The breakup of the Union of the Left in France, beginning in September 1977, and this bloc's subsequent defeat in the March 1978 elections set in motion important long-term repercussions in the labor movement.
The two main French union federations, the CGT and the CFDT, had for years been working on the assumption that the left would win the elections. Awaiting the vote, they had suspended struggles and avoided any expression of militancy.
Nonetheless, the failure of the Union of the Left did not affect both of these federations in the same way, and their respective leaderships drew different conclusions from it. The CGT was hit by a deepgoing crisis. This is the price it has had to pay for its commitment to the Common Program [of the Union of the Left] and its aligning itself unconditionally with the CP in the latter's polemics and break with the Socialist Party.
The nature and depth of this crisis of the CGT are unprecedented, and they are affecting its relations with the working class. At the same time, this crisis has posed as never before the question of internal democracy in unions and what sort of relationship they should have with the workers political parties. The CGT leadership has had to initiate a public debate on these questions.
The CFDT is trying to take advantage of the present crisis and paralysis of the CGT. It has begun very rapidly to make a spectacular political turn, which has become known in France as "the readjustment of focus.
The more and more open objective of the CFDT is to bring about a realignment of the trade-union movement around a "new look" Social Democratic orientation. The essence of this policy is to get the workers to go along with paying the cost of the economic crisis.
In the wake of the Union of the Left defeat in the March elections, Force Ouvrière, the third-largest union federation, whose main strength is among civilservice workers, has won many important gains in representation elections, usually at the expense of the CGT. This progress is the result of the popularity in certain sections of workers of FO's "nonpolitical" orientation. At the time of the elections, this federation refused to make a choice between the left and right. However, the relative strengthening of its position in the representation elections has not been accompanied by any increase in the number of its activists.
The FEN, the teachers union, which is led by Social Democrats, supported the Union of the Left. After March, it went back to a "realist" policy of negotiating and making agreements with the government. In practice, it is following an orientation quite close to that of FO.
In the new political situation opened up by the victory of the right in the March elections, the picture in the trade-union movement is dominated by division, which is a carryover of the split between the CP and the SP. This rift is endangering the trade-union common front, of which the CGT and the CFDT were the main components.
The union federations have agreed on two things only. One is to recognize Giscard d'Estaing's legitimacy as president.? The CFDT did not waste any time in this. Immediately after the election defeat, it asked for a meeting with the president. The CGT, for its part, has continually made it clear that it recognizes Giscard, reiterating that there is no political solution in sight for achieving the immediate demands the workers are raising.
The second thing the CGT and CFDT have agreed on is the need for united action by the trade unions, although each poses its own preconditions for such joint action. Both have, in reality, systematically fostered division in the ranks of the workers. And they have done this at a time when the bosses and the government have been mounting a very broad offensive against the gains of the workers movement.
In fact, the bosses and the government are trying to carry over the political victory they won in March into the economic and social arenas. They are now aiming to create an army of two million unemployed in France. Large-scale attacks and campaigns are being launched against the law establishing a forty-hour week, against the minimum-wage law, and against unemployment compensation.
Recently, François Ceyrac, the chairman of the CNPF, the employers organization, said that workers should be able to work up to the age of sixty-seven or seventy if they want to. He proposed this at a time when tens of thousands of workers are being thrown out of work every month.
But, far from being roused to fight back by these provocative statements, the union federations have agreed to negotiate on the basis of the bosses' proposals. Several dozen contracts have been signed since March, and there is not a one of them that does not involve capitulation on the basic common wage demand for a 2,400 franc minimum wage at April 1978 buying power.
The militancy of the workers has remained at a high level in a whole series of sectors. Examples are the workers in the health services, the arsenals, the Renault automobile works, the railroads, the post office, teachers, and the merchant marine. For months there has been an unbroken chain of strikes. The union federations are trying to outdo each other in coming up with the cleverest way to prevent these mobilizations from converging, to keep them isolated, and to string them out.
The achievement of trade-union unity against the attacks of the bosses and the government would unleash a dynamic in which the workers would be able to express their militancy and their determination to fight back. This would pose the question of a counterattack by the working class as a whole, proceeding from the economic to the general political level.
Neither the CP and the SP or the CGT and the CFDT intend for a moment to let things get that far. Every opportunity is taken to engage in polemics, every opportunity is taken to find a pretext for division between the CGT and the CFDT. The most recent polemics have been over the elections to the European parliament. The CFDT-to the great indignation of the French Stalinists-has come out publicly in support of the international campaign being run by the Socialist parties.
The Crisis of the CGT
The CGT, the principal French union federation, is paying a very high price for having committed itself to the Common Program and for having lined up with the CP at the time of the split in the Union of the Left.
