It’s a “polymorphic object”. It can take the form of collective negotiations, informal staff consultation practices, etc. Social dialogue has many faces and has undergone many changes in recent decades. It is its rich and turbulent history that the sociologist Guy Groux and the director of the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po, Martial Foucault, tell us.
In their work The state and social dialogue, published by Presses de Sciences Po, their analysis focuses more specifically on the links between social dialogue and politics. What place did the State and the legislator have in its construction? How have their relationships evolved? How, too, did the public authorities apprehend the expectations emanating from both companies and employees? So many angles of approach which highlight the evolution of the relationship between labor law, social dialogue and business, and which underline a French singularity: the power, even the influence, and the capacity for influence of the political world. on social dialogue.
These are first expressed during the second half of the 20the century, by force of law, which will regulate work and business. For a long time, in France, a consensus was essential: “The State guarantees the major economic and social balances. » In the 1960s and 1970s, we read for example, “the State and the legislator intervene to govern employee profit-sharing and participation in company profits, unemployment compensation systems, trade union presence in the private sector, consultation of social partners on the conditions of work “.
According to the authors, “For a long time, the legal rules carried by politics have remained hegemonic within social dialogue. In view of the weakness of the unions, it was a question for the legislator of favoring the defense of the weakest against the rules enacted by the market and passed on in the company by the management..
A thirst for social democracy
By the 1980s, however, “State control over the industrial relations system is the subject of much controversy”. Gradually, the social partners will gain in autonomy, the decentralization of rules and standards is being put in place. This being so, the State does not fade away: it is even the State which is at the heart of this transformation, certain texts of the legislator favoring this movement. The Auroux laws thus created, in 1982, an annual obligation to negotiate in companies. In 2007, the Larcher law – a “deep break”insist the authors – “establishes permanent rules by which the social partners become co-producers of rights”.
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