Pacifying the social: Creating the French citizen worker,1968–1975

Introduction

The French social crisis of 1968 had three dimensions: academic, social and political (Reynaud 1975). The student revolt of 3 May was extended on 13 May by the general strike launched by the trade unions (Berstein 1989). However, over the following weeks, the unions experienced increasing difficulties in directing a growing and increasingly unpredictable strike movement. The French Ministry of Labour did not collect data about the strikes in 1968. Reynaud (1975) estimates that some 12 days per employee were lost for all strike or strike-related activities. This compares with 0.34 days per employee in 1967, 0.16 days in 1969 and 0.13 in 1970. Faced with strikes that shook the government, French employers’ associations feared that the economic and political crisis would destabilize firms and factories. Employers regarded the strike wave as a movement that could not be resolved by conventional collective bargaining but as a crisis that demanded a new social settlement. In response to employer pressure, the government drew together trade unions and professional organizations to address the growing social crisis. On 25 May 1968, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou met trade unions and employers at the Ministry of Social Affairs, Rue de Grenelle in Paris. The round-table meeting did not produce an agreement, only an official report (constat de Grenelle), also called the Grenelle agreement, which listed a set of national social negotiations to be undertaken to defuse the social crisis. The Grenelle report tied the industrial to the social by advocating a wholesale revision of collective agreements, particularly the simplification of job classifications.

By setting minimum wages in industry, job classification defined the wage hierarchy, and so reformed the career system at the level of the firm. The establishment of a career system was regarded as a means of promoting the internalization of norms by individuals, binding them to firms, consumer society and democratic politics. Savage’s (1998) study of nineteenth century English railways and McKinlay’s (2002) examination of Scottish banking show that a career system is a governmental technique to achieve a business strategy (cf. McKinlay 2006; McKinlay et al. 2010). Initially, the railways sought to enhance travellers’ confidence by increasing their safety and the reliability of schedules; Scottish banks used careers to control growing branch networks and distant workforces. Organizational procedures were underpinned by inspection regimes. The system of centralized personnel control was strengthened, and these operational measures were paralleled – and made possible – by the systematic implementation of a career system, from 1860 to 1900. The promotion of the internalization of norms by employees was a form of governmentalism, a system that created a manageable population and measurable individuals.

The career supports organizational norms and a career system is a technique of managerial government. The study of the bargaining of national grids of job classification in France in the 1970s shows that these norms were not only organizational norms; they were also societal norms. Through bargaining around job classification, career systems contributed to the pacification of French workers in the 1970s and was central to the project of creating the citizen worker. Career systems can, then, be a technique that articulates political government and managerial government: the state, civil society and the firm. This is shown by the negotiations that constructed a new job classification system in French metalworking between 1968 and 1975.

The job classification negotiated in metalworking was the most influential in France. Metalworking was central to the history of job classification across all sectors. During the Popular Front period, the law of 24 June 1936 on collective agreements was based on the settlement covering Paris metalworking (Saglio 1987). Subsequently, government regulation after ‘la Liberation’ was based on the Popular Front negotiations.

The negotiations around job classification in steel lasted seven years, from autumn 1968 to 21 July 1975. The negotiation of the new job classification was led by the employers’ Union of Mining and Metallurgical Industries (UIMM), the Federation of Metalworkers (CGT), the General Federation of Metallurgy (CFDT), the Federation of Christian Trade Unions of Metallurgy (CFTC) and the Federation of Executives, Master Technicians (CGC). Different occupational categories (workers and employees, technicians and supervisors, engineers and managers) envisioned radically different classification schedules. The CGT, the most influential workers’ union, called for a single classification grid, ranging from unskilled workers to professional engineers, so that all categories could move up the job hierarchy. The employers wanted to retain clear breaks in the job hierarchy, and that each category would include its own distinct job classifications. For the employers, a common grid failed to recognize – and could compromise – the power and authority exercised by managers and supervisors. In 1972, the employers accepted the principle of a common classificatory grid applicable to all workers, including technicians and supervisors. This evolution was driven by legislation that wanted all workers to be able to pursue a career within a particular firm. The career offered a way of tying workers to firms rather than to occupations or trade unions, loyalties that were regarded as significant contributors to the 1968 strike wave. The government wanted to pacify workers by integrating them into consumer society through life-long careers.

