Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power

3 (2023) 85–99

Commentary

∵
The 2023 Mobilisation against Pension Reform in
France: Some Elements of Analysis

Sophie Béroud | ORCID: 0000-0001-5271-3502

Faculté d’Anthropologie, de Sociologie et de Science politique, Université
Lumière Lyon-2, Lyon, France
sophie.beroud@univ-lyon2.fr

Received: 5 September 2023 | Accepted: 4 October 2023 |

Published online: 5 December 2023

Abstract

This article analyses the exceptional social movement that took place in France
between January and June 2023 against the increase in the retirement age imposed by
the government. The mobilisation took place within a unified framework that brought
together all the trade unions and encouraged massive participation by workers. On
several occasions, the demonstrations brought together more than three million
people. However, although there were strong individual strikes, these did not develop
into a general strike. This article explores these contradictions by looking at the various
industrial relations reforms that have weakened union action in the workplace and
now make it difficult to build strike action.

Keywords

social movements – strikes – French trade unions – pension system – labour law
reforms – democratic crisis

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill nv | doi: 10.1163/26667185-bja10047

© Sophie Béroud, 2023 | ISSN: 2666-7177 (print) 2666-7185 (online)
86 béroud

Introduction

The sequence of social mobilisation that took place in France between mid-
January and early June 2023 put the unions in the spotlight: able to organise 14
days of national action, they emerged as the legitimate spokespeople for the
deep anger expressed by the workers. At a time when the trade union landscape
is particularly fragmented, they managed to maintain a united decision-making
framework throughout the movement in the form of a solid eight-organisation
inter-union coalition called ‘intersyndicale’, thereby thwarting the government’s
attempts at division. Opposing the extension of the statutory retirement age by
two years (from 62 to 64) as a whole, they also managed to avoid being locked
into a purely defensive posture, helping to shed light on the contradictions and
unspoken aspects of the government’s plan and bringing the issue of working
conditions and intensity into the public debate, particularly for the blue-collar
and white-collar workers most exposed to insecure jobs. In the light of these
few elements, we might therefore think that the unions are well and truly back
at the centre of social protest, even though they were taken to be outdated a
few years earlier, in autumn 2018, when the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ spoke without them
about how little work was valued and about their financial difficulties while
nevertheless being employed throughout the year.1
However, this very positive reading of the unions’ new-found capacity for
action needs to be qualified and, above all, complexified. On the one hand,
the fact that French trade unions are managing to build cross-industry social
movements that go well beyond the circle of their members and even their
supporters is nothing new. In 2019–20, the first attempt to reform the pension
system launched by Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and his government
came up against very strong social resistance, with once again a series of days
of action bringing together more than a million participants and above all
renewable strikes in the rail and urban transport sectors which lasted longer –
52 days for some ratp staff,2 and for some railway workers – than those carried

1 To put this interpretation into perspective, trade union activists have been present in
the ‘Gillets Jaunes’ protests from the outset, but more often than not at odds with their
organisation: see P. Blavier, Gilets jaunes. La révolte des budgets contraints (Paris, puf, 2021);
S. Béroud, ‘Si loin, si proches …: syndicats et syndicalistes français face aux Gilets jaunes’, in
Sur le terrain avec les Gilets jaunes: approche interdisciplinaire du mouvement en France et en
Belgique, eds. S. Béroud, A. Dufresne, C. Gobin and M. Zune (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de
Lyon, 2022), 107–21.
2 ratp is the Régie Autonome des Transports parisiens (the Paris underground and bus
network).

