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DOI: 10.1177/1024258918765589
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law in 2016: a reconfiguration
of strategies and alliances

Sophie Béroud
Department of Political Science, University of Lyon 2, Triangle, Lyon, France

Summary
A number of French trade unions played a determining role in the opposition to the El Khomri law
(also called the ‘loi Travail’) in Spring 2016. As well as large demonstrations and sector-level
strikes, the movement also gave rise to the occupation of public spaces, such as the Place de la
République in Paris. This new form of protest acquired the name ‘Nuit Debout’ (‘Up All Night’).
This article examines the convergences, but also the tensions, which characterised the relations
between the trade unions and Nuit Debout. It shows in particular how the Confédération générale
du travail (CGT, General Confederation of Labour), a central actor in the protest, was caught in a
dual and sometimes contradictory rationale. On the one hand, it was confronted with the par-
ticular dynamic of social movements, and with the capacity of trade unionism to mobilise and
politicise the protest being called into question during the Nuit Debout movement. On the other
hand, it faced certain constraints within the field of industrial relations, related to the issues of
trade union competition and representativeness.

Résumé
Une partie des syndicats français ont joué un rôle déterminant dans l’opposition à la loi El Khomri
ou loi “Travail” au printemps 2016. En plus d’importantes manifestations et de grèves sectorielles,
le mouvement a donné lieu à l’occupation de places publiques, comme la place de la République à
Paris. Cette forme de contestation inédite a pris le nom de “Nuit debout”. L’article interroge les
convergences, mais aussi les tensions, qui ont marqué les relations entre les syndicats et Nuit
Debout. Il montre en particulier comme la CGT, actrice centrale de la contestation, a été prise
dans une double logique, parfois contradictoire. La première renvoie à la dynamique propre des
mouvements sociaux et aux interpellations dont le syndicalisme a fait l’objet, au cours de ce
mouvement, en termes de capacité à mobiliser et à politiser la contestation. La deuxième est liée
aux contraintes qui traversent le champ des relations professionnelles, avec les enjeux de con-
currence syndicale et de représentativité.

Corresponding author:
Sophie Béroud, Department of Political Science, University of Lyon 2, Triangle-ENS, 15, Parvis Descartes, 69342 Lyon
Cedex 07, France.
Email: sophie.beroud@univ-lyon2.fr
180 Transfer 24(2)

Zusammenfassung
Eine Reihe von Gewerkschaften hat im Frühjahr 2016 eine wichtige Rolle beim Widerstand gegen
das El Khomri-Gesetz (auch ’’loi travail“ genannt) gespielt. Neben den großen Demonstrationen
und sektorweiten Streiks zeichnete sich die Bewegung auch zum ersten Mal durch die Besetzung
des öffentlichen Raumes aus, in diesem Fall des Place de la République in Paris. Diese neue Form
des Protestes erhielt die Bezeichnung ’’Nuit Debout“ (’’Aufrecht durch die Nacht“). Der vorlie-
gende Artikel untersucht die Konvergenzen, aber auch die Spannungen, die charakteristisch für die
Beziehungen zwischen den Gewerkschaften und Nuit Debout waren. Besonders deutlich wird
hier, wie sich der allgemeine Gewerkschaftsbund Confédération générale du travail (CGT) als
zentraler Akteur dieser Proteste auf einmal im Widerspruch zu bisherigen Gewissheiten befand –
auf der einen Seite war er mit der besonderen Dynamik sozialer Bewegungen konfrontiert und sah
die Kapazität der Gewerkschaftsbewegung zur Mobilisierung und Politisierung des Protests durch
die Nuit Debout-Bewegung in Frage gestellt. Auf der anderen Seite sah die CGT sich im Rahmen
der Arbeitsbeziehungen bestimmten Zwängen im Kontext der Konkurrenz und der Repräsenta-
tivität der Gewerkschaften ausgesetzt.

Keywords
Trade unions, France, Nuit Debout, social movements, CGT, El Khomri law, representativeness

Introduction
French trade unions are often considered an ‘atypical’ case when it comes to international com-
parisons due to their small number of members and their strong dependence on the state (partic-
ularly for their funding), but also, and paradoxically to the first two points, because of their ability
to instigate very strong collective mobilisation. These singular characteristics invite reflection on
both the links between workers and unions and the place that the latter occupy in the public space
(Milner and Mathers, 2013). The movement against the El Khomri law, or the ‘loi Travail’1, which
took place from March to July 2016, gives us further reason to pursue this line of inquiry. It was the
strongest and longest social protest under a left-wing government under the Fifth Republic. The
movement was multi-dimensional, with a predominance of ‘days of action’ and demonstrations
organised across the country, but also featuring strikes that lasted several days in different sectors.
It was above all marked by the emergence of a form of protest not seen before in France, named
‘Nuit Debout’ (‘Up All Night’), which involved the occupation of public spaces in a series of cities,
beginning with the Place de la République in Paris.
Unlike the situation which existed in Spain in 2011 when the ‘Indignados’ contested all existing
forms of representation, including that of the trade unions (Nez, 2012), there was not such a
complete divide in France between the unions – at least those which were involved in leading the
mobilisation – and Nuit Debout. On the contrary, a number of the organisers of Nuit Debout
wanted to create a space where their struggles could converge and to help the unions to strengthen
their position of power in relation to the government. For them, it was less about rejecting trade
unions than about pointing out their weaknesses, in relation to the difficulties they have in reaching

