The idea was that with Manuel Valls at the helm as prime minister there would be no more political clangers from the French government. But the calamitous handling of the executive's planned workplace law reforms proves otherwise. This proposed legislation on “new protections for businesses and employees”, to give it its official name, was supposed to be the most ambitious reform of the end of President François Hollande's five-year term of office that terminates in 2017. The president himself sees it as a first step in a “new social model”.
Yet within the space of ten days the whole legislative edifice collapsed into a political heap. First of all the prime minister twisted the arm of employment minister Myriam El Khomri, in charge of negotiations with the various social parties involved, to suggest that the government would be prepared to force the bill through Parliament; and this before other government ministers had even seen the text. Parliamentarians, members of the public and trade unionists then discovered than within the text itself were plans to make employment more flexible in a way that would delight the liberal Right. Since then the protests have grown in scale with the announcement of a spontaneous strike on March 9th, an appeal for students to take to the streets and the massive success of an online petition that has attracted around 900,000 signatures opposing the bill.

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Faced with this, on Monday February 29th prime minister Valls gave a little ground. Under pressure from the Socialist Party (PS) leadership and the CFDT trade union in particular to “rebalance” the bill, he announced a postponement of the presentation of the text to ministers, which will now take place after “bilateral meetings” and discussion with social partners, in other words employers and trade unions. Ministers had been due to discuss the bill on March 9th, but following the postponement this will now take place on March 24th. It will probably not be debated at the National Assembly until the end of April.
“As the debate has got carried away, we have to re-establish the reality about this law,” said Manuel Valls on a visit to the Paris agriculture show on Monday. Initially the government seemed disinclined to give much ground on the bill. “It will allow us to make changes in the text without going back on the main principles,” said a government source on Monday evening. But later in the week some of President Hollande's advisors were hinting at substantive alterations to the bill to make it more palatable to opponents. Here Mediapart looks at how this proposed legislation nosedived before it had barely got off the ground.
Lots of reports but no dialogue
It all began a year ago. In April 2015 prime minister Manuel Valls asked Jean-Denis Combrexelle, formerly the top civil servant at the Ministry of Work and Employment, to report to him on ways to “reform certain rules regarding social dialogue”. At the time there was no question of rewriting employment law, which is a political minefield and especially on the Left. Moreover, reforming workplace legislation had not featured in François Hollande's election manifesto.
Two months later the former socialist minister Robert Badinter and the lawyer Antoine Lyon-Caen published a slim volume called Le Travail et la loi ('Work and the law') which suggested simplifying France's employment laws. The book caused a stir and was immediately welcomed by both Valls and Hollande. A reform of employment law began to take shape.
By the end of the summer a number of reports had been published. Among them was a hostile analysis of the current situation from the Institute Montaigne, which is to the right politically, and another equally unfavourable report from Terra Nova which is close to the PS. The theme underpinning these various reports was the need to give more weight to collective bargaining inside companies, reversing the current position which gives pre-eminence to legislation, experts and top-down rules.
In September 2015 Combrexelle delivered his report which recommended a complete revision of workplace rights. Once again the main emphasis was on local workplace agreements. In the meantime François Rebsamen had left his position as employment minister and been replaced by Myriam El Khomri, who inherited the labour reform project.
The government then appointed Robert Badinter to head a commission, on which sat a number of experts who had helped draw up the Combrexelle report. This commission reported in January 2016. To some surprise this report's general principles, which were more detailed that those in Badinter's book, seemed at first glance to be very inoffensive. The CFDT trade union, whose support is crucial for the government's workplace reforms, even welcomed the fact that “essential rights” were included in the proposals.
But several weeks later, on February 18th, unions and others were in for a shock when Le Parisien newspaper revealed details of the proposed legislation which seemed distinctly liberal in nature. Among the proposals were a further dismantling of France's 35-hour working week, a limit on how much laid-off workers could receive in compensation from industrial tribunals, the possibility that workers could be made redundant justifiably in difficult economic times, changes to rules on on-call working arrangements and changes, too, to the system of remunerating junior managers for overtime. In other words, a number of key planks of workplace rights were being called into question.