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the 2023 mobilisation against pension reform in france 87

out during the social movement in 1995.3 This mobilisation was brought to
an abrupt halt both by the use of article 49.3 of the Constitution of the Fifth
Republic and by the introduction of the first lockdown, on 17 March 2019, in
the face of the covid-19 pandemic.4 Four years earlier, in spring 2016, trade
unions had also organised 12 days of action and sectoral strikes over a period
of five months to oppose a vast overhaul of labour law and the architecture of
collective bargaining in France (the so-called El Khomri law), a mobilisation
that was linked to a strong student protest, initiatives on social networks and
then a movement to occupy public squares known as Nuit Debout.5
On the other hand, despite their ability to mobilise a section of the workforce
at national and cross-industry level, French trade unions have undergone a
long and uninterrupted process of weakening, which has accelerated over
the last 15 years. More than just the return of trade unions as central actors in
social conflict, we need to understand the logic that produces and maintains
this paradoxical situation of French trade unions, which means that these two
apparently opposing dimensions – their role in expressing social anger and their
concomitant difficulties in really structuring it – are deeply intertwined. To do
this, we will begin by presenting the main features of the 2023 mobilisation
against raising the retirement age to 64, and we will see how some of these,
in particular the small number of prolonged strikes, reveal the contradictions
present in the expression of the trade union show of strength. We will then
look at what the multiple reforms carried out in France since 2008 have done
to the unions in terms of their ability to take effective action to organise and
defend workers.

On the One Hand, a Massive and Popular Movement

As it unfolded during the first half of 2023, the mobilisation was described as
historic by both the unions and the media. It was the figures for participation
in the demonstrations that fuelled this interpretation, insofar as they were very
high from the first day of action on 19 January 2023 and dropped very little

3 On the social movement of 2019–20, see the special issue ‘Mobilisations et grèves’
of Mondes du travail published in February 2020: https://lesmondesdutravail.net
/hors-serie-mars-2020-146p/.
4 Article 49.3 allows the government to accept responsibility for a bill. If there is no mention
of censure or if it is rejected, the bill is passed in its entirety.
5 S. Béroud, ‘French Trade Unions and the Mobilisation against the El Khomri Law in 2016:
A Reconfiguration of Strategies and Alliances’, Transfer: European Review of Labour and
Research 24 (2) (2018), 179–93.

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table 1 Event figures for 2023

Date cgt estimate Ministry of the Interior estimate

Thursday, 19 January 2023 2,000,000 1,120,000

Tuesday, 31 January 2023 2,800,000 1,270,000
Tuesday, 7 February 2023 2,000,000 757,000
Saturday, 11 February 2023 2,500,000 963,000
Thursday, 16 February 2023 1,300,000 440,000
Tuesday, 7 March 2023 3,500,000 1,280,000
Saturday, 11 March 2023 1,000,000 368,000
Wednesday, 15 March 2023 1,700,000 480,000
Thursday, 23 March 2023 3,500,000 1,089,000
Tuesday, 28 March 2023 2,000,000 740,000
Thursday, 6 April 2023 2,000,000 570,000
Thursday, 13 April 2023 1,500,000 380,000
Monday, 1 May 2023 2,300,000 782,000
Tuesday, 6 June 202 3 900,000 281,000
afp; le monde; mediapart

thereafter, with a very high intensity during the month of March. Determining
the number of demonstrators is always an important issue in the deployment
of the movement and, as we know, there are still major discrepancies between
the figures drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior and those given by the
unions (see Table 1). However, as early as 19 January, the Ministry of the
Interior announced that there would be over 1.1 million demonstrators, with
rallies in two hundred towns and significant numbers of strikers, particularly
in the energy, education and transport sectors. Both private and public sector
employees took part in the various marches, with a significant number of first-
time demonstrators – although it is impossible to assess this precisely. The
popular success of this first protest meeting, even though the unions thought it
would be part of a longer process of broadening the movement, was attributed,
on the one hand, to a majority rejection within the population of the measures
imposed – the postponement of the retirement age and the extension of the
contribution period – and, on the other hand, to the unitary dimension of the
mobilisation, perceived here again as exceptional.
It was in fact a national intersyndicale, bringing together the eight existing
organisations at this level (cfdt, cfe-cgc, cftc, cgt, cgt-fo, fsu,

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the 2023 mobilisation against pension reform in france 89

