Under-Paid Shop Stewards: A Case of Strategic Discrimination?

Instances of discrimination against union members continue to accumulate in France, as can be seen by the multiplication of legal proceedings and judgements against a number of large firms. This qualitative impression was underpinned by the statistical results from the 2004 French REPONSE (Relations professionnelles et négociations d’entreprise) survey (the equivalent of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey), revealing that, at the same age and education, union representatives are paid around 10% less than their colleagues. We here confirm this result in the 2010 wave of the same survey. Union membership does not suffice to explain these lower wages: it is rather shop stewards, who are the most active in the defence of workers’ interests, who are the most heavily penalised. It is in practice difficult to establish that these workers receive lower wages for reasons other than their union responsibilities. The wage gap for union members who are not representatives is much smaller, at around 4%, while it is in firms that experience conflictual labour relations that shop stewards are paid the least