The main employers' federation MEDEF was delighted and Nicolas Sarkozy's former employment minister Éric Woerth welcomed a text that was “paved with good intentions”. Sarkozy's former social affairs advisor Raymond Soubie, who had never gone so far in his own proposed reforms, said that he would vote for them if he were a Member of Parliament.
The threat of a forced passage through Parliament
During these weeks of reports and legislative plans, the most astonishing thing was the clear absence of dialogue with the trade unions. This was particularly strange for a government that claimed to be social democratic and for a president who wanted social dialogue to be a hallmark of his time in office. “There wasn't really any consultation,” says the CGT union's Fabrice Angéi. “We went in for two hours in the autumn. The minister laid out her plan. But we had no working document to go on.”
“We had two meetings with the minister and contacts with [her] office. But we were never able to read the whole of the text,” says Jean-Claude Mailly, general secretary of the Force Ouvrière (FO) union. “We read the latest version of the text an hour before it was sent to the Conseil d'État [editor's note, which advises the government on the drafting of bills] without being able to take it away to analyse it seriously.” He adds: “Yet in this text there was a problem in almost every article. In relation to other social laws...there's a real deterioration. It's the first time I've seen a law that's been discussed so little.”
There is also similar dissatisfaction among small business owners. “This bill was supposed to respond to the expectations of small companies, yet it was put together by MEDEF and the CGPME,” says Patrick Liébus of the artisans' organisation UPA. The CGPME, which represents many smaller businesses, states that the bill will only affect “4% of small and medium-sized industries”.
Strongman Valls
The political firestorm started on February 19th. Quoted in the business daily Les Échos, employment minister Myriam El Khomri set out the contents of her bill, which had already been widely leaked. She added that when it came to getting the bill through Parliament the government would carry out its “responsibilities”. The message was clear: the executive was prepared to use article 49-3 of the French Constitution to force the text through if necessary, as had been done with reforms overseen by economy minister Emmanuel Macron.
But though that comment purported to come from El Khomri, in reality it was prime minister Manuel Valls who insisted that it be added to the article when the government was given the chance to read the interview before publication. This was against the advice of the Elysée, where presidential advisers preferred the more neutral words initially used by the employment minister herself. The hint about using article 49-3 immediately sent a shock wave through the ranks of the socialist majority in Parliament, who were still worn down and depressed from the vote a few days earlier for the government's deeply controversial constitutional reform. Even loyalist MPs spoke about being “railroaded”.
As soon as the interview appeared President Hollande gave Myriam El Khomri a dressing down and told her to retract the words. The problem was that, caught in the crossfire, the minister did not want to go back on what she had said to either the prime minister or the president. So in the end she limited herself to a vague formula of words to the effect that her primary goal was to “convince” people.
Last weekend, meanwhile, senior ministers Marisol Touraine and Ségolène Royal came out against the idea of using article 49-3 to force the legislation through. From Tahiti, where he was on an official visit, François Hollande sought to calm things down but the damage had been done. In just two days a petition entitled Loi travail: non merci ['Labour law: no thanks'] launched by activist Caroline De Haas had already attracted 150,000 signatures. It is now on its way towards a million. In a bid to regain the initiative the ministry of employment launched its own counter arguments and a Twitter account, @LoiTravail (see below), which was immediately mocked on social networks.

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In the meantime the former boss of the Socialist Party and mayor of the northern city of Lille, Matine Aubry, had created her own media storm with a powerful attack on the government in an article in Le Monde, which singled out the labour law bill. “That employers' institutions makes these demands, why not … But for them to become the Republic's laws, certainly not! Not that, not us, not the Left!” she wrote.
When Aubry's words were published the National Assembly was in recess. But in their constituencies many socialist MPs were becoming deeply concerned. Some who had up until then accepted all the disappointments of the Hollande presidency suddenly started talking loudly about voting for the motion of censure that the Right would inevitably call for in the event that article 49-3 was used to force through the bill. All insisted that the government would not have a majority on the Left to vote through the law.
