Udo Rehfeldt, IRES
The paper will analyse the recent reforms in the French system of workers’ participation at workplace and company level in three fields. The first field is information and consultation. Here the rights of the works councils have further been strengthened on economic issues and extended towards strategic management decisions. Responding to demands by the employers’ organisations, existing workplace representation bodies have been merged and centralised. The second field is collective bargaining at the workplace and company level. Here the trade union delegates have conserved their monopoly for collective bargaining. The unions continue to coordinate the whole system of workers’ participation, as long they are present at the workplace level. Responding to employers’ demands, collective bargaining without unions is however facilitated and derogation in peius from sector level agreements permitted. The legislator’s intention is to further decentralize the whole system of collective bargaining. The third field is participation in economic decision making through board-level employee representation (BLER). Here France is in a paradoxical situation. It was the first European country to introduce BLER as soon as 1945, which remained long time limited to the public sector. Since 2013, BLER is mandatory also in the private sector, but with the highest thresholds, the lowest number of employee representatives per company compared to other BLER systems in Europe, as well as procedural restrictions unknown elsewhere. The obstacles for enhancing this form of participation are rooted in the French industrial relations culture, historically characterized by mistrust between employers and unions, and by hostility towards BLER within the employers’ organizations, but also within the trade unions. The actors’ positions have however begun to change, as one can observe in the ongoing debate on company law reform in order to enhance company sustainability.
References
- Rehfeldt U. (2018), “Industrial Relations in France: From the underdevelopment of collective bargaining to the failure of neocorporatist concertation”, Employee Relations, n° special “Industrial Relations in the 21st century Europe”, Vol. 40, No. 4, February; pp. 617-633.
- Rehfeldt U., Vincent C. (2018), “The decentralisation of collective bargaining in France: an escalating process”, in Leonardi S., Pedersini R. (eds.), Multi-employer Bargaining Under Pressure. Decentralisation trends in five European countries, Brussels: ETUI; pp. 151-184.
- Rehfeldt U. (2019), “Workers’ participation at plant level: France”, in: Berger S., Pries L., Wannöfel M. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Workers' Participation at Plant Level, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 323-342.