1 A law ‘aiming to establish new liberties and new protections for businesses and employed persons’,
presented to the National Assembly on 24 March 2016.
Béroud 181

a whole section of the workforce, including precarious workers, and offering them an adapted
framework of representation. Their criticism also focused on the forms of action chosen by unions
and whether they were radical enough for opposing neoliberal and security policies.
The trade union organisations at the forefront of the mobilisation against the El Khomri law,
chiefly the CGT and Solidaires2, also found themselves at the centre of multiple tensions. They were
caught between veering closer to a movement that was socio-political in character, embodied by Nuit
Debout, which was completely opposed to the Socialist government but whose contours remained
vague, and the necessity of staying in the strictly defined area of industrial relations in a context of
strong polarisation between the trade unions (the second biggest union confederation, the Conféd-
ération française démocratique du travail (CFDT, French Democratic Confederation of Labour),
being opposed to the movement), and strong electoral competition. These challenges in the industrial
relations domain were actually greater from this point as French unions were very attentive to their
electoral results in different workplace elections, results on which their representativeness depended
(Béroud et al., 2012). By analysing these tensions, this article goes beyond an interpretation that sets
‘new’ social movements (a term sometimes given to the Indignados or Nuit Debout) against the trade
union movement. In fact, in the case of a series of protests such as this, it seems to us more interesting
to try to understand how the behaviour of certain trade unions is governed by different yet co-existing
rationales in relation to their simultaneous presence in two social spaces, which only partly overlap
and which involve different types of alliances and strategies: the space of social movements
(Mathieu, 2012) on the one hand, and that which can be designated as the trade union sphere (Béroud,
2015) on the other. We first look at the conditions around the emergence of the movement against the
El Khomri law, indicating the difficulties for all the trade union organisations of mobilising against a
Socialist government. We next analyse the most significant dimensions of the movement, which
allows us to show its limits and internal contradictions. A third part is dedicated to considering the
way in which Nuit Debout, a rather nebulous movement, challenged the trade unions on their
capacity for action, their form of organisation, and also their presence in company workplaces.
Finally, the last part considers the importance of particular challenges in the industrial relations
domain and the way in which these were taken into account by trade unionists.

Methodological framework
This article is based on a systematic analysis of the national and trade union press, as well as on
internal documents from the main trade unions and union confederations (CGT, CFDT, CFE-CGC,
FO, Solidaires).3 We were able to observe the entirety of the debates at the 51st confederal
congress of the CGT in Marseilles from 18 to 22 April 2016, and we also carried out around 15
semi-structured interviews with trade union activists in companies in the metallurgical (CFDT) and
refinery (FO) industries as well as with national union officials (CGT, Solidaires).

The slow maturation of a movement rooted in the workforce

The mobilisation against the El Khomri law was the most important social conflict to take place
during President Hollande’s five-year term (2012–2017). While during the first years of his

2 The trade union Solidaires unites, among others, the Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques (SUD) trade
unions.
3 Confédération générale du travail, Confédération française démocratique du travail, Confédération
française de l’encadrement - Confédération générale des cadres, Force Ouvrière.
182 Transfer 24(2)

mandate protests came mainly from very socially conservative groups – such as those of the ‘Manif
pour tous’ (‘Demonstration for all’) in 2012–2013 against the right to marry for homosexual
couples – or even groups that are more difficult to classify politically – such as the ‘bonnets
rouges’ (‘red caps’) in 2013, opposed to the ecotax project (Rabier, 2015) – the rejection of the
El Khomri law contributed to the remobilisation of a part of the workforce and above all to putting
trade unions back centre-stage. While in this sense it fits into the tradition of big cross-sectoral
movements which have shown, since the one of autumn 1995, a strong opposition to policies
seeking to reform the social protection system and the labour market – this was the case in 2003, in
2006 and in 2010 (Béroud and Yon, 2012) – the mobilisation against the El Khomri law was also
the first confrontation of such a size that had taken place under a Socialist government. Occurring
at the end of its mandate, this movement had immediate political consequences. We could thus
make the hypothesis that the unpopularity of the El Khomri law in public opinion4 contributed,
along with other factors, to the weakening of François Hollande’s legitimacy, but also that of his
Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. The government’s management of this crisis also accentuated the
ideological divisions at the heart of the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS) (Lefebvre, 2017),
which were clear during the 2017 presidential election campaign. The scale of this political conflict
could give the impression that the French trade unions had real power to influence the public
agenda (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013: 30). In fact, the situation was far more complex.
The eruption of the movement against the El Khomri law actually surprised union activists in the
political context of the rise of the Front National (National Front)5 and the security measures which
had been reinforced following the 2015 terrorist attacks.
The economic and social choices made by the Ayrault and then Valls governments created high
tensions very early on in the presidential term with a number of trade union organisations. The
‘Responsibility Pact’, proposed to businesses in December 2013 with the aim of reducing the ‘cost
of labour’ in exchange for the creation of jobs, was strongly criticised by the CGT, Force Ouvrière
(FO, Workers’ Force) and Solidaires, while the CFDT, the Confédération française des travailleurs
chrétiens (CFTC, French Confederation of Christian workers) and the CFE-CGC accepted the idea
of compensation as part of a national, cross-sectoral6 agreement. In 2015, on the other hand, the
Macron Law, which allowed the generalisation of work on Sundays, significantly changed the
jurisdiction of employees’ claims courts, and redefined the scope for economic redundancies,
provoked criticism even from the more so-called ‘reformist’ tendency within the trade unions,
that is, the CFDT, the CFTC, the CFE-CGC and the Union nationale des syndicats autonomes
(UNSA). At that time, the CGT, FO and Solidaires had attempted, although with little success, to
raise awareness about that law in order to mobilise workers. The El Khomri bill, presented at the
beginning of 2016, was a logical continuation of the options advocated by President Hollande, and
of the idea, unprecedented for a Socialist government, of a labour law adjusted to the economic
objectives of business and no longer protective of workers. Several objectives were at the centre of
these successive reforms: the easing of protections around permanent contracts and dismissal