The socialist MPs on the parliamentary social affairs committee were particularly worked up. The president of the socialist group of MPs in the National Assembly, Bruno Le Roux, who is close to President Hollande, led them to believe that the proposed bill would be examined in the Assembly by a special committee – as was the Macron legislation – rather than their committee. It was, they thought, a way of pushing to one side a committee that contains many experts on workplace law and rights and quite a few Parliamentary rebels or critics of the government line.
The chairwoman of the social affairs committee, socialist MP Catherine Lemorton, discreetly got to work behind the scenes, letting the prime minister's office know that if her committee was stripped of the bill she would publicly speak out against the reform and would even put forward amendments to remove certain articles. In the end the prime minister's office reassured her, but she remains dubious about the bill's contents. “There's no point in postponing the presentation of the bill to ministers if nothing is going to change,” she says.
Lemorton, who is close to former economy minister Arnaud Montebourg, has already set out the issues on which she expects the government to make changes. “The government is going to have to move on industrial tribunal compensation,” she says. “The ceiling put in place is going to disadvantage those who have worked for a long time at the same company.” She also says she expects movement on measures affecting payment for workers on call, remuneration for overtime by junior managers and working hours for apprentices. In other words, there looks set to be a lot of discussions with the government. A sign of MPs' scepticism about the measure is the fact that the socialist MP Christophe Sirugue, who is slated to be the MP to pilot the legislation through the Assembly, has not yet given his response. “He's still hesitating – he has no desire to get burnt,” says a colleague.
Myriam El Khomri feels the heat
Officially, the employment minister Myriam El Khomri is still in charge of the reform legislation. But within the space of ten days her political credit has been considerably eroded. On Monday Manuel Valls announced that he would be meeting the social partners – unions and employers' representatives – next week along with her, and that the economy minister Emmanuel Macron would also be involved. So the new employment minister, who was appointed in September 2015 to represent the fight against unemployment, is now being closely supervised. “She's expendable, she doesn't have any clout,” said one government advisor.

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Myriam El Khomri's continuing role in the reform process will not have been helped, either, by stories about the state of her health on Tuesday, reports that caused a brief media flurry. Her entourage said on Tuesday morning that she had suffered a “little illness” that required tests in hospital, while speaking later President Hollande referred instead to a “domestic accident”. The junior minister in charge of Parliamentary relations, Jean-Marie Le Guen, sprang to his colleague's defence, singling out critics from their own political camp. “It's true that the way in which she's been attacked by people on the Left has weighed on her,” he said. Even before Myriam El Khomri's brief health problem – she was back to work on Wednesday - Mediapart had been told that she had appeared “overwhelmed” by the situation, even “burnt out”.
Yet for months Myriam El Khomri had insisted to journalists that it was definitely she who would be overseeing the new legislation. Indeed, economy minister Emmanuel Macron had resigned himself to the fact that his own planned reforms would have to wait to be put into a future law on 'new economic opportunities' planned by budget minister Michel Sapin. But in reality El Khomri saw many of those reforms imposed on her own bill. “She lost every battle,” says one senior socialist MP at the Assembly.
The truth is that from the start El Khomri has been under the control of the prime minister's office, via her own chief of staff Pierre-André Imbert, even though she told Libération newspaper that she was “no one's puppet”. A senior union figure says: “She's nice and works hard but she's not in charge.” In fact, several government advisers insist that she only saw the contents of the Badinter report two days before it was published. She also only found out at the last minute that, on the say-so of the president's office, several tough measures wanted by Macron but rejected by the unions – such as the changes over redundancy for economic reasons – had been added to her own bill. “This decision was indeed taken during the final analysis,” accepts a source close to Hollande. “The idea was not to make the bill tougher but to make it more credible. And it's on this aspect that there was a lack of consultation. We could have found a compromise with the reform-minded unions.”
