A Labor of Laws: Courts and the Mobilization of French Workers

Abstract

By most measures, French labor is among the weakest in the industrialized world. Yet it has retained a high level of mobilizing and institutional power. This unusual position is partly due to the historical role of labor courts, one of France’s oldest and most influential labor institutions. Based on a range of historical and contemporary evidence, this article shows that the involvement of the state and labor in these courts over the past two centuries has played a crucial role in the evolution of French industrial relations. This process unfolded along three main dimensions: the early establishment of labor courts strongly and durably influenced the mobilization patterns of the emergent labor movement, France’s labor relations model was largely inspired by the judicialism embedded in labor courts, and a combination of more contingent events led to the emergence of a problematic notion of union“representativeness.” These patterns have contributed to shape French labor into its present condition of both weakness and strength.

The Transformation of French Industrial Relations: Labor Representation and the State in a Post-Dirigiste Era

“…There is an important sense in which the French state invented the social partners at the end of the 1960s, and Couton has argued that the weakness of labor has historically been offset by its high degree of institutionalization in the administrative and political structures of the state. 8 Certainly, it is hard from an anglo-Saxon perspective to understand how organizations that now represent less than 8 percent of the workforce remain the privileged interlocutors of both business organizations and the state.…”