Nicolas Sarkozy should push to pragmatism

That volunteers raise the finger! Employees want to work more, week, month, year, or even in their life Nothing's easy now. For eighteen months, the Government blew one locks that freeze of working time. And he does following a method exactly opposite to that which had applied Martine Aubry when it had imposed the 35-hour. The key to social Nicolas Sarkozy is called "free choice". It is she who inspired the reform of the overtime, the employee is free, in theory, to accept in the limit of the quota, and, in law, beyond refused. It also inspires two emblematic reforms: the decline of the age limit for update retirement, enlargement of Sunday work. The first opens the employees to work beyond 65 years until their 70th birthday. For the Government, is in no case obligation, just the lifting of a ban to little consistent with the national objective of increase in the rate of activity of the seniors.

More still disputed until in the majority, the relaxation of Sunday work is of the same spirit: in authorized areas, work on Sundays must result from a deliberate of the employee. If these provisions cause a Union shield thrown, it is less because of their content that because only they accentuate the individualization of social relationships. Cornerstone of the social policy of Nicolas Sarkozy, the call to "voluntary" draws on measure relationships between employee and business leader. This change reduced the space of collective bargaining and the traditional role of the trade union organizations. Even more when, as is the case with retirement at 70 years and work on Sunday, the Executive is going of the prior agreement of the social partners. Encouraged by new forms of organization work more atomized, more mobile, the collective to the individual slide began over 30 years.

The movement was launched by employers at the beginning of the 1970s, in response to labour movements of 1968: from 1976, individual work schedules substitute in enterprises to the single class schedule. Already, trade unions are opposed with force. Following the individualization of remuneration. A few years later, a Pierre Guillen, the "Mr. Social" of the CNPF (ex-Medef), go further by proposing a contract of employment of private between employer and employee.

Develop social relations on the basis of individual reports obeys a deeply liberal inspiration. However, it is not on the liberalism but on pragmatism that builds Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of economy and finance, he begins to theorize, in summer 2004, the "free choice" as a method of social reform. He then gives an application: "map overtime."

This formula arises not from nowhere. The previous year, François Fillon, Minister of Social Affairs, popularized the concept of "retirement in the map" by proposing a system of discount-raise starting age. "Freedom of choice is part of the software of François Fillon", claims close to the Prime Minister. Gut feelings, Nicolas Sarkozy made a method to work subtly around the Union power. It is because "volunteering" responds to the desire of emancipation of the workers. The challenge is immense for unions who, with work in the map, see shrink the field of the fight. "We explain that the State overestimates the free will of the employees, that the relationship to work is never based on a deliberate and that part-time experience should encourage them to distrust, but the message is difficult to pass", recognizes Marcel Grignard, national Secretary of the CFDT.

Unlike their English counterparts, become part service providers, French unions are remained attached to the primacy of collective defence. For the Secretary General of the CGT, Bernard Thibault, "context" is certainly "processed through the new of the individual in society", but unionism is the heir of a hundred and fifty years old concept: "unite to resist". In France, unions have missed the turn of the individualization of work, to which they have little adapted their practices. Nicolas Sarkozy should push to pragmatism. Signs of a slight change, the CFDT has placed its campaign of agrarian 2008 under the sign of "respect" for each.