4 Since the beginning of March 2016, the opinion polls indicated that around 70 per cent of the people
questioned were opposed to the El Khomri law. These positions remained constant over the course of the
movement, with other surveys showing 60 per cent of respondents favourable to the movement at the end
of May 2016.
5 During the second round of regional elections, on 13 December 2015, the Front National received 6.8
million votes, thus beating its own record when Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round of the
2002 presidential election with 6.4 million votes.
6 The French term ‘interprofessional’ has been translated as ‘cross-sectoral’.
Béroud 183

procedures, the role of employee-representation bodies and the place given to company-level
agreements (Laulom et al., 2016).
The factors which contributed to the form that the mobilisation against the El Khomri bill took,
something which the unions had not managed to achieve in the face of the ‘Responsibility Pact’ in
2014 and the Macron and Rebsamen laws in 2015, are multiple. One of them was the end of the
reluctance, internalised by a number of activists, to oppose a Socialist government. It should not be
forgotten that François Hollande’s victory in the 2012 presidential election had been openly wished
for by the leadership of both the CFDT and the CGT, against the background of an overwhelming
rejection of the political direction represented by former president Nicholas Sarkozy and after the
very strong mobilisation against pension reforms in 2010. The networks that Hollande’s close advis-
ers had in the union confederations proved to be limited (Béroud and Taiclet, 2016) and were also
weakened by the decision not to upset French bosses, as had been the case between 1997 and 2002.7
Nevertheless, it was still difficult for trade unionists to convince employees to oppose a government
considered to be close to their interests. It is doubtless here the persistence of a high unemployment
rate, the accumulation of counter-reforms over the whole of the presidential term and the inefficiency
of measures which had been presented by Hollande, when he was a candidate, as key tools in his
employment policy – such as the ‘generation contracts’ approved by all of the trade union organisa-
tions in 2013 – which contributed to creating conditions favourable for a large-scale social movement.

A multi-faceted movement with interweaving timelines

A more immediate, key factor, however, relates to the different types of actors that were involved
in the movement and the different forms of action they carried out. We could even posit that there
were many movements within a broader one, heterogeneous and partly overlapping: a young
people’s movement (high school pupils and university students) which gave us an early glimpse
of a large-scale social protest, but which died out quite quickly (at the beginning of April 2016); a
trade union mobilisation with the call for 12 successive days of cross-sectoral action, between
9 March and 5 July, as well as prolonged sectoral-level strikes; and finally there was the social-
political movement named ‘Nuit Debout’.
The fact that these three movements were not chronologically concurrent explains to a great
degree the duration of the conflict over the El Khomri law, but it also resulted in tensions. Three
phases can be distinguished. The first began in mid-February when a petition entitled ‘Loi travail:
non merci!’ (‘El Khomri law: no thank you!’) was launched by political and trade union activists
and obtained more than a million signatures in two weeks (Binet, 2017). A group of videographers
also posted a series of testimonies on YouTube, titled ‘On vaut mieux que ça!’ (‘We’re worth more
than that!’), on the different types of precarity that workers experience, which was widely broad-
casted with huge success. This intensive information spreading and awareness raising which was
carried out externally to the trade union organisations contributed to the surprisingly large turnout
at the first protest, held on 9 March 2016 (between 250,000 and 500,000 participants across France,
according to the figures provided by the newspaper Le Monde). Above all, the fact that a number of
school youth organisations (FIDL, SGL, Unef and UNIL)8 came out against the bill suggested a

7 In 1997, the government’s announcement of its intention to legislate on the reduction of working time to
35 hours had received a hostile reaction from the Conseil National du Patronat Français (CNPF), pro-
voking its transformation into the Mouvement des Entreprises de France (Medef) (Offerlé, 2013: 27–92).
8 Fédération Indépendante et démocratique lycéenne, Syndicat Général des Lycées, Union Nationale des
Etudiants de France, Union nationale lycéenne.
184 Transfer 24(2)