The indictment of the CP for having provoked the split and opened the way for the victory of the right is having repercussions in the CGT. In September 1977 this union federation suddenly discovered that it could not support a program that did not include nationalizing the subsidiaries of the nine corporations that the Common Program pledged to transfer to the public sector.
On March 13, immediately following the first round in the legislative elections, the CGT expressed its satisfaction at the lastminute electoral pact arrived at by the CP, the SP, and the Left Radicals, even though this agreement did not include one word about nationalizing the subsidiaries in question.
For its fortieth congress, which is being held this November, the CGT has put down in black and white the demand for nationalizing the so-called daughter companies. But this is a crude attempt to legitimize, after the fact, the attitude it took in September.
However, the Stalinist fraction that runs the CT has recognized how troubled the activists and the rank-and-file workers were by its position. It could not continue forever to ignore the protests of the activists, especially trade-union leaders who are also SP members.
In September 1977, two members of the national leadership of the CGT, Claude Germont and Pierre Carrasus, denounced the federation's lining up with the CP. They demanded freedom of expression for all points of view in the federation's press, calling for the publication of open-forum columns. For months a number of petitions and open letters have been circulating in the CGT raising the same demands.
The national leadership decided to try to co-opt these critical tendencies in the preparation of its fortieth congress. It has arranged for the publication of very long and very rich open-forum columns in the federation's press. It needs at all cost to refurbish the CT's democratic façade in order to try to reverse the trend and regain the ground that has been lost.
The CGT leadership senses that its bureaucratic grip cannot be maintained by the traditional methods of imposing discipline, asserting authority, and refusing to allow debate and the expression of differences. While it is very limited and tightly controlled, this democratic opening is creating conditions that are unprecedented in the CGT.
Now, the expression of all sorts of differences in the federation has been, to some extent, legitimized. Le Peuple, the fortnightly organ of the CT, recently published a discussion column by two very critical activists, who called for coordinating and unifying the struggles taking place with a view toward building a general strike.
These unprecedented democratic freedoms in the CGT, of course, remain largely formal. The CP apparatus keeps a firm grip on the organization and is going to continue to. But a different sort of climate exists now, one that offers more of an opportunity for the workers to express themselves and to consider the issues. Nothing can keep the criticism of the CGT's bureaucratic subordination to the CP from spreading. The crisis in the CGT, which has been marked also by a stagnation or decline in membership despite repeated recruitment campaigns, is developing parallel to the one in the CP. They feed each other.
The CGT leadership is not only paying for the divisionist attitude it adopted in the period leading up to the elections. It has now to take account of the political influence the SP has in the working class. This problem could be concealed as long as there was a façade of unity behind the Common Program. But now that the CP and the SP are competing openly, this problem has come out into the light of day.
The CT also has to make concessions, although these have been very limited and often purely formal, to the new aspirations that have arisen in the society and in the working class. It has to recognize now that women workers have their own specific demands. More belatedly than the CP, it has taken up the term "self management."
All these factors combined are creating a situation marked by persistent problems for the Stalinist leadership. These chiefs are trying to maintain their bureaucratic control over the CGT without putting the federation in a position where it has to fall back into a ghetto existence, confined to those sections of the working class that have long supported it.
One of the CGT leadership's major difficulties in carrying out this operation lies in the lack of understanding and the rigidity of the intermediate-level cadres. They are often unprepared for a "democratic"
flexibility in which requires course, thought and action. This is something that they have never learned.
The CFDT 'Readjusts its Focus'
Immediately after the electoral defeat in March, the CFDT leadership announced a "change of focus." This was officially explained as "refocusing on trade-union problems," as reasserting the unions' autonomy vis-à-vis political parties. The electoral road had failed, the CFDT leadership explained, owing to a lack of dynamism in social struggles. The attitude of sitting back and waiting for the elections had paralyzed the trade-union movement and the working class.
Thus, the CFDT is presenting itself as the only major organization in the workers movement that has gone on after the election results to undertake a general reassessment and to make a certain selfcriticism, since it recognizes that it itself fell into illusions.
Underlying this largely demagogic critical turn is the kind of line that is known in France as the "policy of climbing stairs." In fact, the CFDT leaders have gotten themselves photographed from every angle on the stairs leading to the presidential or ministerial offices. They have claimed that negotiation was now the royal road for the trade unions and the key aspect of the class struggle.
This policy of going hat in hand to government officials has been imitated by the unions in the various industries as well as the district councils, without it leading to any appreciable result. But it has been followed with a lot of interest by the government and the bosses, who have sometimes granted satisfaction-not on the demands but on the procedures for consultation and negotiation.