Solidaires and Unsa),6 that led the action, deciding as it went along on the
key areas and means of action. Apart from the fact that such unity had not
existed for 13 years – the precedent being the mobilisation against an earlier
pension reform in 2010 – it had seemed highly unlikely given the dividing lines
running through the trade union field. The dissensions between the unions
were strong, both in 2016 on the subject of the El Khomri law and in 2019–20
over Macron’s first draft reform of the pension system, in particular between
the two leading confederations, the cfdt and the cgt. Despite these tensions,
the unitary framework built up from December 2022, that is, before the official
presentation of the content of the reform by the Prime Minister, was seen as
a powerful vector of mobilisation, making it both massive and popular and
therefore likely to destabilise the government.7
In fact, after 19 January this inter-union group succeeded in organising 13
further days of action across the country, during which participation remained
at a very high level compared with other major social movements in France,
such as that of autumn 1995 or spring 2010. From the second day of action, on
31 January – which the Ministry of the Interior described as involving 1.2 million
demonstrators and the cgt 2.8 million – the intersyndicale built a regular
schedule of mobilisations, including Saturday 11 March, in order to involve
other categories of the population, but also over the school holiday period in
order to maintain favourable public opinion. The day of action on Tuesday, 7
March – the end of the holidays for all zones – was one of the high points of the
mobilisation (1.2 million according to the ministry, 3.5 million according to the
cgt), especially as the intersyndicale tried to change the forms of action taken
by calling for ‘bringing France to a standstill’. However, this call for renewable
strikes was not as successful as had been hoped. The day of protests, organised
throughout the country and even in small towns which had hardly seen any up
to that point, remained the central form of action.

6 There are four historic trade union confederations in France. They bring together all workers,
whatever their category, and cover all sectors of activity. They are the Confédération Française
Démocratique du Travail (cfdt), the Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens
(cftc), the Confédération Générale du Travail (cgt) and the Confédération Générale du
travail – Force Ouvrière (cgt-fo). A fifth confederation organises only professional and
managerial staff: the Confédération française de l’encadrement – confédération générale
des cadres (cfe-cgc). Finally, since the 1990s, there have been three new organisations at
national level: Solidaires and the Union nationale des syndicats autonomes (Unsa) – both of
which organise private sector and public service employees – and the Fédération syndicale
Unitaire (fsu), which only organises public service employees.
7 See the interview with Simon Duteil, co-delegate general of Union syndicale Solidaires, at:
https://www.revue-ballast.fr/simon-duteil-solidaires-ce-qui-destabilisera-cest-la
-massification/.

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90 béroud

A new peak in participation was reached on Thursday, 23 March, after

the government had resorted to Article 49.3 of the Constitution of the Fifth
Republic a few days earlier to pass the bill en bloc. This political decision was
a turning point in the mobilisation, as it led to greater involvement of young
people at school (high school and university students) and a diversification
of the forms of struggle: spontaneous and undeclared demonstrations in the
evening, blockades and site occupations, and so forth. It also led to increased
police repression, with dozens of arrests, which in turn contributed to a
hardening of relations between the forces of law and order and demonstrators,
including during the days of action organised by the inter-union coalition. Up
to 6 June – the last day of action, but with a much lower turnout – the inter-
union movement continued to dictate the pace of the movement, although
parallel actions multiplied at local level, in particular visits by the President
of the Republic and members of the government being ‘serenaded’ by pots
and pans being bashed together. These events became so common that they
became known as ‘pot concerts”’
In contrast to other periods of social struggle when the inter-union framework
did not last, this was not the case during these six months of mobilisation.
Meeting once again on 15 June 2023, the eight organisations that make up
the intersyndicale, which were subsequently joined by five high school and
university student organisations, even called for this framework for exchange
and initiative to be preserved and extended to other issues, starting with wages
and working conditions. It has to be said that this intersyndicale was not only
a tool for mobilisation but also a remarkable political tool for the unions.
Despite their small membership,8 it enabled them to appear as the legitimate
repositories of immense popular anger in the face of a reform perceived as
profoundly unfair, particularly for the working-class categories of employees
who had started their careers early. However, the conditions that made the
existence of this intersyndicale possible stem less from factors internal to the
trade union field that would have led to closer links between organisations than
from the government’s own actions. From this point of view, there is continuity
in the social policies pursued under Macron’s presidential periods, with the
use of force (recourse to statutory decrees in particular) to the detriment of
effective consultation with the unions. In 2022, the Borne government in a
sense opened the way for the formation of a national inter-unions coalition
by imposing a reform of unemployment insurance that was rejected by all
the unions. These came together a few months later to prepare the offensive
against a reform of the pension system that ignored their main demands. This