scenario comparable to what had happened in 2006 when the Villepin government had wanted to
reform the labour market by creating a specific contract for young people: the Contrat Premie`re
Embauche (CPE, First Employment Contract). The determination of youth organisations to fight
the Valls government on this issue is all the more striking considering the fact that a number of
them had developed in orbit around the PS. The major role played by Unef in particular must here
again be understood in relation to the internal divisions of this party.9 However, the mobilisation of
high school and university students was far from having caught on in all the cities: the general
assemblies in the universities were often not very highly attended, and the dynamics remained
limited. This first significant phase of the conflict around the El Khomri law ran out of steam, to a
certain extent, by mid-April, firstly because of the school holidays but secondly due to a series of
measures announced by the government to satisfy the youth organisations and defuse the tensions
in this section of the protest.10
A second phase emerged when protesters, responding to the call from the newspaper Fakir11 but
also from the Housing Rights Association (l’association Droit au logement, DAL), decided to
remain at the Place de la République after the end of a demonstration on 31 March 2016 and to
occupy it (Farbiaz, 2016: 36–37). The originality of this type of action and the success that it very
quickly had, the occupation being repeated every night afterwards, evoked the spirit of the Indig-
nados movement, which unfolded in Spain in 2011, particularly in light of the fact that previous
attempts to create a movement of the same kind had not had much success in France (Chabanet and
Lacheret, 2016). The space opened up by Nuit Debout resulted in a broadening of the movement,
as much in terms of the diversity of the participants as of their demands. From the Place de la
République in Paris, the calls multiplied for the trade union organisations opposed to the El Khomri
law to call a general, indefinite strike. But the dynamics within the labour movement did not follow
the same rhythm as this new movement established by Nuit Debout, which symbolically created a
new calendar for itself. In a cross-union alliance, smaller than that at the demonstration against the
pension reforms in 2010, the CGT played a major role. Yet it was only following the confedera-
tion’s congress, held in Marseilles between 18 and 22 April 2016, that CGT trade unionists, in
different sectors, attempted to organise indefinite strike action: in the refineries, on the roads, at the
SNCF (the French national railway corporation) and even in the cleaning sector of urban
communities.
A third and last phase took shape from the end of April to the end of June. It was characterised
by the multiplying of blockade actions (of the road networks and ports) and sector-wide strikes, but
also the intensification of police repression at the demonstrations. The expectations, including
from Nuit Debout, of the trade union movement were high; at the meetings held at the Place de la
République around 1 May, hopes were expressed of turning the strikes into a general one, and of
making sure that the demonstration organised for 14 June in Paris would be a huge one (more than

9 The student union Unef was considered to be close to the leftist tendencies within the Socialist Party and
to the Movement of Young Socialists (Mouvement des Jeunes Socialistes, MJS). Benoı̂t Hamon, presi-
dential election candidate for the PS following the primary elections, had been president of the MJS before
becoming one of the spokespersons of this leftist current.
10 The measures included: financial help for job searching, the improvement of apprentices’ pay, the
upgrading of scholarships, the creation of extra BTS (French technician certificate) places, and the
taxation of overuse of fixed-term contracts.
11 Fakir was originally a local newspaper, founded in Amiens in 1999, independent and joining the sphere
of the radical left. The notoriety of its editor-in-chief, François Ruffin, author of many works and
associated with the Monde Diplomatique, helped to publicise it at the national level. The newspaper
comes out once every three months.
Béroud 185

a million people), but also of directly confronting the government on the issue of civil liberties.
Indeed, the government decided to ban a demonstration planned for 23 June and wanted to allow
only a static gathering. The trade unions, which appeared once again as central actors in the
conflict as the participation in Nuit Debout was beginning to dwindle in different cities, were thus
confronted with many problems at once. First of all, they did not have the overall control of the
demonstrations, the leading groups in the processions being dominated by ‘autonomous’ activists
and other libertarian groups, but also by protesters (sometimes trade unionists) infuriated by the
repression tactics of the police (Kokoreff, 2016: 168–172). Secondly, they were leading protesters
against a Socialist government in a context of significant weakening and division of the parlia-
mentary left. Finally, the trade union front was far from being united. While, for example, an
organisation of managers and executives such as the CFE-CGC did not participate in the cross-
union alliance which was driving the movement, it did voice strong criticism of the El Khomri law.
This, however, was not the case with the CFDT, the biggest confederation in terms of members but
also electoral results in the private sector, as proved by the measure of union representativeness at
the national and cross-sectoral levels published by the Ministry of Employment in spring 2017 (see
below). After having opposed several articles in the first draft of the bill, the CFDT leadership
actually declared itself in favour of the reform and disapproved of any further mobilisation. This
division between the trade unions made it more difficult to organise strikes in companies and
public administrations, but, on the other hand, it pushed a number of organisations invested in the
struggle (the CGT, Solidaires) to be more attentive to the discourse of other kinds of actors, outside
of the trade union sphere.