The French worker against the state

The constat de Grenelle provided immediate measures of appeasement (a 50 per cent payment for strike days), and the prospect of a longer-term social settlement: an increase in the minimum wage; a 10 per cent raise in salary levels; and a reduction in employee social security contributions. The constat de Grenelle also provided an extensive programme of joint negotiations: a one-hour reduction in working hours; a revision of collective agreements; negotiations on improved job security; and a commitment to providing training and professional development for all workers. The Grenelle report contained a draft framework for a future law defining an expanded role for shop stewards. The role of unions inside the firm was strengthened, guaranteeing employees with a powerful voice on the shop floor and in the boardroom. The employers accepted these major changes without dissent.

Despite the negotiations, strikes continued. The refusal of workers at the CGT-dominated Renault-Billancourt to cease striking was widely discussed by the media (Zancarini-Fournel 2000). In response to grass roots pressure, the CGT denounced the draft Grenelle agreement. The employers exercised self-restraint and did not abandon the Grenelle agreement, even in the face of the union executives’ inability to enforce internal discipline. For the employers, to break with the Grenelle agreement would simply deepen the immediate crisis and reduce their credibility with the state, which had defined 1968 as a pervasive crisis of social order, not confined to collective bargaining or to the factory (Weber 1991).

Politically, the end of May was marked by a power vacuum (Berstein 1989). General de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly on 30 May. The legislative elections of June returned the Gaullist government by electing a National Assembly with a presidential majority. The social negotiating agenda established by Grenelle was gradually implemented. An inter-professional agreement on employment was signed on 10 February 1969; agreements on working time reduction followed. However, public dissatisfaction persisted and a presidential referendum on regionalization and senate reform was rejected, despite de Gaulle’s endorsement. On 27 April 1969 General de Gaulle announced his decision to leave power.

The implementation of the Grenelle programme continued under the presidency of Georges Pompidou. Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Prime Minister from June 1969, elaborated a ‘project for a New Society’ in which the monthly payment of wages (mensualisation) was central. Mensualisation is a wage payment system that ensured a predictable income for all workers. Previously, the earnings of hourly paid manual workers had varied according to the actual hours worked. The ‘monthly’ (mensuels) meant that all workers received a predictable income, irrespective of their actual working hours. Monthly payment also harmonized contracts for all workers. All employees were now compensated for absences due to illness, accident or maternity. Finally, various bonuses were consolidated into labour contracts, so removing an important form of employer discretion.

For the state, the aim was to better integrate workers into French society. The monthly allowed more people access to consumer society. This was one of Pompidou’s campaign themes, on the advice of the trade unionist George Levard (Bunel 1973). For Pompidou:

It brings to the workers, both high security and also a new dignity, since it now no longer divided, the elite, the so-called “monthlies”, from the infantry, the “footmen”, who were paid per hour. We must strive to ensure that everyone is paid monthly, enjoy a better standard of living, achieve greater security and more dignity. ¹

In September 1969, the Prime Minister delivered a policy speech to the National Assembly denouncing social segregation (Reynaud 1975: 289): ‘We’re still in a country of castes. Extreme differences of income and insufficient social mobility maintain anachronistic partitions between social groups.’ Politically, the material growth of employees was linked to overall economic growth. Pompidou’s policy found its first expression with the law of 11 January 1970, which indexed the minimum wage to the rate of economic growth. Mensualisation was, then, not just a technique for compensation, but a modernizing move to link the individual to the firm and the citizen as a drive for national economic growth and social order.