The twists and turns of the bill's fortunes have even caused some turmoil in Myriam El Khomri's own ministerial office. Her special advisor Pierre Jacquemain, who had followed her from her previous position as minister for towns, quit his job. In an interview with L'Humantité newspaper he described the bill as an “historic error”. Jacquemain said: “The employment ministry's policy is decided elsewhere, at Matignon [editor's note, the prime minister's official residence]. It's the prime minister who sets the tone. Yet after the Combrexelle report Myriam El Khomri had great ambition. She carried out a fruitful consultation with the social partners which led to real advances. Unfortunately not one of these advances appeared in the final bill.” At the same time the minister also lost her press secretary Nadjet Boubekeur, who joined the office of new culture minister Audrey Azoulay.
What now?
A friend of the president admits there has been a “lack of vision”. It was almost as if the government had underestimated its own bill. For months polling carried out by the government insisted that, while the French people did not want greater job insecurity, they were ready for reforms to employment law if they contributed to the fight against unemployment. So the government thought that the bill would pass easily, especially given that, as someone close to Hollande claims, we are in an “historically low phase of social conflict”.
Both within the presidency and the prime minister's office the view was that the mention of article 49-3, far from being seen as an act of political violence, would be interpreted by the French people as proof of the desire at the very top of the state to carry out reforms. This explains Manuel Valls' intervention in Myriam El Khomri's newspaper interview, which was seen as a way of preparing public opinion.
However, the “presentation” of the reforms was carried out with “excessive tension” and in an overly “anxious” way, to use the words of someone close to François Hollande. This was not helped by the lack or prominence given to measures that had in the past been described as major reforms, for example the idea of a personal work and training account (compte personnel d’activité or CPA in French) to help ensure workers are better adapted and trained for the workplace. This had been a cornerstone of Hollande's aims to support employment security but was curiously downgraded and relegated to lower status in the publicity around the bill.
The CPA, now stripped of real importance, had also been one of the main reforms demanded by the influential CFDT union. Invited on the C Politique show on France 5 television station last Sunday, February 29th, the union's general secretary Laurent Berger called for the government to “postpone” the planned legislation and to “restart head to head talks but also discussion with all those involved”. Berger suggested it would take take more than two to three weeks to carry out this process. The message was heard and the next day the government put the presentation of the bill back. Yet is is still not certain that Berger and his union will come on board.
For the CFDT membership are very worked up over the issue. Nor does the union's leadership want a replay of 2003 when its then boss François Chérèque backed the pension reforms of right-wing minister François Fillon, leading to anger and resignations. “Contrary to the absurdities bandied around by [petition organiser] Caroline De Haas and some unions, the CFDT is not the government's creature,” says someone close to François Hollande who is closely involved with the union world.
“The government's retreat shows that a reform can't be carried out without the CFDT and that it would have been better to have listened to the CFDT rather than MEDEF,” says a long-standing Hollande loyalist with union connections. He says he was on the phone to alert the president to the “doubts, questions and violent reactions” that this proposed legislation was provoking among trade unionists.
On Monday, March 1st, Manuel Valls insisted that the government was not in the process of “retreating”. He said: “Retreating would be to abandon the text.” But one government advisor did not hesitate to use the word. “It's got off to a bad start, you have to retreat to start it off again better,” he said. He, along with others, is convinced that the final wording of the bill will be very different from the one that appeared in Les Echos.
Speaking on Tuesday, President Hollande sought to calm the situation. “The bill has given rise to queries, that's quite reasonable, to questions, I understand that. That's why the prime minister is planning a consultation,” he said. The president then sought to find the middle ground. “I want our country to be able to move forward,” said Hollande. “There is no other way than by moving [forward]. Nothing would be worse than doing nothing or questioning all our rights, in particular our workplace rights.”
However, one can still expect tough rhetoric from the government, in particular from Manuel Valls, over the issue. On Monday the prime minister called on “all reformers in this country” to come together “faced with all this conservatism”. It was an inelegant way of casting all opponents of the legislation as being supporters of the status quo, while talking up his status as a moderniser. In view of the growing opposition to this bill it is a risky gamble.
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- The French version of this article can be read here.
English version by Michael Streeter