ILPC 2026

 France’s auto sector has traditionally been perceived to exemplify the French social model of high employment security (Jaidi and Thévenet, 2012). Yet in recent years its historical status as a union stronghold has been threatened by new labour relations practices that are being adopted in response to global competitive pressures. Strategies such as production relocation, outsourcing, increased use of agency labour, and the introduction of modularised team-working units are threatening workers’ job security and creating an increasingly uncertain environment for trade unions (Gorgeu and Mathieu, 2009; 2005; Purcell et al, 2011). In such an environment, the potential rewards of cooperation amongst all unions in the sector - such as the capacity to increase bargaining power, pool resources and share costs, share information, as well as offer support in strike action - could plausibly empower unions to become more effective strategic actors, enabling greater defence of workers’ terms and conditions of employment.  However, France has a particularly high number of unions which are deeply divided along ideological, religious and political lines (Connolly, 2010).

This study explores whether these long-standing divisions between different union confederations are insurmountable, or if new labour relations strategies generate inter-union cooperation in the sector. It pursues this objective so as to provide evidence on how historically divided labour movements might cooperate in the face of a more powerful, internationally mobile capital. As a particularly ‘footloose’ industry that has often been a leader in diffusing new models of work and employment, the auto sector provides an acute context for examining these dynamics. The study draws on existing documentary evidence from local union sections providing contemporaneous evidence of management strategy and trade union responses. Qualitative content analysis of this data offers an important insight into inter-union dynamics at plant and company levels, which are the most prominent loci for collective bargaining within France’s decentralised system.

A rather disjointed interpretation of union interaction emerges from the findings, with some unions engaging in limited or specific exchanges with other unions, and others not cooperating at all in a bid to maintain their own institutional identity, security and preferred strategy. Significantly, the findings vary across plants, even within the same company, indicating that factors influencing inter-union cooperation are not only firm-specific, but also subject to workplace specificities. This suggests that the significance of historical ideological differences is diminishing in the context of contemporary firm- and workplace-specific pressures.

References

Connolly, H. (2010) Renewal in the French trade union movement: a grassroots perspective, Oxford: Peter Lang.

Jaidi, Y. and Thévenet, M. (2012) ‘Managers during crisis: the case of a major French car manufacturer’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 23(16), pp. 3397-3413.

Purcell, C., Brook, P. and Lucas, R. (2011) ‘Between Keeping Your Head Down and Trying to Get Noticed: Agency Workers in French Car Assembly Plants’, Management Revue – The International Review of Management Studies, 22(2), pp. 169-187.

Gorgeu, A. and Mathieu, R. (2005) ‘Teamwork in factories within the French Automobile Industry’, New Technology, Work and Employment, 20(2), pp. 88-101.

Gorgeu, A. and Mathieu, R. (2009) ‘Les enjeux de la proximité des fournisseurs dans la filière automobile en France’, L’Espace géographique, 38(2), pp. 110-23.