Je reproduis ci-dessous les premières pages de mon article (en anglais), Réformer le système français des retraites : un étrange ballet de négociations, mis en ligne il y a quelques jours sur le site de Negotiation Journal (lire ici) revue états-unienne d’excellence, adossée au PON, Program On Negotiation, de la Harvard Law School, du MIT et de Tufts university. Pour lire l’article, cliquer ici et téléchargez ensuite le PDF.
***
A quick look back at the protests against reforming France’s pension system that occurred from 2020 to 2023 can lead one to conclude that this was just another strike movement, similar to those that have occurred every 20 or 30 years since 1789 that pit the eternal “refractory Gauls”— meaning the stubborn Celtic tribes of Gaul who resisted Roman rule —against their government. It might seem as though the same sociopolitical game was played out, with each side eager to do battle with the other and offering only the prospect of defeat, hidden (sometimes) in the folds of an agreement adopted at the end of a pseudo-negotiation. But we would be wrong to view these protests in this way. For there is a more general sociological lesson to be drawn from this “French case.”
The aim of this article is twofold. The first objective is to describe a complex system of government decision-making that includes tripartite collective bargaining (between the government, employers, and unions); inter-union negotiations; parliamentary deliberations; negotiations between parliamentary groups; negotiations between parliamentary groups and the government’s executive branch; and input from experts who disagree on facts and figures. All this takes place against a backdrop of strikes in the transport and refining sectors and demonstrations that brought together more than a million employees to the streets of France’s major cities. The second objective is to extract from this description of the French case a number of lessons about the process of reforming a public policy when all those parties and negotiations are involved.
Three analytical threads are crossed below, around the concepts of conflicting rationalities, scenes of negotiation, and negotiation configurations. The apparent jargon of this conceptualization should not frighten the reader. It refers to situations common in collective bargaining processes. Renaming them within this conceptual framework helps to draw attention to the specific mechanisms at work in negotiated processes of public policy reform. We begin by providing some background to this major social crisis.
The Social Crisis
The French pension system is based on a “pay-as-you-go” principle (rather than a “capitalization” principle): working people’s contributions pay for the pensions distributed to retirees, a principle of intergenerational solidarity. But the system has run out of steam. Life expectancy has increased so there are more and more pensioners, young people are entering the workforce later, and two million unemployed people means fewer contributors. By the mid-2010s, a reform of the pension system was inevitable.
In his 2017 election manifesto, President Emmanuel Macron endorsed instituting a “universal points-based retirement system,” an idea put forward by the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labor), the majority union in France since 2018. The principle is simple. Employees’ monthly contributions and employer contributions are converted into points (for example, one euro = one point). These points are accumulated throughout one’s career. Periods of unemployment, sickness, or maternity leave are also considered. The term “universal system” reflects the democratic spirit of this mechanism. Every euro contributed “earns” points, regardless of the number of hours worked during the month. Rights are identical for all, regardless of status or work activity; and the value of the point is indexed to the average annual rise in salaries.
As early as September 2017, President Macron opened a lengthy consultation—as he had promised—with unions and employers to reform the French pension system. A High Commissioner was appointed, and the “concertation” process began (1). The process would last almost two years, punctuated by numerous multilateral and bilateral meetings with the social partners and, above all, by the work of the Orientation Council for Retirees, made up of members of parliament, economists, trade unionists, employers, and senior civil servants. In autumn 2019, the French government abandoned its plan for a universal, points-based pension system, deeming it impossible to implement. All that remained was a so-called parametric reform. Of the three adjustable variables—the legal retirement age, the length of contributions, and the amount of retirement pensions—the government retained only one: the retirement age, which it wished to raise to 65 or 64 (from 62). Immediately the country was ablaze. For several weeks, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, in medium-sized towns as well as big cities. President Macron remained silent. In March 2020, he announced the suspension of the project and ordered the first confinement to combat the Covid-19 epidemic.
In May 2022, Macron was re-elected president and announced his intention to reactivate the contested pension reform bill in autumn. The bill was once again contested in the streets. On several Saturdays between January and May 2023, up to a million participants demonstrated in towns and cities across France. The government refused to modify its project, despite several bilateral and multilateral meetings with the unions. In anticipation of the proposal’s possible rejection by the deputies in the National Assembly, the government used a legal artifice (“le 49-3,” named after the relevant article and paragraph in the Constitution) and the bill was adopted at the end of March 2023 without parliamentary vote or deliberation. The Constitutional Council did not censure the law, and it was promulgated in April 2023.