The state encouraged collective bargaining as the mechanism to resolve disputes between professions through ‘mutual compromise’ (Berstein and Rioux 1995: 54). Collective bargaining was conceived not as the cause – or a symptom – of industrial or social disorder but as an integrative mechanism. Pompidou first applied this logic in the public sector to pressure employers’ organizations to accept the principle that the scope of collective bargaining must be extended and that archaic notions of managerial authority had to be jettisoned if modernization were to succeed (Fridenson 2000). The development of training was one of the axes of Pompidou’s ‘New Society’ (Berstein and Rioux 1995: 51). In the private sector, an agreement on vocational training was signed on 9 July 1970. During negotiations, the unions unsuccessfully demanded automatic pay rises for all employees on completion of their training (Terrot 1983). Nevertheless, this agreement was welcomed by the trade unions but divided employers (Terrot 1983; Weber 1991). The right to vocational training during paid working time was a major achievement; a necessary but not a sufficient condition to guarantee a universal right to career progression.

The groups most affected by mensualisation were unskilled workers (Ouvriers specialisés (OS)). Skilled workers and labourers comprised more than half of all metalworkers and conflict was greatest within these categories Monthly payment prompted claims for greater employment stability. For the state, the monthly payment increased the bond between worker and profession and the firm. The term ‘bureaucratization’ – ‘fonctionnarisation’ – emerged together with the ‘carriérisation’ of manual workers. ² That is, the political strategy of mensualisation necessarily entailed the construction of new managerial strategies and governmentalist technologies to construct the possibility of individual careers. The crises that stimulated the search for a new political strategy to construct a new social order based on economic growth and social order also triggered the pursuit of a robust governmentalist regime at the level of the firm. This was a negotiated process that involved not just the state but also management and trade unions. The state may have initiated mensualisation, but its implementation required the formation of robust, novel forms of managerial government:

Monthly payment … cannot be treated in isolation. It is part of an overall policy to be defined … At the most general level, these measures relate to topics such as: employment, wages, conversion, social security, land …

At company level, they relate to guidelines in the area of production techniques that can appeal to a workforce more or less skilled and the production methods, schedules or rates and they also concern policies and practices of personnel recruitment, promotion, wage, security, sharing work and results, training, information and, of course, union relations. ³

Mensualisation was not primarily a question of law. Its logic could only be developed in the firm, and focused on the organization of work:

Instead of bringing together systems and statutes, such as the extension of the “monthly”, we must build on new foundations and replace outdated concepts of “Monthly” and “Hourly” by analyzing the contents of how system function and their job requirements. This data has many other uses besides deciding transfers and promotions … ⁴

In their joint statement of 20 April 1970, the General Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises, the Conseil National du Patronat Français and the unions challenged all companies to launch mensualisation as the prelude, the forcing ground to modernizing their personnel systems and labour processes.

Mensualisation and job classification

In 1969, just 10 per cent of workers were paid monthly. Many firms expressed doubts about its generalizability. Mensualisation could lower productivity, increase absenteeism, and impede labour mobility and the benefits linked to seniority. ⁵ In a manual designed to help companies introduce monthly payment, the prestigious Société d’Organisation criticized the conservatism and self-interest of the ‘corps des mensualisés’ (Fadeuilhe and Saint-Guilhem 1970: 19):

What characterised the situation before 1969 was the fact that not only are salaried staff a minority in every firm, but that this is a minority trying to maintain its monopoly over its privileged status. Thus we speak of workers who were … an “old boys club” …

Major strikes erupted in the automotive sector where workers enjoyed relatively high earnings. The movement began at Renault, Le Mans in 1971 and quickly spread throughout the company and beyond. ⁶ The situation of unskilled automotive workers (OS) became emblematic of a more general social problem (Hatzfeld 2000). The government recognized the central importance of the OS in the construction of the universal career and social order. The state instructed Yves Delamotte, director of training of labour inspectors, to report on the crisis of scientific management. The Act of 16 July 1971 on continuing vocational training aimed to upgrade manual work and reform workplace training. Companies also responded to the OS crisis: Renault improved working conditions, both as a short-term concession and as the start of a long-term response (Perriaux 1999). Employers mobilized to halt the collapse of mass production. At the request of Francis Ceyrac, president of the CNPF, Bernard Vernier-Palliez, president and CEO of Saviem, a subsidiary of Renault Trucks, produced a 1972 report on The Problem of OS. ⁷ Metalworking companies began to reform the job classification system that they had been using since the 1950s, most commonly the Telemecanique technique. This method determines the skills necessary for each task organized hierarchically. Telemecanique measured intelligence, memory, application, dedication to work and general culture. The unions often rejected Telemecanique as a method of job evaluation tainted by its association with post-war American productivity missions. For the employers, employees must accept the grid of qualifications and that work practices represented a neutral technology that was outside of collective bargaining. Equally, the introduction of a comprehensive job classification required that separate occupations and unions had to accept that this new logic ended historic patterns of sectional bargaining.