8 The unionisation rate in France is estimated at around 11 per cent.

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the 2023 mobilisation against pension reform in france 91

unexpected alliance between self-styled reformist organisations and more

radical organisations can therefore be seen as the product of authoritarian
choices made by governments that no longer seek to maintain the illusion that
they need ‘social partners’.
This situation also enabled the intersyndicale, and in particular the cfdt,
whose presence in this alliance was widely publicised, to pose as champions
of social democracy in the face of a government that showed little concern
for its proper functioning, and even to question the government on its use of
the Constitution, its rejection of parliamentary debate and the existence of
a genuine political crisis. A relatively new development was that, backed by
the strong legitimacy conferred on them by mass mobilisation, the unions
allowed themselves to enter the political arena, not to take the place of the
parties but to challenge the left-wing parties on their tactics of parliamentary
guerrilla warfare. They tried to extend the social struggle by obtaining a shared-
initiative referendum proposing to abolish the move to raise the pension age
to 64, a move that failed before the Constitutional Council. The idea of linking
street demonstrations and strikes to a popular consultation is not new in
their register of action: for example, a citizens’ vote was organised in October
2009 at La Poste by a coalition of associations, unions and parties with the
aim of obtaining a national referendum on the public postal service. What
was unprecedented in 2023 was the fact that the unions were able to oppose
a politically minority government as social actors with a majority base in the
population and to assert this strong legitimacy by putting forward the need for
a popular consultation.

On the Other Hand, Low-Intensity Strike Action

In this respect, the trade unions may have won a moral and political victory
over the executive, but they failed to block the current reform. The bill
extending the retirement age has been adopted and the implementing decrees
promulgated. This difficulty in getting the government to back down, despite
the millions of demonstrators who gathered on several occasions, is indicative
of the level of bargaining power that needs to be established in the face of
politicians who are more attentive to fluctuations in the ratings awarded by
international financial agencies than to appearing as the guarantor of the
general interest.9 The question of strike action was therefore at the heart of

9 K. Yon, ‘Introduction’, in K. Yon, Le syndicalisme est politique. Questions stratégiques pour

un renouveau syndical (Paris: La Dispute, 2023), 7–39.

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92 béroud

the mobilisation, but above all it was the possibility of launching renewable
strikes in administrations and companies. While there were large numbers of
strikers on the various days of action (see Table 2) – in particular those of 19
and 31 January, but also 7 March – prolonged strikes were only effective in a few
sectors: transport with the sncf (Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer) (but
not the ratp – Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens – or urban passenger
transport networks outside the Ile-de-France); the energy sector and in
particular edf (Electricité de France), Enedis and Engie; waste collection in
Paris, Rennes, Rouen and Le Havre; and the Total group’s refineries. In some
of these sectors, the momentum of the struggle had been building for several
months and had a knock-on effect, for example at edf, where several days of
action were led in 2022 by an inter-union group against a project to transform
the company, and then for pay rises. Directly affected by the end of special
pension schemes, the electricity and gas workers were particularly active, with
12 weeks of strikes for some employees and the organisation of large daily
reductions in electricity production. They also carried out hundreds of targeted
electricity cuts – in towns where members of the government or majority
mp s are mayors, or during Macron’s travels – or, on the contrary, switched to
reduced or free rates for buildings in working-class neighbourhoods, hospitals
or small shops. Electricians and gas companies have thus resumed the ‘Robin
Hood’ actions already publicised in 2004 and multiplied them in 2022.10 In
the petrochemicals sector, refinery workers from the Total Energie group also
staged a major mobilisation in October 2022 to obtain wage increases in a
context of both inflation and very high profits for the group. Once again, they
were at the forefront of the movement against pension reform, although they
were unable to cause a real shortage of fuel at service stations. In a similar way,
the strike was strongly followed at the sncf during the days of action called by
the national intersyndicale, but the renewable strikes remained localised and
were carried out mainly by driving staff.
In the end, the strongest momentum for a renewable strike came from
the refuse collection sector in Paris, with coordinated action between cgt
militants in the waste and sanitation sector and those working at the capital’s
incinerators. The strike was both highly visible – as promised by a union
leaflet entitled ‘They won’t hear us at demonstrations, we’ll put Paris under the
rubbish bins’11 – and highly publicised, giving the impression of a break with
normal service.
10 S. Béroud, Les Robins des Bois de l’Energie (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2005).
11 https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2023/04/13/contre-les-retraites-les-eboueurs
-de-paris-a-nouveau-en-greve-on-ne-nous-entend-pas-en-manif-on-mettra-paris-sous
-les-poubelles_6169425_3234.html.

