Pension campaign renews legend of unions' unassailable power

PARIS LETTER: The French public has reacted to disruption caused by protests not with fury but with clear support, polls suggest

FRENCH TRADE unions must inspire envy in their European counterparts. Twice in the past month, they have managed to bring parts of France’s cities and towns to a standstill with strikes and protests against president Nicolas Sarkozy’s pension reforms. Planes have been grounded, trains have fallen silent, schools have closed and the government has watched anxiously as millions have answered union leaders’ calls and taken to the streets. What’s more, the public has reacted to the disruption neither with fury nor even grudging tolerance, but with clear support, opinion polls suggest. The protests have been studies in attention-grabbing choreography. At each of the Paris marches, the atmosphere has been more akin to a music festival than a dispute over pension contributions. Scores of giant balloons rose from crowds decked out in colourful T-shirts and face-paint as music blared from enormous speakers. Children danced. Parents chanted. Every few metres along the route, a vendor did a brisk trade in food, drink (discounted wine and Pastis were among the best-sellers) and communist texts from the back of his lorry. You knew the procession had begun when the flares went up, the whistles sounded, the placards rose and a new round of raucous chants filled the air.

At home and overseas, the pensions campaign has renewed the legend of French unions’ unassailable power. After all, protests such as these are no mere relic of a lost political culture but a powerful civic force that have twice in recent years caused governments to back down on contentious plans. Little wonder that analysts have predicted all year that Sarkozy’s biggest obstacle to enacting his pension reform would come from the street.

And yet here’s the paradox: for all their political clout, French trade unions have some of the lowest membership rates in the western world. Only eight per cent of French workers were unionised in 2008, compared to 19 per cent in Germany and 27 per cent in Britain, according to the OECD. In the United States, some 12.4 per cent of the country’s supposedly union-shy workers paid their unions dues in 2008.

And while foreigners may joke about how often the French seem to be en grève, the number of strike days here is actually around the European average. "Not only are we not the most grévistecountry, but we're not even near the top of the league," says Guy Groux, an economist at Sciences Po in Paris.

So why does it never seem that way? The simplest explanation is that union members are concentrated in a relatively small number of highly visible sectors, such as transport and education, that provide services to millions of people every day. Last year, the rail operator SNCF accounted for 25 per cent of strike days even though it employs just 1 per cent of the workforce.

But some believe the unions’ increasing activity may be a sign not of strength but of weakness. As Groux points out, there is a growing tendency towards substituting strikes with protests (the latest took place last Saturday), where the stakes are lower and the disruption minimal.

France has only a third of the union members it had in 1975, a drop attributed partly to the decline of industry, while new laws introduced over the past 15 years have brought the big unions into the law-making process while denying recognition to those that represent fewer than 10 per cent of workers in a company. The effect of hugging the bigger, more moderate unions and excluding the smaller, more radical ones has been a “profound transformation” in industrial relations, Groux believes.

Their leaders retort that French trade unionism has never been about mass membership, but rather has always relied on a core of militants who can mobilise others. And that, perhaps, is where lies the most persuasive explanation for the unions enduring power: the legitimacy they claim from their sympathy and support among the population of non-members.

The two dominant ideologies in 20th century France, communism and Gaullism, have bequeathed to France a strong, instinctive belief in the state’s – and through it, the ordinary person’s – right to intervene for the greater, common interest.

On the left, communist thinking not only informed the protesters of May 1968 but has influenced the mainstream left to this day, while centre-right Gaullism espouses a social philosophy in which the state's intervention is entirely legitimate, whether to override the whims of capitalism or the market, to insist on the cherished principle of the intérêt général.

Together with some of the more prosaic facts of French life – concern about the effects of globalisation, an unpopular president and endemic unemployment – what this means is that irrespective of whether French unions are in long-term decline, you certainly wouldn’t know it to listen to the clamour from the street.