Sylvie Contrepois

Collective and individual alternative dispute resolution in France and Britain

The paper compares trends and case studies of individual and collective employment conflicts in France and the UK. Its focus is on the extent to which conciliation, mediation and mediation are used within the two different industrial relations systems. In both, third-party intervention is associated with the legitimacy conveyed by the involvement of both employers and trade unions, or by the presence of an impartial judge. The research finds extensive use of alternative dispute resolution is taking place in both countries, with dispute resolution taking place commonly in the justice system in France, while in the UK there is extensive use made of the arms-length independent government agency, Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service. However, the research concludes that the most effective third-party interventions take place when they are combined with mobilisation, rather than merely being the sole form of dispute resolution.

Labour struggles against mass redundancies in France: understanding direct action

Purpose – This article aims to examine recent labour struggles against mass redundancies in France. It seeks to understand the well reported incidences of direct action within the terrain of how industrial relations operate and are governed.Design/methodology/approach – Primary and secondary data sources are deployed to build and understand, in a grounded way, a case study of an industrial conflict.Findings – The weakness of the regulation of employers, when allied to a number of considerations like union presence, has led to radical, direct actions. This highlights that overall the source of stimulus for action is worker weakness vis‐a‐vis the employer and not strength.Social implications – To aid social peace in the workplace, further regulation of employer behaviour by the state is needed given the weakness of union regulation.Originality/value – The article highlights that conflict takes place primarily in contexts where the institutions of the French republic are shown to be incapable of forcing empl...

European Works Councils in Central and Eastern Europe: varieties of institution building among French service sector multinationals

European Works Councils (EWCs) were launched as important institutions capable of helping workers coordinate responses to multinational corporations (MNCs). Euro-optimists hoped they might help the transfer of the European social model to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Euro-pessimists believed they lacked the capacity to be effective and suggested EU enlargement might encourage ‘a race to the bottom’ in Western Europe. This article focuses on the behaviours of eight service sector French-origin multinationals in Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. It finds that they generally adapt to the host country social model. However, while most keep their subsidiaries in separate compartments, investing little in EWC institution building, some are more ready to invest in stronger EWC institutions and to use them as an integrating tool.

Direct Action in France: A New Phase in Labour-Capital Conflict

The world over, it seems, citizens of France are seen as having a strong tradition of radical class struggle. Paradoxically, it is seen as being very alive but also being very out of date. The recent radicalization of a number of local and national conflicts within France, as well as some other spectacular actions largely covered by French and international media, were taken as vestiges of the direct action strategy developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, Ancelovici (2011: 132) observed: ‘Social movement scholars often associate radicalism with the use of particular modes of action. For example, Sidney Tarrow and Hanspeter Kriesi treat, respectively, the diffusion and intensification of disruption and the increasing use of violence as an indicator of radicalization. Following this logic, the growth of certain forms of labour contention since the 1990s in France could be interpreted as the sign of a renewal of labour radicalism. The “boss–nappings” of 2009 and 2010 and the blockage of oil refineries during the protests in the fall of 2010 were presented as such by the media.’ More recently action has been taken that was successfully aimed at attracting media attention, such as small farmers bringing sheep to town, or workers brandishing Lejaby lingerie during their demonstrations against redundancy – a giant patriotic brassiere in the national tricolour of red, white and blue which they had made.

Internationalizing Firms and Employee Representation: French Multinationals in Central and Eastern Europe

Employee representation is becoming increasingly integrated into company internationalization strategies, especially where the mother company is based within the European Union. This tendency shows itself principally in the development of European Works Councils (EWCs) and more widely through the multiplication of international framework agreements (IFAs). The spread of these new tools, however, remains limited and their achievements uncertain. Thus the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC, 2009) found that only 34 per cent of companies covered by the EWC Directive 94/45/CE adopted on 22 September 1994 had set up an EWC.1 Its report comments: ‘Although the number of EWCs is growing every year, doubling since 1996, the rate of progress is too slow, and constitutes a major challenge for the development of European information and consultation procedures. At present, there are few if any penalties for companies that defy the directive.’

Syndicats et dialogue social

Une meme question a ete posee a une equipe de chercheurs specialises dans les relations du travail dans les principales economies post-industrielles de ce debut du 21e siecle : comment a evolue la regulation sociale dans les entreprises depuis une trentaine d’annees ? Leurs reponses montrent que les restructurations economiques, l’europeanisation et la mondialisation ont conduit a d’importants changements, rarement volontaires, dans les relations entre les « partenaires sociaux » : organisations syndicales et patronales, sans oublier l’Etat, qui joue souvent un role d’arbitre. Ainsi, les modeles nationaux herites du 20e siecle ont ete remis en cause. Les particularismes se sont effaces pour laisser place a des cadres plus fragiles et plus fluctuants. Ce livre dresse un etat des lieux precis des principaux changements qui ont affecte les syndicats et le dialogue social dans les entreprises en Europe et Amerique du Nord. Il permet de depasser les idees recues concernant les modeles anglo-saxon, scandinave, rhenan et latin.

Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe

What have been the effects of de-industrialisation across key European regions over the past forty years? The decline of industrial economies came to define many parts of Europe during this time, radically altering ways of working and notions of livelihood formed over time. Once distinctive regions and localities shaped by economic development evolved as sub-systems of much wider national formations and traditions, which were commonly shaped through conceptions of nation and state, culture and economy. From the early nineteenth century, the emergence of the Industrial Revolution began the uneven transformation of European nations. Already by the 1950s in most parts of Europe and in other industrialised nations, specific regions had developed distinct identities primarily through the increasing importance and the dominance of industrial work: this could be found, for instance, in coal mines, in factories, in shipyards. Yet as radical economic restructuring in many of these areas began after the 1970s, there was a fragmentation of these established structures, formations and traditions. New products and production methods and technologies and the growth of the service sector rapidly altered the condition of labour, the nature of communities and the lives and experiences of people. One rapid and major effect of this was the rise of unstable and precarious social conditions, leading to the development of flexible forms of work, irregular working hours and a growing discontinuity and transformation in working lives (see Beck, 1992; Sennett, 1998; Thornley et al., 2010).

Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe J.Kirk, S.Contrepois & S.Jefferys Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg L.Meier & M.Promberger Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region S.Contrepois A Tale of Two Spanish Cities: Elda and Alcoy at the Crossroads M.Arnal, C.Castro, A.Lahera-Sanchez, J.Revilla & F.Tovar De-Industrialisation in Upper Silesia K.Wodz, K.L?cki, J.Klimczak-Ziolek & M.Witkowski The Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-Mining Communities H.?engul & E.Aytekin Representing Identity and Work in Transition: The Case of South Yorkshire Coal-Mining Communities in Britain J.Kirk, S.Jefferys & C.Wall A Skyline of European Identities S.Contrepois, S.Jefferys & J.Kirk Bibliography Index

Surviving the Global Financial Crisis: Automobiles and Finance in Central and Eastern Europe

Over the last 15 years two huge economic events have shaken Central and Eastern Europe: the shift from a command to a market economy in the mid-1990s, and the global financial crisis at the end of the 2000s. Within a very brief period of time, most working people in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) were first exposed to liberalization or privatization and in many cases began to work directly for companies based outside their own countries. Then they were subjected to the consequences of the collapse of the world financial bubble.

Deindustrialisation, regeneration, mobilisation…and human drama in capitalist economies

In Empty Mills, Timothy Minchin offers a well-documented and stimulating contribution to potential comparative research in economic restructuration and industrial regions revitalisation. Part of the originality of the book derives from its focus on textiles, an industry that became symbolically insignificant over time, at least from an academic point of view. Amongst the first and biggest economic activity during the nineteenth century in Europe and North America, the textile and apparel industries underwent a continuous and significant decline as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, up to the mid-1980s, they still employed directly over two million people – about 13% of the total workforce in manufacturing, more than steel and autos – and supported at least another two million citizens in related industries in the USA. They had the same weight in the EU 15, where they directly employed four million people – 14% of the manufacturing employment. But by 2012, the number of workers had dramatically fallen in all advanced economies – to less than 400,000 in USA and just over one million in EU 15 (two million in the EU 27). Minchin explores in great details the reasons for the decline in the USA, suggesting three main factors: the progressive delocalisation of this easy-to-implement industry in low cost areas; the very active export strategy from emergent industrial countries; the degraded image of the textile industry and its effects on the domestic company modernisation strategies. The delocalisation phenomenon became obvious as early as the 1930s, when American North companies decided to move to the low labour cost American South. Their interests meet local economic interests since “because most textile jobs could be learned easily, the industry was attractive to a region that possessed a large but unskilled native-born workforce”, noticed the author. This was true later on for Asian countries that extensively used textiles as their first industry, from the 1960s. By 1978, Asian textile output was increasing by 25% a year. The delocalisation became still a more massive phenomenon during the 1990s, resulting in an unprecedented growth of China’s textile industry, based on the worst conditions of labour exploitation. By 2000, Chinese mills employed 18 million workers, more than double the entire population of North Carolina. Chinese