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the 2023 mobilisation against pension reform in france 93

table 2 Strike rates at the main high points of the 2023 movement

Date Sectors/Strike rates

19 January 2023 National education: 65–70% according to the unions

in primary and secondary education; 42.35% in primary
and 34.66% in secondary according to the Ministry
State civil service: 28% (ministry)
Local government: 11.3% (ministry)
Hospital civil service: 9.8% (ministry)
sncf: 46.3% according to the unions
edf: 44.5%
Refineries: 70–100% within the Total Energie group
according to the unions; 65% according to management
31 January 2023 National education: 50% in primary schools and 55%
in secondary schools according to the unions; 26.65%
in primary schools and 25.22% in secondary schools
according to the Ministry
State civil service: 19.4% (ministry)
Local government: 7.9% (ministry)
Hospital civil service: 8.5% (ministry)
sncf: 36.5% according to the unions
edf: 40.3%
Refineries: 75–100% strikers according to the cgt; 55%
according to Total management
7 March 2023 National education: 60% in primary and secondary
schools according to the unions; 35.35% in primary and
30% in secondary schools according to the Ministry
State civil service: 25.8% (ministry)
Local government: 12.8% (ministry)
Hospital civil service: 14.6% (ministry)
sncf: 40% according to the unions
edf: 41%
Refineries: according to the cgt, fuel shipments are
blocked at all refineries in France

afp; le monde; mediapart. sources of strike rates in brackets.

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94 béroud

However, it is precisely this entry into a different time frame, the one made
possible by the renewable strike, that has not taken place in other professional
sectors, despite the call from the intersyndicale to go beyond the single days of
action to stop work. Over the course of these days, employees from different
professional sectors – from commerce to metalworking to cultural institutions
– demonstrated and even went on strike two or three times. But they also used
their days off or holidays and took part in the demonstration while working
before or after it. In this way, several temporalities were intertwined: the
temporality of daily salaried work, which was not suspended; the temporality
of trade union work for the elected representatives and permanent staff of the
organisations; and the temporality of mobilisation at regular intervals. As a
result, the most advanced sectors – whether railway workers, refuse collectors,
electricity and gas workers or refiners – saw the confirmation of the situation
that they had feared, that is, the fact that they were leading a renewable strike
on their own and in an increasingly isolated fashion. Within the cgt, the leaders
of five professional federations got together at the beginning of February,
bringing together the representatives of their main unions, in order to gradually
build up their strength and jointly call for 24-hour strikes, then 48-hour strikes,
and finally a prolonged strike.12 This initiative, carried out in parallel with the
intersyndicale and above all outside the cgt confederal leadership, attests
as much to the desire to implement a concerted strategy of struggle against
the government as to the existing tensions within the trade union. The cgt
held its 53rd confederal congress in the midst of the social unrest from 27 to
31 March, with very heated disputes over the direction and composition of
the new leadership.13 This internal political issue within the most powerful
confederation in terms of mobilisation had an impact on the movement.
However, the fact that demonstrations become the central element in the
repertoire of protest action during a major cross-industry movement and that
strikes are difficult to organise, even in professional sectors where the unions
are strong, is nothing new but rather something that has recurred since the
early 2000s. The fragmentation of work collectives in administrations and
companies, but also and above all the weakening of militant collectives with a
smaller number of elected representatives and union delegates, is one of the
factors that sheds light on this situation.14 As activists find it difficult to hold

12 Press release dated 13 February 2023.

13 https://rapportsdeforce.fr/classes-en-lutte/cgt-les-cinq-lignes-de-fracture-qui-secouent
-le-congres-033017517; https://www.contretemps.eu/congres-cgt-crise-syndicalisme
-binet-martinez/.
14 P. Blavier, T. Haute and E. Penissat, ‘La grève, entre soubresauts et déclin’, Mouvements
103 (3) (2020), 11–21.