Trade unions challenged by Nuit Debout

From the beginning of the occupation of the Place de la République in Paris by Nuit Debout,
journalists provided a particular reading of this movement that set its spontaneity, its ‘citizen’
dimension and its open character, against the more traditional types of mobilisation proposed by
the trade unions, meaning demonstrations, work stoppages and strike days. This was a certain way
of resuscitating the old division between the labour movement and new social movements, long
defended by the school of sociology influenced by Alain Touraine. However, this interpretation did
not prove to be a very relevant one, as the issue of establishing relations between Nuit Debout and
the unions was at the centre of the discussions led within certain committees or assemblies, as
much at the Place de la République as in other places, in many cities where the movement took off.
These discussions were also presented at the CGT’s 51st confederal congress in April 2016. In the
debates on trade union strategies for mobilising against the El Khomri law, a number of delegates
referred to Nuit Debout, calling for closer relations and the organisation of ‘Jours Debout’ in
workplaces. The idea of inviting the editor-in-chief of Fakir and director of the film Merci Patron!,
François Ruffin, to speak before the congress was even put forward by the journalists’ union of the
CGT. The fact that a movement such as Nuit Debout was alluded to in a sympathetic way is no
small thing in a confederation like the CGT where the relationship with activist groups or associa-
tions, foreign to the trade union sphere, often gives rise to fears, or even hostility. This desire to
develop closer relations resulted in two public appeals, drawn up following a debate organised,
along with others, by the newspaper Fakir, at the Bourse du Travail (labour exchange) in Paris on
20 April 2016. One of them was approved by Nuit Debout’s general assembly and signed, notably,
by its ‘Action’ committee and by the ‘Convergence of Struggles’ committee (Farbiaz, 2016:
47–48). The other was launched by a group of trade unionists, members of the CGT, Fédération
Syndicale Unitaire (FSU, Unitary Trade Union Federation) and Solidaires. The two appeals
186 Transfer 24(2)

demonstrated that there was a concern with not getting caught in false oppositions. However, the
fact that it was not possible to draw up one single text also showed the difficulty in achieving a
consensus on the choice of terms and on how to describe the issues and consider the central focuses
of each of both Nuit Debout and the labour struggles, without undermining the specific nature
of either.
This desire for closer relations also resulted in the presence of prominent trade union officials at
the Place de la République in Paris. Some of them were involved in the launch of Nuit Debout, one
example being a national leader of the SUD-PTT (SUD-Postes, Télégraphes et Télécommunica-
tions). The trade union Solidaires provided the movement with logistical support from the start,
helping in particular to notify the authorities of the occupation. On 9 April one of the two national
spokespersons of Solidaires, Eric Beynel, spoke at Nuit Debout’s general assembly in order to
dismantle the ‘trade union bureaucrat’ image, calling for a huge turnout at the demonstrations but
also at the occupations of public spaces. Almost a month after the first Nuit Debout, on 28 April
2016 the presence and the speech of Philippe Martinez, General Secretary of the CGT, at this same
general assembly were widely broadcast in the media. He asserted the determination of his
organisation to lead the strongest possible fight against the bill, while repeating that he was not
in a position to call for a general strike. Although he spoke in the name of the most important trade
union organisation leading the struggle against the El Khomri law, his speaking time was limited to
several minutes, just like the other speakers. The fact that he obeyed the collective rules of the
debates as they were decided on within Nuit Debout, in itself had symbolic significance. Finally,
on 1 May, a debate on work was organised as part of Nuit Debout’s activities, with the participa-
tion, notably, of Catherine Perret, confederal board member of the CGT. Other initiatives, which
received far less media attention, also existed at the local level or in trade union federations.
This concern that a number of trade union organisations involved in the conflict had with
proving their links to Nuit Debout – the confederation Force Ouvrière remaining on the other
hand very distant from what was happening in the public spaces – can be understood more clearly
by looking at both the trajectory of some of the initiators of Nuit Debout and the different ideas that
already existed within the movement. The original group behind the initiative brought together
activists involved in political protest groups such as ‘Jeudi Noir’ (‘Black Thursday’) or anti-
globalisation groups such as Attac, activists in the struggle of intermittent workers in the arts
sector and in political theatre (the Jolie Môme company), and journalists from Fakir, as well as
some trade unionists present in an individual capacity. These activists had rubbed shoulders during
other political disputes; they did not harbour any resentment against trade union organisations. In
launching Nuit Debout, the idea was to create a space where the different ongoing sector-specific
struggles could come together to intensify the conflict. However, the success encountered by Nuit
Debout contributed to the development of other ideas about the purpose of this movement, in
particular the idea of establishing an autonomous space for discussion, politicisation, learning and
other social practices. This tension between autonomy and organisation was therefore very present
within Nuit Debout (Cukier and Gallo Lassere, 2016): the first dimension was closely associated
with the experiences of zones autonomes à de´fendre (ZAD, ‘autonomous zones to defend’), like at
the site of a proposed new airport at Notre Dame des Landes, and very distant from organisations
such as political parties or trade unions; the second dimension (linked most notably to Fakir), on
the other hand, adhered to the concept of class warfare, something which in the eyes of these
activists had to be reinforced and broadened.
Therefore, far from representing a break with the trade unions, the existence of Nuit Debout
rather served to question their limits and weaknesses. Challenges were posed in many different
areas. The first source of tension concerned the temporality of the movement. For example, while
Béroud 187

