Original in French, in Revue internationale du Travail 164 (4). Translation by the ILR Editorial team. This book review is also available in Spanish, in Revista Internacional del Trabajo 144 (4).

This collective volume draws on studies carried out across seven industries in France to analyse how the institutions of wage employment – particularly employee representative bodies – helped the country to weather the COVID-19 crisis. Its authors argue that the experience of the health crisis demonstrated the importance of the protection provided by these institutions and the need to examine the challenges they have faced in recent years.

In the twentieth century, labour regulation in France was structured at the industry level. However, successive reforms over the past 20 years have weakened industry-level bargaining, ushering in regulation at the firm level, where employers’ interests appear to carry greater weight than those of workers.¹ The authors pay particular attention to the 2017 reform of employee representative bodies, which abolished the specialized bodies on occupational safety and health (OSH) – the Health, Safety and Working Conditions Committees (CHSCTs) – whose agendas have now been “buried” under all the questions that employee representatives have to address under a single representative body: the Social and Economic Committee. This de-specialization of representatives has marginalized OSH issues, a development which appears to have been misaligned with the times, given the emergence of the COVID-19 crisis and firms needing to come up with health protocols in order to maintain production. This disconnect is further reinforced by the centralization of firm-level social dialogue at the group level – another consequence of the recent reforms to collective bargaining. By distancing negotiations and consultations from the workplace level, they are carried out without the specific practical knowledge of those directly involved in production – knowledge that is essential when organizing work during a health crisis.² This is the view of Denis Giordano in Chapter 2, which examines public works firms. He argues that the centralization of social dialogue at the firm level reduced the capacity of employee representatives to monitor and adapt health measures at the workplace. In the automobile sector (Chapter 5), Juan Sebastian Carbonnell also notes that the abolition of the CHSCTs weakened local-level consultation. In the telecommunications industry, examined by Camille Dupuy and Jules Simha (Chapter 6), and in the banking industry, analysed by Vincent-Arnaud Chappe (Chapter 7), employee representation was also undermined by the centralization of social dialogue.

Ironically, as the reform was only recent, it was precisely the OSH expertise of staff representatives that helped weather the COVID-19 crisis. In the public hospital studied by Damien Cartron and Claude Didry (Chapter 1), the time required to implement the reform meant that the CHSCT had not yet been abolished when the pandemic struck. The cinema industry, which Samuel Zarka examines in Chapter 3, had historically delegated bargaining on OSH and working conditions to an “industry-level CHSCT”, which exempted it from the 2017 reform. In both these cases, the preservation of expertise and bargaining spaces created the conditions for the continuation or rapid resumption of activities. In other industries where representative bodies had already undergone reform – such as construction and public works – the still-recent experience of the CHSCTs contributed to effective consultations between employee representatives and employers, helping to limit health risks (Chapter 2). Lastly, in the vacuum left by the CHSCTs, the automobile group studied in Chapter 5 set up local OSH committees, including trade union representatives, to develop health protocols locally. By contrast, Karel Yon’s analysis of McDonald’s (Chapter 4) shows how weak trade union organizations and employee representative bodies – lacking established expertise – were sidelined in the regulation of health issues and in the organization of the continuation or resumption of work. Instead, these matters were subject to negotiations between McDonald’s France and its franchises. The experience of the health crisis underscores the importance of maintaining spaces for social dialogue that are closely connected to working conditions and the long-term damage caused by the loss of CHSCT expertise.

The health crisis also revealed the protective role of the institutions of wage employment. In the twentieth century, these institutions had established that wage employment was not a commodity – first, by enforcing the employment contract and employer responsibility, and second, by subjecting its conditions to social dialogue at the industry or interoccupational level.³ Although the institutions of wage employment in France remain relatively robust – open-ended contracts still account for three quarters of jobs and the welfare state remains strong⁴ – they have faced sustained challenges over the past 40 years and the foundations of the right to remuneration, whether through employment or social protection, have been progressively weakened.⁵ Nevertheless, it was the decommodification of labour that enabled the country to withstand the health crisis. According to Damien Cartron and Claude Didry (Chapter 1), the public service status of hospital workers – which strongly decommodifies non-medical healthcare roles – was a key enabling factor in the mobilization and reorganization of teams during the crisis. Similarly, the widespread use of partial employment benefits in the construction and public works industry and the automobile industry helped protect workers’ ties to their companies – even while the economy was at a standstill and workers stayed at home – and created the conditions for a rapid restart once the restrictions were lifted.

