STRASBOURG, France — A group of French factory hands have just written an illuminating chapter in the history of the global economic crisis, bending reluctantly to a growing realization that France can no longer afford all its lavish social protections.
By a 70 percent majority, the 1,150 workers of a General Motors transmission plant on the edge of Strasbourg voted to forgo their annual bonuses, six days of vacation and any pay increases for the next three years. Moreover, they endorsed a reduction in the work force by 198 people, chiefly through early retirement.
The givebacks, designed to reduce production costs by 10 percent, were the price set by General Motors for continuing to build transmissions in eastern France rather than moving operations to Mexico and a cheaper labor force. The ultimatum from an iconic U.S. company emerging from bankruptcy was a raw demonstration of the new economicenvironment and its threat to the high-cost workers of western Europe.
For French workers in particular, nourished over the years on a tradition of Marxist-inspired labor unions, 35-hour workweeks and six-week vacations, the vote marked a sobering retreat and a recognition that things are not the same since the world economywent shaky two years ago.
“Do we have the choice?” asked Jean-Marc Ruhland, a three-decade veteran at the factory and a union leader who advocated voting yes on the givebacks.
“This is not a victory,” he added, “but I’d rather take my pants down a little than end up totally naked in front of the employment agency.”
Ruhland’s reasoning, laid out over coffee in the factory cafeteria, closely resembled the arguments being put forward by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative government in another shift symbolic of the new economic realities in France: pushing back the legal retirement age from 60 to 62.
Since it was instituted in the 1980s by the Socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand, retirement at 60 had come to be seen as an untouchable part of France’s generous social protection system. No more, said Sarkozy, because the country cannot afford it in the post-crisis era of deficits and budget tightening.
Martine Aubry, the Socialist Party’s general secretary, at first suggested that the move was probably necessary, if regrettable. But she has since steered the party into strong opposition to Sarkozy’s change, appealing to the labor vote and creating what is likely to become a major campaign issue for the presidential election in 2012, in which she hopes to be the Socialist candidate.
In Strasbourg, however, the local Socialist leadership enthusiastically backed the pullback at General Motors, eager to avoid adding 1,150 workers to an unemployment rate that already has 100,000 people looking for jobs in the Strasbourg area. The Socialist mayor, Roland Ries, and the Socialist president of the broader urban community, Jacques Bigot, issued a joint statement offering their support and saying the agreement should make it possible for General Motors to keep the factory humming in the years ahead.
Ruhland’s union, the French Labor Federation, which has traditional links to the Socialist Party, also backed signing up for the GM deal, seeing it as the lesser of two evils. As the strongest union at the plant, its support was key in generating the 70 percent favorable vote July 19.
The second-strongest union, the General Labor Federation, which has traditional ties to the Communist Party, denounced the GM offer as a capitalist trick designed to bring the labor movement to heel and to maximize profits on the backs of French workers.
“They are gangsters, these bosses,” the union’s GM delegate, Robert Roland, said at a recent rally at which workers vented their anger at being forced to renounce benefits acquired in previous years.
“Unions are not all the same,” he added, denouncing Ruhland’s willingness tocompromise and vowing not to add his signature to the deal. “Some support the benefits we have acquired. Others crawl. They lie down in front of the bosses.”
Bernard Fussner, a 63-yearold retiree and General Labor Federation activist who spent most of his career at the GM plant, compared the union’s holdout to the struggle of the Popular Front, the Socialist-Communist alliance in the 1930s that under Prime Minister Lion Blum brought France a 40-hour workweek, paid vacations and health insurance.
“When they try to set workers in one part of the world against those in another part, well, we see just how perverse capitalism is,” shouted Andre LeToutlec, 68, a retired printer and General Labor Federation activist who denounced GM’s threat to move to Mexico in a rousing speech in which his face displayed several shadesof red.
But the next day, after local government authorities intervened, Roland’s union quietly signed a separate agreement with GM management vowing not to oppose the deal approved by other unions, arguing that it was obliged under the rules of democracy to abide by the majority’s will.
With that signature, General Motors had the guarantee of production cost savings and union docility that it had laid down as a condition for continuing operations. Company officials said the outcome would be communicated to GM headquarters in the United States, where a final decision was likely in the coming weeks.
The Strasbourg factory, which started up in the 1960s, technically has been the property of a holding firm, Motors Liquidation Co., since General Motors Corp. filed for bankruptcy two years ago and began a worldwide reorganization of its assets. Under the plan being discussed, GM would buy back the plant from Motors Liquidation at a nominal price and launch a new product line that would begin production sometime after 2013.
When the final decision is announced, however, most of the plant’s employees probably will not be around to hear about it. Summer vacation is this month, workers said, and the factory will close for two weeks while they hit the beach.
Business, Pages 65 on 08/08/2010