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the 2023 mobilisation against pension reform in france 95

general meetings in the workplace, they turn to actions outside the workplace,
such as blockades, roadblocks or occupations of private and public buildings.
These operations give them the satisfaction of taking action, of disrupting
the economic and/or political order, and are sometimes part of a strong local
dynamic. One of the particularities of the 2023 mobilisation is that this type
of action became widespread from mid-March onwards, after the government
forced its reform through parliament. However, unlike other sequences of
intense social protest – such as that of 2019–20 in particular – the local general
assemblies, bringing together employees from different professions, did not
grow very large and there was no autonomous construction of the struggle,
except in a few very limited cases. General assemblies in administrations and
companies also struggled to function, with limited attendance. Employees
responded to calls from the inter-union coalition at national level but did
not try to build a mobilisation in their workplace. In order to understand the
existence of these intrinsic weaknesses in the movement, we need to look
back at the way in which trade union representation has been profoundly
transformed over the last 15 years as a result of various changes in the legal
framework for industrial relations.

Structural Weakening of Trade Union Representation over the Last

15 Years

We must guard against a teleological reading which would give excessive

coherence to the various transformations implemented since the reform of the
rules of trade union representativeness via the law of 20 August 2008. Some
processes, such as the decentralisation of collective bargaining to company
level, began well before this reform, at the instigation of the state.15 However,
strong continuities can be identified over a period of 15 years, starting with
the way in which social dialogue has been set up as an ideological reference
point by politicians – over and above changes in governments and electoral
majorities – by administrative officials, industrial relations professionals and
also by some trade union leaders.16 This promotion of social dialogue as a vision
of industrial relations in which conflict is dismissed as a dysfunction and trade
union activity tends to be reduced to participation in negotiations has taken

15 L. Baccaro and C. Howell, Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation: European Industrial

Relations Since the 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
16 E. Bethoux, Le dialogue social, sociologie d’un concept controversé, hdr dissertation (Paris:
cnam, 2020).

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96 béroud

place at several levels and through several vectors. A large part of the legislative
changes have consisted in making the company the central location for the
production of social standards, firstly by strengthening the electoral legitimacy
of trade unions, but also the principle of majority agreement. By making the
results of professional elections the key to accessing a series of resources and
mandates, both within the company and beyond, the 2008 reform of the rules
on representativeness turned trade union practices upside down.
This first stage of the rocket was supplemented by a second with the El
Khomri law of 8 August 2016, which profoundly altered the hierarchy of
collective agreements, in particular by giving primacy to company agreements
on working time. Far from being the only text that radically altered the Labour
Code, the El Khomri law was one of a series of laws adopted during the
presidential term of François Hollande (such as the Macron law of 6 August
2015 and the Rebsamen law of 17 August 2015) which, in the space of a few years,
greatly increased the possible derogations for Sunday working in a number of
sectors or modified the criteria for assessing economic redundancies. What
emerges strongly from this body of legislation is the fact that company-
level bargaining is seen as serving the competitiveness of companies and no
longer as a means of regulating antagonistic interests between employees
and employers.17 These developments have had major implications for the
content and contours of trade union activity in the workplace by reinforcing
the processes of specialisation and professionalisation of elected or authorised
representatives. Indeed, even more than before, trade union teams in
government departments and companies have been reduced to a handful of
activists who accumulate mandates, spend almost all their delegation hours
in meetings with management and have very little relationship with their
work colleagues. What’s more, while the topics for negotiation have continued
to diversify, the results achieved rarely enable union representatives to
demonstrate the effectiveness of their investment.18 This situation, in which
negotiations are above all at the service of company management, highlights
a reversal of the balance of power within the company: it is no longer the
employees and their representatives who are pursuing a strategy of ‘cold strike’
against employers, but rather the latter who are constantly putting negotiations

17 S. Laulom, C. Nicod, A. Mias, C. Guillaume, J.-M. Denis and P. Bouffartigue, ‘La promotion
du “dialogue social” dans l’entreprise. Loi Rebsamen et rapport Combrexelle’, La nouvelle
revue du travail [Online] (2016). doi 10.4000/nrt.2623.
18 B. Giraud and G. Ponge, ‘Des négociations entravées’, La nouvelle revue du travail [Online]
8 (2016). doi 10.4000/nrt.2591.

