‘Crisis’ in the French Labour Movement Reconsidered

This study has sought to explain CGT and CFDT behaviour at the grassroots level, that is within the individual firm. I have focused on the local level primarily because of dissatisfaction with the dominant scholarly approach to the French labour movement, which has emphasised national-level organisation. This approach has many virtues, especially the identification of general confederation strategies — how they are perceived and translated into concrete action by militants and constituent unions. In so doing, this approach has tended to slight important recent trends in French industrial relations at the firm level: the growth of organised labour’s institutional foothold (if not enhanced power) in terms of union rights and plant committee participation, and new management strategies to ‘contain’ unions, to name just two. Finally, the dominant approach has little to say about union organisational life beyond national headquarters, thus providing a highly static view of unions as complex organisations.