Nuit Debout experienced a high degree of success in digital participation over the month of April,
the actual mobilisation against the El Khomri law slowed down somewhat due to the school
holidays (and the weakening of the high school and university student movement which had partly
contributed to the occupation of the public squares). The expectations of the trade union move-
ment, engaged in a power struggle with the government, were therefore very high: to call for a
general strike. The response from the trade unions and particularly from the CGT and Solidaires
was to point out the difficulties of organising sector-wide strikes and articulating employee
demands related to challenges in the specific company or sector – as could be seen from the
example of the French Railways SNCF where a united trade union front (including the CFDT)
negotiated a new company-level agreement and a new branch agreement – while also leading the
more general protest against the bill.
For a number of the Nuit Debout participants, the fact that the trade unions did not have the
capacity to set in motion a general and indefinite strike could be interpreted at best as an admission
of weakness, and at worst as proof of their renounciation as effective mobilising machines. This
was also the vision that provoked a group such as ‘on bloque tout’ (‘we block everything’) which
attempted to bring grass-roots trade unionists to the foreground, in a critical position against the
federal or confederal leaderships. We can find here a classical political vision, present in libertarian
and far-left thinking, that sets the militant and supposedly radical base against the bureaucratic
management (Darlington, 2013). However, this critique did not carry much weight during the fight
against the El Khomri law, given the obvious efforts deployed by the cross-union alliance and
primarily by the CGT to organise sectoral strikes.
For the Nuit Debout participants, there was sometimes the temptation of going in the place of
trade unions to meet workers in companies. When such steps were taken, they helped to
enlighten these activists on the reality of work-related situations and the effects of the managerial
pressures exercised on employees. This was important because these tensions around the time-
frame of the movement also came from a lack of knowledge of the concrete conditions around
trade union action, of the difficulties of promoting participation in general assemblies and
convincing employees to go beyond one day of protest. This ignorance should also be analysed
with regard to the employment and work experiences of some of the Nuit Debout participants,
a large number of them being higher education graduates, unemployed or in precarious
employment12, with an over-representation of the cultural sectors and temporary workers in the
fields of events organisation and education.
A second form of challenge, linked to the first, concerned the actual ability of the trade unions to
reach large numbers of employees. The French unions, as a whole, are mainly established in the big
companies, both public and private. Their membership base remains very much linked to employ-
ment status, with workers in precarious employment being under-represented (Pignoni, 2016).
How is it possible to communicate, therefore, with the ‘unorganised’ or with the workers in small
and medium enterprises? This was a concern at the launch of the petition ‘Loi travail, non merci’
(‘El Khomri law, no thank you’), in which the general secretary of the CGT general federation of
engineers, executives and technicians (UGICT) was heavily involved (Binet, 2017). Likewise, the
‘On vaut mieux que ça’ video testimonies posted on Youtube also helped to show to what extent the
trade unions were a very distant reality for many workers subject to different types of precarity.
Nuit Debout participants were able to feed their hopes that the use of the most modern

12 An initial sociological survey of the Parisian participants was carried out between 8 April and 13 May:
https://reporterre.net/Qui-vient-a-Nuit-debout-Des-sociologues-repondent.
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communication technologies (such as the video streaming of debates on Instagram), just like the
kinds of organisation and discussion proposed in the public spaces – horizontal, open to all, and
leaderless – would help to attract workers that were resistant to the more traditional operating
methods of trade unions. It is undeniable that these different ways of organising and debating
enticed people that the unions did not manage to interest in collective action in their workplace.
When we were doing our field research, union activists from the company Alstom told us how
workers from their workplace in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, came with Nuit Debout to distribute
leaflets, without establishing links with the union representatives there even though the latter were
very mobilised and regularly called for strike days. These divisions sometimes exacerbated an
already existing distance between different grades of staff, such as engineers and workers; the
engineers being attracted to Nuit Debout, while the trade unions in the company (CFDT and CGT)
were more established amongst the manual workers and technicians. They also showed the diffi-
culty trade unions had in distancing themselves from an image of being institutionalised organisa-
tions within the company.
For all that, participation in Nuit Debout was also demanding; the fact that most of the activities
took place evening after evening over several weeks did not favour, for example, the involvement
of workers obliged to work difficult hours and with family responsibilities.13 Furthermore, the
stop-start nature of the debates – each new participant could call into question the work done in a
previous committee – sometimes tired out the more regular participants (Kokoreff, 2016: 166).
Although they were expecting a decisive contribution from the trade unions in terms of mass
mobilisation, a number of Nuit Debout participants discovered that the organisational power
(Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013) of the French unions was limited. There was a marked
contrast between the capacity of the unions to take over the streets during big social movements –
by creating the conditions for non-unionised workers to be able to participate, although not con-
sistently – and their actual base in the workplaces. Trade union officials from the intermediary
union structures, particularly territorial structures (local and regional unions), were thus struck by
the rotation of protesters on days of action, with a considerable involvement of workers from the
private sector (Le Pichon, 2017). However, a substantial number of these protesters were not on
strike, but taking hours off work or recuperating them from over-time. This practice has spread
since the beginning of the 2000s: the demonstration has established itself as the central tactic in the
trade unions’ repertoire of protest actions, due to them not being able to organise strikes in
workplaces (Pernot, 2010: 50). Strike action also remained weak, including in the sectors which
still constituted strongholds for unions like the CGT and Solidaires (such as public hospitals and
the French national post office). According to trade union officials from different organisations
(CGT, FO, Solidaires), the fight against the El Khomri law was led in a voluntarist way in different
sectors, above all by groups of activists. These struggled to widen the participation to ordinary
members and above all to organise general assemblies in workplaces. In a sector like the refinery
sector, as a leading sector in the conflict as in 2010, the action of several very determined groups
can also be enough (as explained by the chemical sector federal union leaders of FO) to block
production and the exit of lorries loaded with fuel. This kind of tactic can be very effective because
the blockade of refineries receives immediate media attention; however, the action depends more
on activist minorities than on a widespread mobilisation of workers.
The strategic power of trade unions was also questioned within Nuit Debout and at the local
initiatives such as the cross-sectoral general assembly of Saint-Denis. The traditional forms of

