The contradictions of French industrial relations reform

This article explores the impact of the 1982-83 industrial relations reforms known as the lois Auroux of the Socialist government in France. It argues that, contrary to the goals of the Socialists, this reform package failed to stimulate regular collective bargaining between employers and trade unions. Nevertheless, the reforms did have an important impact on French industrial relations. In the context of economic crisis and chronically weakened trade unions, a secondary component of the reform package came to the fore. This component, shorn of its radical, anticapitalist elements, shared a common ideological heritage with the autogestionnaire, or self-management, current of the Socialist Party, which had been briefly popular in the 1970s. The result of the application of this legislation in the mid 1980s was to encourage a decentralized, firm-based, micro-corporatist form of industrial relations which fit well with the dominant managerial emphasis upon flexibility in the workplace