France and the Struggle over Labour Reforms
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- Published on Thursday, 22 September 2016 22:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1307 .... September 23, 2016
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France and the Struggle over Labour Reforms
Maxime Benatouil
The so-called Labour Law, passed en force by the French government on 20 July, is the most serious attack against the "Code du Travail," already undermined for the past thirty years. A short historical overview is necessary to better grasp the destructive scope of this law, promoted and enforced by a socialist government -- cruel irony!
The Labour Code is a compilation of regulations giving structures to the relationship between employees and employers at the national level. It emerged after the shock of the 1906 catastrophe of Courrières, Northern France, where 1099 miners lost their lives.
The underlying idea was to adapt labour to people, and not people to labour. If the principle of... 3x8 (8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure and 8 hours of sleep) was acknowledged, it was not to please companies’ bosses but people themselves, so that they can live from and with their labour.
So when President François Hollande states that "we need to adapt labour law to companies’ needs," this is a conceptual counter-revolution. Nothing is modern in this statement, and it has nothing to do with the crisis. He confessed it himself: "(the labour law) will not produce effects in terms of employments for a few months. It is more about setting up a new social model." He made crystal clear that unemployment was a pretext, and that the objective was to break with the existing rationale of the labour code. The Labour Law should therefore be seen for what it really is: a neoliberal reconsideration of decades of struggles led by trade unions and the Left to protect workers. Even employers were surprised by the content of the Law, which goes much further that any right-wing previous attempts to change the labour code.