By documenting the capacities of the institutions of wage employment in a major crisis, the book underscores the regressive effects of recent reforms. Claude Didry advocates a return to the protection offered by the employment contract rather than the uberization of work; to wages based on qualifications rather than performance-related bonuses; to the stability of the workplace rather than the disruption caused by teleworking and hot desking; and to the CHSCT as a foundation for workplace democracy. This “restoration” of the institutions of wage employment – referencing the title of the book’s final chapter – must, however, be held up against the results that the book itself presents. Regarding workplace democracy, the presence of a CHSCT did not necessarily guarantee bargaining over work organization during the health crisis: in one of the hospitals studied (Chapter 1), the CHSCT was excluded from such decision-making. Conversely, in the automobile group examined (Chapter 5), the CHSCT had been abolished, but local health committees provided a space for dialogue. Moreover, the absence of CHSCTs was less decisive in shaping McDonald’s response to the crisis than the influence of franchise owners and a weak bargaining culture (Chapter 4). Lastly, rather than the public service status of hospital workers, was it not the suspension of managerial bureaucracy that enabled the fluid reorganization of hospital services during the COVID-19 crisis?⁶ This suggests that, beyond employee representative bodies, the main obstacle to “restoring democracy” (p. 249) lies in the managerial apparatus that restricts workers’ control over their work.⁷

Regarding the book’s call to “restore the employment contract” (p. 228), this should not obscure the fact that open-ended contracts protect employees – the insiders – neglecting the outsiders. The collapse of temporary work during the health crisis serves as a reminder that relying on the employment contract as the sole guarantor of employee rights leaves employees vulnerable to job cuts. Linking employee rights to the individual rather than the job – through mechanisms such as public service status or the right to remuneration between jobs under the French scheme for intermittent workers in the performing arts⁸ – may offer more secure alternatives than the employment contract. Advocacy for a return to certain achievements of the institutions of wage employment at the firm or industry level should therefore be complemented by another lesson from the health crisis: the need to advance the decommodification of labour beyond the employment contract in order to better protect workers and enable them to exercise greater control over their work.⁹

Jean-Pascal Higelé

TETRAS - Université de Lorraine

Notes

1. Baptiste Giraud and Jérôme Pélisse, eds, Le dialogue social sous contrôle (Paris: PUF, 2024). ⮭
2. IRES, “Après les ordonnances Travail de 2017: une négociation collective toujours plus proche de l’entreprise?”, La Revue de l’Ires 107–108, No. 2 (2022). ⮭
3. Claude Didry, L’Institution du travail: droit et salariat dans l’histoire (Paris: La Dispute, 2016). ⮭
4. Christophe Ramaux, L’État social: pour sortir du chaos néolibéral (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2012). ⮭
5. Jean-Pascal Higelé, ed., Les transformations des ressources des travailleurs: une lecture de l’emploi et des droits sociaux en France (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2009). ⮭
6. Fanny Vincent and Pierre-André Juven, “De Charybde en Scylla: l’hôpital au gré des crises”, Savoir/Agir 56, No. 2 (2021): 11–20. https://doi.org/10.3917/sava.056.0013. ⮭
7. Lionel Jacquot, L’enrôlement du travail: comprendre la machinerie managériale (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2014). ⮭
8. Mathieu Grégoire, Les intermittents du spectacle: enjeux d’un siècle de luttes (de 1919 à nos jours) (Paris: La Dispute, 2013). ⮭
9. Jean-Pascal Higelé, “Formes de valorisation du travail: le «crash-test» du confinement”, Les mondes du travail, No. 26 (2021): 135–146. ⮭