it, which can take its place. Each organization participates with its list of demands, then waits for announcements from Matignon, then expresses its dissatisfaction.
This social game, ritualized to excess, is unproductive. It does not allow the development of a shared diagnosis, nor the necessary confrontation of points of view, even less the agreement of all around a few combined solutions, included in pragmatic compromises mobilizing techniques of concession, exchange, compensation and innovation.
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