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the 2023 mobilisation against pension reform in france 97

under pressure in order to restore managerial power even more markedly.19 In

this context, the conflictual situations that arise in ordinary times at company
level reflect mainly defensive positions, with the notable exception of wage
disputes, which have increased in number since 2022. But given the difficulties
of opposing the growing control of company management over the form and
content of industrial relations, it is easy to see how complicated it can be
for union teams to link the battles waged at company level to broader cross-
industry issues, such as pension reform.
Finally, the last stage of the reform rocket was put in place by the Macron
decree laws of September 2017, which extended the changes already
introduced in 2015–16. One of the decree laws completely transformed the staff
representation bodies (irp) in private companies, as they had been built up
during the 20th century, by merging the prerogatives of the employee delegates
(dp), the works council (ce) and the health, safety and working conditions
committee (chsct) into a single entity, the Social and Economic Committee
(cse). This merger has resulted in a very sharp reduction in mandates and
delegation hours in large companies: up to 50 per cent in some cases, and 30
per cent on average. Moreover, as the first empirical studies on the implications
of the 2017 decree laws have clearly shown, this merger of institutions has had
other negative consequences for trade unions’ capacity of representation.20
One of these is the loss of autonomy and means of action for health, safety
and working conditions committees (cssct s), which, where they exist, do
not replace the former chsct s. Without going back over all the implications
of this new configuration of employee representation in the undertaking, it
is quite clear from the initial research work that these transformations are
fuelling the structural process of weakening the trade unions.
The effect of these multiple reforms of labour law and industrial relations has
been a growing weakening of trade union action in companies, at a time when
French organisations are already suffering from both their weak numerical
base and their fragmentation. We know the extent to which the presence of
union representatives in the workplace is decisive in encouraging not only
membership, but also participation in collective action.21 Fewer trade union

19 J. Pélisse, ‘A Reverse Cold Strike? Eléments sur les mutations des relations professionnelles
dans l’entreprise en France (1968–2018)’, Négociations 31 (1) (2019), 61–81.
20 R. Bourguignon, P. Becdelièvre de, E. Bethoux, H. Connolly, A. Mias and P. Tainturier,
Effet de la mise en place des cse sur le dialogue social: étude longitudinale de sept grandes
entreprises, Rapport pour le comité d’évaluation des ordonnances Travail, France Stratégie,
2021.
21 On this subject, see the survey carried out during the mobilisation against pension reform
by the Collectif Quantité critique: https://qcritique.hypotheses.org/644.

Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power 3 (2023) 85–99

98 béroud

teams, saturated by the institutional activity linked to the multiple themes of

negotiations or the cse, are no longer able to create the conditions to bring
general assemblies to life in workplaces and convince employees to take part
in them. However, this process of weakening is not unilateral. The fact that the
promises linked to the decentralisation of negotiation – which was supposed
to bring employees closer to the decisions that affect them – have not been
kept and, on the contrary, have led to an increased concentration of power in
the hands of company management has contributed to a serious weakening of
the rhetoric of social dialogue, including among those who helped to bring it
about.22 It is therefore impossible to understand the involvement of the cfdt
confederation in the movement against pension reform without taking these
factors into consideration. Added to this is the fact that the practice of social
dialogue at national and cross-industry level, in which the cfdt was heavily
invested, has also been greatly demonetised since Macron came to power in
2017. In the light of these factors, we could put forward the hypothesis that a
cycle has come to an end in France, that of the promotion of social dialogue as
a form of union control, giving way to a more acute phase of class struggle, in a
context of the affirmation of authoritarian neo-liberalism.

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