13 This same survey showed that two-thirds of the participants were men.
Béroud 189

union action – the day of demonstration being an obvious example – could appear too moderate or
far removed to really harm the operation of the production machinery. Blockade operations were
thus carried out to affect the movement of goods, targeting the nerve centres, like refineries, ports
and bridges. This reflection on the necessity of adapting the forms of struggle to the morphology of
neoliberal capitalism is very present in the theoretical elaborations of autonomous movements
(Cukier and Gallo Lassere, 2016: 136). This is much less the case within trade unions such as the
CGT or Solidaires where the central concern is expanding the movement and establishing contacts
for unionising workers; this was even more the case if the government refused to amend its bill.
A series of partial victories were certainly won in different occupational sectors in spring 2016,
including the mobilisation of workers in the entertainment industry, lorry drivers and railway
workers. The Valls government chose to concede to a certain number of sectoral demands in order
to defuse the situation and prevent social protest groups joining forces. There were therefore a
series of small successes for the trade unions. For all that, however, the bill was not amended – the
parliamentary debates were even reduced to a minimum via the use of Article 49(3) of the
Constitution – and it was not withdrawn. For the organisations involved in leading the movement,
the question of ‘after’ the mobilisation was even stronger because they were caught in internal
competitive relationships within the trade union movement.

The significance of challenges specific to the industrial relations field

Some writers today put forward the hypothesis that the space available for reformist or social
democratic trade unionism has diminished considerably, due to the transformations of collective
bargaining frameworks and more broadly of industrial relations systems (Upchurch et al., 2014).
The dismantling of the protective dimension of labour law and the localisation of bargaining
practices to just the company level, to the detriment of branch or cross-sectoral solidarity, shows
the small hold that reformist trade unions have today, faced with employers who are in no way
compelled to engage in any kind of political exchange. The result has been a polarisation between a
trade union movement that has incorporated the ideology of ‘social partnership’ (and the idea of a
community of interest between a company’s workers and its management in a globalised and
highly competitive economy) and a ‘radical’ trade union movement (in the sense that it continues
to try to mobilise workers in the face of neoliberal policies).
The dynamics of the struggle against the El Khomri law can give the impression that this
polarisation in the labour movement is at work in France. The idea of ‘syndicalisme rassemble´’
(meaning an inter-union alliance, as broad as possible) championed by the CGT leadership since
the mid-1990s, came up against the CFDT’s support of the reform, despite its criticism of the
first draft. What had been possible in 2010 at the time of the reform of the pension system and
when faced with President Nicolas Sarkozy was no longer so in a different political context. It
would, however, be misleading to talk about the subsequent development of two trade union
poles, one reformist and the other radical, the latter possibly being reinforced by its openness to
alliances with other types of social movements. In our opinion, many elements give us reason to
question this reading.
On the one hand, there is no longer a homogenous reformist bloc. The CFE-CGC, for example, a
confederation of higher-grade professionals, adopted a very critical position on the El Khomri law
in 2016, at the risk of distancing its relations with a number of employers’ representatives, a
position that the leadership maintained on the measures proposed by Macron in 2017. This devel-
opment must be understood in relation to the social base of the confederation, its strong roots in
industry and the experience of its teams with company restructuring plans (Béthoux et al., 2013).
190 Transfer 24(2)

On the CFDT’s side, the union teams also demonstrated their opposition to the contents of the El
Khomri law and consequently criticised the confederal leadership. This was the case in the CFDT
metallurgical federation which held its congress in May 2016. Departmental trade unions, follow-
ing the Rhône Departmental union (Symetal) whose representatives we met with, led a battle at the
congress to get the federation to refuse to sign derogation agreements in companies. They sup-
ported an amendment, which was adopted, against the wider use of the referendum provided by the
El Khomri law. The activity report promoted by the leadership was finally approved by only 60 per
cent, a low score in a congress union in France. The activists of this departmental union explained
to us that they participated in demonstrations against the El Khomri law, ‘but without carrying the
CFDT colours’ (meaning the orange tunics and flags). Here again, the disagreements regarding the
confederal line of the CFDT were based on the experience that these workplace activists had of
the concrete conditions of negotiation. These were their daily means of action which were being
targeted by reforms aiming deeply to transform social relations within companies. However, and
despite the internal pressures that these activists sometimes endured due to their diverging posi-
tions – having, for example, a mandate at the employees’ claims court – they did not imagine
leaving the CFDT in the near future, as could have been the case after the 2003 pension disputes.
As regards the forces grouped together against the El Khomri law – the CGT, FO, the FSU and
Solidaires – there were also many problems and contradictions. Some of these organisations,
such as the FSU, struggled to mobilise on cross-sectoral issues. Others, such as Solidaires,
encountered a relative stagnation of their influence, notably electorally, in the sectors where
their biggest trade unions were present, like the post office and the telecommunications industry
(Beynel, 2017). Trade unions linked to Solidaires were still not established enough in the private
sector (commerce and industry) to play much of a role in driving disputes forward. At the inter-
union meetings organised during the mobilisation against the El Khomri law, areas of common
ground could be found between the CGT, the FSU, Solidaires and FO on the refusal of the text.
On the other hand, counter-proposals for another reform of the labour code were refused by the
FO leadership, who intended to pursue its own agenda and did not develop a common dynamic
with the other organisations.
The movement against the El Khomri law constituted an important process of legitimation for
the new CGT leader, Philippe Martinez (previously the secretary of the metallurgical federation).
Martinez took over the post of general secretary following an intense period of internal crisis in
2014–2015. This leadership crisis, which revealed the very severe tensions that existed in the
confederation between different tendencies – on the weight to be given, notably, to the federations
– was far from being over in 2016. However, taking on the leadership of a strong social protest
movement allowed the CGT to project an externally positive image and, internally, to convince
union activists of the organisation’s combativeness, proved by their determination to organise
strikes. At the confederal congress, which was held in the middle of this period of mobilisation,
in April 2016, the new CGT leadership built a majority that was likely to back it for the 2016–2019
mandate, by obtaining, notably, the support of sectoral federations considered to be ‘orthodox’,
like the agri-food and chemical federations. This meant promoting a CGT identity associated with
‘class struggle’ (which is partly explained by the influence within these organisations of a Trots-
kyist tendency, linked to the Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (Independent Workers’ Party). Conversely,
the new leadership maintained very tense relations with the management teams of the two most
important sectoral federations: the public services (local authorities) and health federations. For
their part, these two federations had more of a critical discourse on the necessity of adapting trade
union structures to transformations in the workforce. The internal alliances made within the CGT
by the new leadership therefore led it to take on a very aggressive and hostile discourse against the
Béroud 191