The CGT and CFDT welcomed the prospect of uniform contracts, an agreed mechanism of job evaluation and single-status contracts. A single job classification grid posed no threat to OS and opened up new possibilities of career progression. The two unions also advocated the construction of a new, unified collective bargaining regime that dispensed with separate agreements for all occupations, including technicians, supervisors and managers. The UIMM blocked the principle of a unified job hierarchy in favour of maintaining the distinctive status of engineers and managers. An agreement on the classification of engineers and managers was signed on 3 November 1969. For other labour categories, no text was negotiated until 1972. A watershed in the negotiations came in 1972 when the UIMM produced a draft job classification.

Classification and mensualisation

The Grenelle agreement was critical in accelerating negotiations around worker classifications. For the universal career to be possible, the major principles of professional development within the company also had to be negotiated. In 1972, the UIMM noted the relationship between mensualisation and job classification:

The refusal to give workers new coefficients cannot obviously be prolonged further, the acceptance in principle by the UIMM of a single grid for the workers and supervisors, the monthly payment process and what has already been granted by some companies, make it inevitable eventually, regardless of the classification system used, the setting of new rates for workers in the framework of a continuous grid … ⁸

By signing the monthly payment agreement for metallurgy in July 1970, the UIMM accepted the principle of a single grid for workers. However, the employers maintained the principle of a separate status for professional engineers and managers. A collective agreement specific to that category was signed on 13 March 1972. For other categories, the UIMM accepted that the single grid allowed all workers to progress to the top of their specific category. The contradiction between principle and practice was clear and undeniable but, for the UIMM, tolerable so long as there was little chance of their status being under real threat.

While preparing its model agreement, the UIMM identified company classificatory practices. ⁹ The UIMM’s lead negotiator, Pierre Guillen, and Michel Champion examined the practical influence of Telemecanique and other highly formalized job classification methods. Champion participated in job evaluation training sessions in Berliet and Renault. ¹⁰ The aim was not to generalize local practices into national procedures, but to derive robust principles and techniques that could structure a managerial practice of enterprise government. The UIMM concluded that there were two dominant approaches: the classification systems in steel and the Berliet model. ¹¹ The Berliet model served as the benchmark for negotiators. This project was established in late 1972 by a group that comprised Champion, formerly of Telemecanique, Jean-Pierre Mignot and Pierre Aubert, head of Berliet’s Qualification, Labour and Testing Services.

Berliet was a truck-maker based in Lyon. In the early 1970s, it was the most important French exporter of manufactured products to the European market. Berliet’s history made the company iconic for both employers and unions. In 1961, Berliet management recognized the union as representative of all employees with extensive rights in terms of communication, contracts and access to executives. ¹² This extensive recognition of trade unions was paralleled by the introduction of single-status contracts for all Berliet staff, including the harmonization of all benefits. ¹³ Throughout the 1960s, Berliet was renowned for social agreements concluded between management and unions. By the early 1970s, the company had a reputation for progressive social programmes combined with tight management of increasingly strained workplace social relations. The July 1968 national agreement on trade union rights was denounced by Berliet management as compromising managerial authority. ¹⁴ In May 1971, while an annual social audit was under way, a strike of nearly two months was ended only by the personal intervention of Berliet’s director of the labor. In Berliet, the political tensions of 1968 reached into the unions. The CFDT leadership in Berliet was immobilized by attacks from the left from 1972, and this limited the authority of the national union leadership of CFDT (Bonnet 2000).