Although the CFDT leadership says that it is not happy with what it has gotten, it intends to continue its new policy "in the face of all adversity" and to get it endorsed at the federation's congress in Brest in May 1979.
This "readjustment of focus" does deserve the attention the bosses are paying to it. This policy, which was worked out last January and announced in a document that has become known as the "Moreau Report, represents capitulation by the workers movement in face of the economic crisis.
The theme of "negotiable" demands, that is, ones "that are appropriate in view of the economic crisis," was popularized several months before the elections by Edmond Maire, the general secretary of the CFDT. The talk about the need in France to "restore the framework for negotiations" began about the same time.
After the elections, the "readjustment of focus" took the form of rejecting all actions involving more than one kind of worker. The reasoning was that such mobilizations did not apply pressure on the decision makers with whom it was possible to negotiate. Moreover, it was argued that they were dangerous because they assumed a political character. Actions involving several categories of workers made the unions dependent on political parties.
The CFDT leadership showed its adeptness in exploiting the bitterness the activists felt about days of action bringing together different categories of workers that were just intended for show. It is basing itself on their revulsion against this sort of thing in order to justify its rejecting unity in action with the CGT.
Underlying the readjustment of focus is the CFDT leaders' analysis of the problems the crisis poses for them. What they propose is a policy of adapting to the crisis. At the same time they try to cover themselves by talking about the need to safeguard democratic institutions and by making a face-saving deal with the bosses. The deal they offer is along the lines of "you give us concessions on the quality of labor's situation, and we'll be reasonable about our quantitative demands."
All the CFDT's proposals point in the direction of capitalist reforms of the work process, of working hours, and "responsibility" on the job. This is also to involve a more egalitarian distribution of the volume of wages. The whole package is decked out in the vocabulary of self-management in an attempt to make it appear that it reflects the aspirations of the workers.
The CFDT has shown that it is ready to accept lower wages in exchange for a shorter workweek. But it is abandoning any perspective for a struggle for the thirty-five hour week now under the pretext that such a reform can be consolidated only on a Europe-wide scale. Everywhere it is throwing out offers of participation by union organizations on the different levels in setting economic goals for the various localities, regions, and industries.
The CFDT justifies these proposals on the basis of its theory of a "new type of development." This involves the conception that it is possible to find a solution for the crisis that is in the interests of the workers by altering the economic decisions the bosses make at every level. The federaremains cautious about tion, however, putting forward its policy publicly. This is because of the pressure it faces from the CGT and the CP. Unlike the CGIL* [the CP controlled federation] in Italy, it cannot praise accepting austerity and sacrifice as a revolutionary virtue.
The CFDT leadership has also learned the lessons from the recent behavior of the CGT and the CP. These organizations are refusing to take responsibility before the workers for managing the crisis. So, no other policy is possible in France as long as the CP and the CGT remain dominant in the workers movement.
The CFDT leadership is linked to the SP but it is very critical of the party's line. It judges correctly that the SP cannot hold its own against the CP on the shop floor and suspects it of being willing to concede too much to the Communists for the sake of unity.
The CFDT's central objective in its operation "to restore hope" is to bring about regroupment in the French workers movement favorable to a form of Social Democracy in which the unions would play a preeminent role. It believes that it can hold its ground against the CP and calls on the SP to act as a mere extension of the unions in parliament.
The CFDT is openly backing the "Rocard Current" in the SP. This has brought it some sharp reprimands from François Mitterrand, who remains the head of the SP. There is some truth in the accusations of "neoworkerism" hurled at the Rocard tendency by the CERES," the "left" current in the SP, which is heavily influenced by the CP.
In the CFDT, this "change of focus" is provoking a great deal of concern and resistance, as well as open opposition. But this policy is backed up by a rejuvenated and reinvigorated old anti-Marxist right wing. There is a left opposition that could become very large. But it is quite fragmented and heterogeneous and has no tradition of struggle against the federation's bureaucratic apparatus.
1, in recent years the
On the other hand CFDT leadership has continued its forced march to build a homogeneous apparatus and done so quite effectively. For more than a year it has not hesitated to resort to massive expulsions, even at the risk of tarnishing its reputation for democracy and for promoting "self-management."
Notes
1. Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labor). Confédération Fran- çaise Démocratique du Travail (French Democratic Confederation of Labor).—IP/1
2. Fédération de l'Education Nationale (National Education Federation).-IP/1
3. Giscard D'Estaing was elected for a sevenyear term in the framework of an "electoral college" established by the Gaullist constitution, which places severe restrictions on popular sovereignty.-IP/I