CFDT, a discourse which was perceived from the outside as positive by other actors in the dispute,
such as a number of activists involved in Nuit Debout. However, the activists in the ‘orthodox’
sectors were not the most open to building relations with this type of movement, seen as emerging
from the middle classes, insofar as they maintained a relatively ‘worker’-oriented conception of the
struggle. While the radicalness declared by the CGT leadership could give the impression to the
Nuit Debout leaders that convergences were possible, the internal balances existing in the con-
federation were an impediment to the construction of sustainable relationships.
Therefore, while the most engaged activists in Nuit Debout were hoping for a repeat of the
activities in public spaces that had taken place in autumn 2016, the situation ended up being quite
different. Issues related to the presidential election campaign in May 2017, as well as the labour
movement’s own concerns, took priority. On 31 March 2017, the Ministry of Labour published a
new measure of representativeness for all French trade union organisations. The CFDT became the
first organisation in terms of electoral turnout in the private sector, with 26.37 per cent of votes
cast. The CGT had 24.85 per cent and FO, the third organisation, 15.59 per cent. This periodic
revision of unions’ representativeness was established by the law of 20 August 2008 (Béroud et al.,
2012). The measure of the turnout was based on the aggregation of several electoral ballots: the
elections for the works councils (or failing that for the employee representatives), which took place
between 2013 and 2016, and the elections for workers in very small businesses (VSB), which were
held at the end of 2016. All the trade union organisations – including those which are sometimes
labelled as ‘radical’ such as SUD/Solidaires – made these last elections a priority in their agenda in
autumn 2016 for several reasons. For the CGT, it was already known that the CFDT were getting
better results in the works council elections, and so gathering as many votes as possible in the VSB
ballots appeared to be crucial. For the other organisations, including Solidaires, the representa-
tiveness measure at the national and cross-sectoral level, but also at the sectoral level, was decisive
for having access to financial resources, but also for carrying influence in negotiations and, more
generally, with the wider public. Finally, despite union activists being absorbed by the VSB
elections for several months, they still had a very low participation rate, with only 7.35 per cent
out of the 4.4 million eligible workers voting. The CGT stayed in the lead with 25.12 per cent of
votes, the CFDT in second position with 15.49 per cent and FO in third position with 13 per cent.14
This importance given to the measure of trade union representativeness shows to what extent a
confederation like the CGT finds itself caught in a dual, sometimes contradictory rationale. A
central actor in a period of dispute with the government, as it was during the mobilisation against
the El Khomri law, it has evolved within a space which hosts other actors as part of the social
movement, some of which expect a more political position from the organisation. This involve-
ment in a protest movement – which also resulted in an alliance on the ground with unionists from
Solidaires – carries a symbolic significance for a large number of its activists who are sometimes
involved in an individual capacity in different collective struggles, in a ZAD or in Nuit Debout.
The biggest French trade union confederation (if measured by its influence in both the public
services and the private sector), the CGT’s leading role is however very threatened by the CFDT.
Its leadership must also take certain industrial relations issues into account in its strategy and
cannot be too public about alliances which would end up marginalising it in this field. It also has to
integrate the imperative of trade union development, meaning the redeployment and reinforcement

14 Among the union organisations which are not recognised as representative at the national and cross-
sectoral level, the UNSA recorded a higher result (compared to the first ballot of this kind in 2012), with
12.49 per cent of votes cast, while Solidaires experienced a slight drop, with 3.5 per cent.
192 Transfer 24(2)

of its forces in non- or very weakly unionised sectors. This is a prerequisite for its capacity to carry
influence in both spaces: social movements and industrial relations.

Translation from the French by Bethany Staunton

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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