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

Abstract

Despite continued social protest, something quite fundamental has changed in the regulation of class relations in France. This article explores two paradoxes of this transformation. First, a dense network of institutions of social dialogue and worker representation has become implanted in French firms at the same time as trade union strength has declined. Second, the transformation has involved a relaxation of centralized labor market regulation on the part of the state, yet the French state remains a central actor in the reconstruction of the industrial relations system. Institutional reform of industrial relations could not take place without the active intervention of the state because employers and trade unions alone were unable to create durable industrial relations institutions. The collapse of trade unionism meant the need for new actors on the labor side and only the state could both create and confer legitimacy upon those new actors.

Comparative Capitalisms, Ideational Political Economy and French Post-DirigisteResponses to the Global Financial Crisis

“…Although the term has been evoked before (Cole 2008;Levy 1999;Howell 2009;Massoc and Jabko 2010) here its parameters and conditions of possibility receive more detailed elaboration than hitherto. The concept has been developed to analyse France, but it may also have some relevance to other countries with statist traditions of political economy, such as Italy or Japan.…”

“…As freer markets became the norm, and hostile takeovers became a feature of the French capitalist landscape, this thesis argues, France increasingly conformed to Hall and Soskice's liberal market economy (LME) model, or the modalities of the British economy (Hall 2006: 21). The alternative 'post-dirigiste' interpretation advanced here (see also Levy 1999;Howell 2009; Massoc and Jabko forthcoming) recognises substantial liberalisation, but emphasises French capitalism's influential and enduring ideational and institutional legacies. Post-dirigisme registers two important departures from the standard VoC approach.…”

Vive les différences? Voice in French MNCs' overseas workplaces: a comparative study of voice in French, German and US subsidiaries in the UK

“…French subsidiaries are more likely to have bleak houses than are those from the US. Although France has experienced considerable reforms connected to worker rights, the formal institutional system of France still affords labour considerable rights in employment relations (Howell, 2009); actual workplace relations are, however, often adversarial (Allen and Whitley, 2012;Wood and Frynas, 2006), this study highlights the need for further and more fine-grained examinations of the influence of home-country institutional systems. More detailed and nuanced analyses will permit a better understanding of how best to apply VoC and other institutional analytical frameworks to improve our knowledge of home-country influences on voice in subsidiaries.…”

The Consequences of the Global Financial Crisis

“…Union membership has gone from over 25 percent in the postwar period to below 7 percent today. When the Socialist government withdrew from the organization of labor relations, having passed laws establishing direct management-labor dialogue in the early 1980s in the hopes that a CME-style coordination would take its place, radical decentralization of wage-bargaining ensued instead (Howell, 1992). But thanks to the state's continued involvement, despite the resulting lowest union density among advanced industrialized economies, French workers benefit from a dense-almost "micro-corporatist"-network of institutions of social dialogue, bargaining, and worker representation, while almost all are covered by collective bargaining and the great majority has some type of nonunion labor representation inside the firm.…”