Berliet representatives were particularly active in the employers’ technical working group on job classification, a reflection of the company’s prestige and deep experience. Indeed, Berliet experts possessed essential knowledge for both union and employer negotiators. The Berliet expérience was crucial for the UIMM, confronted with the task of rolling out the new classification system across French engineering. Berliet also provided employer and union negotiators with a large number of benchmark jobs around which to negotiate new classification systems. The connection between the method adopted by the UIMM and that developed by Berliet was clearest in that both used criteria relating to information use: instructions, objectives and programmes. At Berliet, the first category of workers to undergo job classification in the early 1960s was professional workers level 1 (P1). In early 1970, this was extended to include the management of unskilled workers. ¹⁵ For union negotiators, the goal was to secure raises for the greatest possible number of unskilled workers. During the negotiations, the negotiators’ strategies converged on the skilled worker category, P1: ‘It is on this definition of P1 that we have fought the hardest, because it must provide maximum access to the OS class professionals.’ ¹⁶ For the CGT, job assessment had to be based on criteria that were not subject to managerial interpretation and control. The Certificate of Professional Competence (CAP) was the degree that defined the level of knowledge of the professional worker (P1). The diploma was the most robust and uncontroversial marker and was recognized by all three actors: government, managers and unions. The negotiation concerned which aspects of the diplomas to take into account. For the CFDT, it was essential that knowledge was broadly defined and not restricted to engineering expertise controlled by the professions. The career was also important. Again, the CGT model of career was based on the civil servants’ grid, which was predicated upon a strong link between classification and degree. The CGT extended the logic applied to the CAP and P1 to other categories and to general education diplomas. The CAP established a reference point from which job classification could be extended downward. The CGT also endorsed the principle of automaticity between degree and job classification.17 The UIMM refused automaticity but conceded that ‘the possession of a technical degree may be considered a positive indicator of probable of success in a function.’ ¹⁷ For the unions, the link between classification and degree had to be asserted cautiously otherwise it might prove detrimental to unqualified individuals. The CGT sought to limit the weight given to formal qualification in the lowest labour grades. Further, for the CGT, while formal qualifications were linked to initial training, classification had to allow for skill gained by experience. ¹⁸

Negotiation on the workers’ classification grid was suspended because the unions refused to ratify a partial agreement. ¹⁹ In June 1973, there were further discussions on the classification of the category of supervisors. The link between negotiations about the classification of supervisors and career workers was twofold. First, inside firms, the OS was the object of career decisions by supervisors. Second, a common classification grid would limit promotion opportunities for unskilled workers to supervisory levels if those were defined in terms of technical skills. The definition of supervisory categories opened up discussions of control of materials, technologies and personnel. The discussions immediately revealed significant differences between the employers and the unions about the relative weight of the technical and command functions of supervisory work. The employers wanted to separate supervisors from technicians and administrators, a principle that would be compromised if these functions were measured together when examining supervisory work. Moreover, the employers’ investigation produced a grid of 10 ladders divided into three levels for technical and administrative labour. Firms wanted both more ladders for technicians and more internal gradations. The unions, on the other hand, wanted all categories to have no more than seven internal grades. For the CGT, it was essential to link workers and supervisors in the classification: the original category of supervisors centred on their control of workers. It was also necessary to establish classificatory links with technicians and comparators with engineers and executives, to allow foremen to progress across the grid to the engineer and manager categories. ²⁰ The CFDT addressed the issue of connecting the grids through limiting hierarchy, a proposal that simplified the grids but would inevitably result in large-scale pressure for larger groups of workers to be upgraded (Tixier 1992). All parties shared the perception that technological developments had diminished the authority of lower levels of supervision by stripping them of technical competence. What was left was essentially a disciplinary mission that workers found increasingly unacceptable. The solution was to restore the importance of the supervisor’s technical role. ²¹ For the unions, the employers attempted to combine the technical and control aspects of supervision in a single category risked defining ‘the foreman … as good at everything’. ²² The foreman, argued the unions, was ‘a specialist in techniques and organization’, a definition that opened up firm-specific knowledge learned in the workplace as well as formal credentials. ²² By defining leadership and management as central to the supervisor, the employers wanted to use classification as a device to separate supervisors from shop floor workers: to ensure recognition of ‘the specificities of command’. ²³ The CGT, on the other hand, by maintaining the argument for a single, comprehensive grid, aimed to ‘situate the shop foremen in their links with the workers, technicians, engineers and executives’. ²⁴ Any definition of supervisor, argued the CGT Force Ouvrière, must include ‘the psychological and human aspects that are in the role of control’. ²⁵ In September 1973, all sides agreed on a general definition of the function of supervisor that provided for an equal weighting of technical, control and coordination functions. ²⁶