Such was the story of this reform and social conflict. Was there a negotiation process, and is the contested adoption of the pension law a failure of this negotiation process involving the government? Yes and no. Yes, because the government’s initial (and public) intention was to construct this reform through the (very French!) “game of concertation.” No, because the government never actually made any offers or counteroffers; it was satisfied, as authorized by article 1 of the Labor Code, to communicate its claim to reform to the unions and employers, allowing them to negotiate only minor aspects of the bill (for example, concerning certain women’s careers, and for older workers and those exposed to occupational risks).
Does this mean there were no negotiations? It all depends on how negotiation is defined—strictly, as a process of decision-making by several people, with all that implies in terms of reciprocal concessions and the renunciation of certain preferences; as a more flexible process of joint arrangements, somewhere between bargaining and adjustment; or even more broadly, as a process but with one decision-maker who is willing to integrate elements proposed by his opponents into the final outcome. Of these three definitions, the one that best fits the French situation studied here is the second: a process of adjustments. Why is this so?
The reasons are structural, linked to the social interplay of numerous players, all with their own agendas. Let’s take a closer look at this game.
Bricolages and Circles of Decision-Makers
From the first pages of his 1978 opus, Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order, Anselm Strauss reminded his readers of the conclusions he reached toward the end of the 1950s. Such conclusions include the acknowledgment that social order is a negotiated order; negotiations obey certain patterns and do not occur by chance; and the results of negotiations have temporal limits. He added:
The negotiated order on any given day could be conceived of as the sum total of the organization’s rules and policies, along with whatever agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained. These include agreements at every level of organization, of every clique and coalition, and include covert as well as overt agreements. (Strauss 1978: 5–6)
This is a fitting definition of a government reform process that involves negotiations with unions and employers. Every day, on a variety of subjects, a “government machine” produces decrees, publishes orders, enacts standards, draws up procedures, imposes regulations, updates legislation, and conducts multiple other activities. This governmental work is the occasion for numerous arrangements. In the case of pension reform in France, these arrangements involved (at the very least) the following actors: the Presidency of the Republic (the president, the secretary general of the Elysée Palace, the relevant advisors, etc.); the prime minister’s office (the prime minister, her chief of staff, her advisors, etc.); the Ministry of Labor (the minister, his chief of staff, his technical advisors, the director general of labor, etc.); the Ministry of the Economy and the Budget (the minister, his chief of staff, advisors, directors of central administrations, etc.); the High Commissioner for Pensions, with ministerial rank; and academics appointed to the Orientation Council for Retirees, responsible for issuing opinions on the subject.
In all, this first circle of decision-makers includes some thirty political and senior civil servant players. In a second circle, there is another series of players—related to political parties—with influence over the final decision: the presidents of the two parliamentary assemblies; the presidents of the dominant parliamentary groups; the leaders of the parties represented in the Assembly; the “night visitors”(2) and so on. Let’s call this circle “the influencers.”
When it comes to reforming public policy, these “bricolages,” adjustments, and arrangements have as much to do with the content of the reform as with the way in which it is steered. To put it mildly, the whole thing looks to outsiders more like Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five, on display at the Museum of Modern Art, than Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue and Black. To these decision-makers are joined their opponents—advocates of a different type of reform, a different set of regulations, a different way of proceeding. Let’s call this third circle “the antagonists.” Not all the antagonists carry the same weight in the concertation process; their influence depends on the number of members, the experience of the leader, his or her leadership, and so on. During the social crisis in France from 2019 to… (suite de l’article : lire ici)
(1) In French, the word “concertation” refers to a situation in which information and opinions are exchanged on a given subject, without there being any official “negotiation.” Indeed, the French government never speaks of “negotiations” when it wishes to exchange views with trade unions and employers’ organizations; it only speaks of “concertation,” meaning that it intends to be the sole final decision-maker—even if it may correct its bill, albeit marginally, according to the suggestions of the trade unions.
(2) « Visiteurs du soir” refers to the people (intellectuals, communicators, former co-religionists, etc.) who visit the President of the French Republic in the evening, after his working day. They are said to have a great deal of influence, probably more than they actually have.
Négociation collective 