Ten months
after taking power, Emmanuel Macron, his Prime Minister and his government will
be facing their first real taste of opposition in the next few weeks. As so
often happens in France, it will come from the street and as so often in the
past, it will be mounted by railway workers. This time they are protesting about the
government’s proposals for reform of the SNCF. There is a general impression
in the media and public opinion that the future of Macron’s reforming agenda
will be determined by the outcome of this dispute
The
objective reasons for reforming the wholly state-owned SNCF can be summarised
in a few sentences and are hardly in dispute: the company has a quasi monopoly of
rail services in France, a debt of over €50 billion, about 160,000 employees for
just over 300,000 pensioners and its running costs are roughly 30% higher than
those of its European competitors. The main reason for this is that train
drivers, maintenance and sales staff and on-board ticket inspectors work shorter
hours and are entitled to longer holidays and earlier retirement than most
other public and private sector workers. Their highly specific labour contract,
their “statut” as it is called, dates
back to 1920 when a large part of their job consisted in shovelling coal into the
boilers of steam-powered locomotives. The government is intent on abandoning the
“statut” for new recruits and turning
the SNCF, currently an integral part of the public sector and therefore immune to
normal market pressures, into a still publicly owned but normal joint stock
company to be run on a more commercial basis. It should be noted in passing that the SNCF,
through its majority owned subsidiary, Keolis, is successfully and profitably
running railway, tramway and bus service all over the world, from Boston, Massachusetts,
to India to Australia. But in France, it
has never been able to do so. In protest against the reform plans, the railway
unions have announced a two-day strike every three days from the beginning of
April to the end of June, a strike mode designed, as a union official quite openly
admitted on television a few nights ago, “to combine maximum disruption to train
services with minimum loss of earnings for railway workers”.
As previous
French governments have accepted, after much procrastination, an EU-wide
regulation introducing greater competition in rail services, while doing
nothing to prepare the SNCF to meet it, it is clear enough to most people why these
fairly minimal reforms are necessary. But
the unions see the reform as the thin end of the wedge towards more flexible
working practices, longer hours and more commercial management. And yet, the government
has been careful to stake out its ground: existing employees will keep their statut until they retire, and no
proposal is being made at this stage to reform their generous pension scheme or
close down unprofitable rail services, both of which will be dealt with in 2019
or later. The government has promised consultation with the unions, presumably
one of the reasons why they haven’t called a strike until after the Easter
weekend. There will undoubtedly be many such consultations, out of the media spotlight,
between now and April 3.
This ritual
process of consultation is probably the key to the outcome of the dispute. In
France, no more than anywhere else, employees are understandably reluctant to give
up employment privileges, however out-dated. But in France, much more than
anywhere else, people in general insist on being consulted, expressing their views
and being listened to. In the somewhat futile “what-if” approach to history,
many are those who wonder whether the French Revolution, for instance, would
have taken the course it did if Louis XVI had listened more carefully to the
complaints of his downtrodden subjects. The fact is that every French person
feels that everyone has a right to speak out and be listened to. Having lived in
France for so many years, I have lost count of the number of meetings of committees,
associations or other groups I have attended in which participants did not
necessarily want to answer the chairperson’s questions, react to what someone
else had just said or propose a practical way forward but simply to sound off
about what was on their mind. In an Anglo-Saxon culture, a meeting of any kind
usually has a chairperson, whose job it is to guide the meeting through an agenda,
give the floor to people who ask for it, sum up the discussion and suggest a
way forward. In France, and I suspect in most countries with a more Latin culture,
the chairperson is seen as more of an honorific title than a function, the
agenda is vague, contributions to the discussion are spontaneous and not
necessarily about the point at issue, there is little attempt to sum up and once
everybody has had a chance to express their views, the meeting goes on to talk
about something else or breaks up. Subsequently, whatever needs to be done gets
done - those with executive power have to find a way of reconciling conflicting
views and constraints, often an impossible task. But the essential thing for most
people is not necessarily that decisions are taken but that everyone has had a
chance to air their views.
French labour
unions, far stronger in the public than the private sector, have become extraordinarily
skilled at exploiting these foibles of the national psyche. On top of
presenting labour conflicts in the usual guise of workers fighting for their
rights against an uncaring and technocratic government, they frequently complain
that governments “don’t listen”, have already “made up their mind” or refuse to
engage in “real negotiations”, which is usually union speak for the refusal to
meet their demands. Other bogeymen designed to resonate powerfully with the public
are often conjured up too, like “an all-out attempt to destroy”, or - even more
prominent in union demonology - to “privatise”
public services. For their part, ministers fall over themselves to declare that
they are “negotiating in good faith” and that “their door is always open”.
It is of
course the unions’ role to defend their members' interests as best they can. As
for the government, it may have picked its fight carefully over SNCF reform but
it has not made life easier for itself by announcing that it will legislate through
the French equivalent of executive orders (ordonnances),
which makes it sound as if it will not listen to the other side and is refusing
a proper parliamentary debate. And for the first time since the start of the
Macron presidency, the unions are apparently united in their chosen course of
action.
The cause
of the last major transport strike of 1995, that paralysed the whole country
for six long weeks, was that Prime Minister Alain Juppé unexpectedly foisted
radical reform proposals on unsuspecting public sector employees, including railway workers, and they were justifiably
angry. The government eventually had to back down and abandon much of its
proposed reform. And it was not because
the unions won the argument but because a majority of the general public, in spite
of the chaos in the country and the extreme difficulty of getting to work or
anywhere else, ultimately chose to back the public sector employees and not the
government. I suspect that the key to averting or ending the promised rail strike
this time will not be the merits of each side’s arguments but, once again, whether
people generally feel that the railway workers have been given not necessarily
a fair deal but a fair hearing in the court of public opinion. Today, railway
workers’ “anger”, faced with a reform that Macron has abundantly trailed and that
will not affect them much anyway, sounds more rhetorical than real. But the
government does not have much ground to give. If it does come to a protracted strike,
both sides will appeal to public opinion
- and public opinion will decide.
One thing is
therefore abundantly clear. If the
government manages to attain the limited goals of this reform and is considered
to have won its fight with the unions, it will have a freer hand to move on to the
more ambitious reforms that Macron has promised in other areas. If it has to
back down, it will have seriously weakened its capacity to take on more intractable
issues like pension reform or the reorganisation of the tentacular civil service. It is worth recalling that many
of those who voted for Macron in May of last year did not necessarily support his
reforming ambitions but wanted, quite simply, to prevent Marine le Pen from coming
to power. His reforms to date, of the labour code, vocational training and university
access have not caused much protest, but on the other hand, for all except the
very wealthy, taxes have risen. Sooner or later, men and women in the street will
deliver their verdict on his efforts so far and decide whether they want him to
continue.