In principle, a comprehensive career structure must have no artificial or unjust ceilings. For the unions, just as any unskilled worker had to have the opportunity to rise to a supervisory position, so there also had to be a route for supervisors to progress to managerial status. Paradoxically, that would create a link that the employers wanted to avoid. The employers compromised by offering the possibility of certain foremen to become managers, but this involved ad hoc managerial decisions rather than the formal classificatory process. For unions, only the highest level of technicians should belong to the category of managers. ²⁷ The deadlock was finally broken in 1974 when all sides agreed that supervisory and managerial grades would be distinguished by their capacity to receive, process and operationalize different levels of complex, abstract or ambiguous information. Where the categories of managers and technicians would be defined mainly by abstract, general information, supervisors were those who handled firm-specific forms of complex information.

Negotiations on the implementation of the national job classification agreement provided job benchmarks to each sectors. This allowed the unions to return to two issues: the legitimacy of the method of job classification and recognition of the CAP. Overall, by mid-1974, the CGT was satisfied by raising ‘the level OS to level P1’ and that ‘a new level of classification was created, the workshop technician’. ²⁸ Equally, the unions successfully broadened the range of formal qualifications that were included in job grading and added the consideration of workshop experience. The unions succeeded in maximizing the number of employees eligible for job classification and so the universal career. Union bargaining no longer targeted wages but the classification system. It is less the movement of wage rates that is important than the ability to move towards more favorable salary classes.

Conclusion

Monthly payment was a political programme that triggered a managerial extension. Mensualisation was a government policy that necessarily entailed innovations in managerial government. Where firms had based their form of government on the mobility of workers and variable working hours, monthly payment defined the faithful company worker, rewarded by improved status. Unskilled workers were the group most affected by monthly payment and a job evaluation system that recognized and rewarded any firm-specific competences. Monthly payment offered the possibility that the fate of the employee would be linked to the company’s prosperity. For the state, the production of a citizen worker also extended the numbers eligible for loans to fund consumption. The citizen worker was, then, critical to restoring short-term social order and economic modernization based on mass consumption and stable mass production. Job classification allows for all workers to pursue a career. Equally, job classification becomes legitimized through union involvement in their development and through bargaining tactics inside the firm.

The search for a way to restore long-term social order in French factories produced a form of governmentality, novel not in its particulars but in its scale and authority. Statistical definitions of skill were projected outwards from the state to the sector, and then to the firm. Labour statistics shared a common logic, language and authority. Governmentality was operationalized through managerial tools that simultaneously created new populations and individuals to be known and governed. Paradoxically, the universal career system was designed to be dynamic, to create both active liberal individuals and a population rendered docile. By binding individuals, unions and employers to this governmentalist system, managing the career became a form of juridical process. The firm, the state and union co-produced a shared, not a bargained outcome that could only be operationalized at grass roots. Social order in the workplace, in short, confirmed, renewed and extended the authority of the firm, state and union. The idea of monthly payment began as a political programme that entailed the construction of a comprehensive form of managerial government in the firm. The fate of the individual career was now bound to the long-run success of the firm. Social order entailed the making of managerial government and the citizen worker.