The road to anomie: the rise and decline of public service unions in France

Abstract

This article attempts to demonstrate that public service industrial relations in France are closely linked to a historical model that has its roots in the construction of the Republican system as early as 1880. The historical resilience of this model distinguishes it sharply from the one developed in the private sector which is much more related to the defence of the industrial working class. Public service unions emerged as a Left political force in the 1920s and still retain this function in the twenty-first century. Since 1946, civil service unions have developed a representation role of a political nature that challenges the political class. This article argues that the specificity of public service industrial relations is connected in France with a political conception of the employment relationship in the civil service. Therefore, new public management has failed to take root. However, unions are facing a serious crisis because they cannot curb the austerity policies pursued by both Right and Left governments. They have been forced to adopt a defensive strategy while civil servants are turning increasingly to the Far Right.

Keywords:

• French civil service
• public service industrial relations
• public service strikes
• public service unions

Notes

1. The French civil service includes three groups of civil servants: the state civil servants, the local authorities civil servants and the public hospitals civil servants. A majority of them enjoys a professional public law statute. There are also 14% of contractual agents in the state civil service, 20% in the local civil service and 17% in the public hospitals civil service. Contracts are generally public law contracts. These proportions keep on climbing over time.

2. A global comparison of the two legal systems shows that duties are stricter on the civil service side: strikes are forbidden in core state services such as the police, the army or the courts; the right to strike is supervised by the administrative courts and can be limited on the basis of the social or the political situation; the freedom of expression is far more limited for all the civil servants who have to obey a ‘discretion’ rule; civil servants can be moved from one place to another in the interest of the service while private wage-earners can claim that it is a cause of breach of their employment contract.

3. This can be observed in the 2017 presidential campaign. Almost all the candidates of the Right primaries have developed the idea to reduce the civil service forces and to replace the statute by contracts.

4. A corps is a legal structure organizing the civil servants’ career paths with successive grades and pay levels. Corps have been endowed with specific professional rules (about seniority, professional evaluation and so forth), legal rules (for instance about the prevention of interest conflicts) or ethical rules depending on the nature of their professional occupations.

5. Historically, two factors have had a major role: the concentration of technological knowledge in technical corps especially after 1945 which gave the civil service a real power over the economic modernization policy in the aftermath of World War II; and the corporatist homogeneity of each ministerial sector that has often prevented governments from playing on the internal divisions of the public service.

6. He further adds:

The treatment is transformed into wages; the appointment is only a private contract, a contract of service; the Budget Act respects the supply and demand rule; hierarchical authority is subject to discussion (strike to fire top or middle-level managers) ; the civil servant is not any more a public authority trustee but an employee or a worker …. (Leroy, 1907, p. 250)

7. The creation of Whitley Councils in the British public service had been rapidly noticed in Le Temps, a major newspaper of the time (the ancestor of Le Monde), in its February 23, 1919 issue.

8. The right for civil servants to strike is legally recognized in the 1950 State Council Dehaene decision. But the State Council adds that this right to strike is exercised ‘within the framework of the laws governing it.’ Legally, the civil servants’ right to strike is thus submitted to exceptions and limitations under the scrutiny of administrative law judges.

9. Influenced by the Durkheim’s work, solidarism argues that the 1789 French Revolution has created, with individualism, a false freedom. Man is not an abstraction but a social being having rights and duties, which depends from others (parents, teachers, society as a whole) through social relationship. Everybody must pay his/her ‘debt’ to his/her social environment and the state has to make this solidarity efficient. Solidarism is a midway between socialism and economic liberalism. It is the forerunner theory of more recent ‘care’ theories. Léon Bourgeois proposes the instauration of a minimum wage, of social insurances and of the earnings tax.

10. For instance, a poll shows that 43% of interviewees supported the 15 May 2014 strike in the National Education while 40% of them opposed it. http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2014/05/15/greve-fonctionnaires-mouvement-qui-divise-francais-sondage-yougov_n_5324114.html.

11. Between 2012 and 2013, basic salaries fell in the three civil services. Between these two dates, the average earnings of state civil servants (full time equivalent) had lost .7% in constant euros for an average net salary of 2740 euros net per month in 2013. In the territorial civil service, the decline was .1% in constant euros, for an average net salary of 1850 euros per month, while in public hospitals it was .2%, for an average net monthly salary of 2240 euros. The explanation for this decline is to be found in the salary freeze associated with an increasing pension contribution rate.