It could turn out to be one revelation too many. On Tuesday December 2nd, L'Express magazine revealed that the embattled general secretary of French union the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), Thierry Lepaon, had received a pay-off from his old job when he took over control of the union in March 2013. The reason why this severance payment – which Mediapart understands was 31,000 euros – is so damaging for Lepaon is because it was made by the Lower Normandy branch of the CGT. In other words, he received a pay-off for being promoted inside his own union.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Officially, Lepaon himself sees no problem in being paid that money. But he is apparently alone in the union hierarchy in thinking that. Coming so soon after revelations about the large sums of members' money spent on his union flat near Paris and also his office, this latest disclosure could soon hasten his departure from his job. The omens for Lepaon, who was chosen almost by default as general secretary following a bloody internal war of succession after the departure of long-serving leader Bernard Thibault in 2012, are certainly not good. “He's dead, all that remains is to know when and how he is going to leave,” says one member of the CGT leadership who, like everyone in the union who has been speaking to the media, did so on the understanding that he remained anonymous.
However, so far Lepaon has shown little sign of wanting to go quietly. Last Friday, December 5th, there was a meeting of the union's key ruling body, the ten-member confederation committee. Afterwards a press statement noted that “no member of the confederate committee called for Thierry Lepaon's resignation”. As a further sign that he is still in charge, Lepaon himself appeared in a short video on the union's website (see video above) after the end of the meeting, smiling and looking relaxed. In it he saluted the high level of support the union says it received - without citing figures - in last week's public sector workplace elections, where staff vote for which unions they want to represent them. In fact, the CGT's share of the overall vote fell.
However, on Tuesday, December 9th, the CGT's 56-member executive committee held a crucial meeting. Most senior figures hoped that Lepaon would himself choose to quit after the gathering. In the end he did not, so instead the executive committee called a meeting of the national confederation committee (CCN) for January 13th, 2015. This committee brings together the union's 129 most senior officials and is the only union body that has the power to remove the leader. Lepaon's fate could be sealed by that meeting, according to senior executives. “The message coming in from all areas is: 'Resign before we dismiss you',” says one CCN member.
Why has Thierry Lepaon been so weakened? What is the deeper significance of the drama that has gripped the CGT in recent weeks? Will it be able to bounce back from it without having suffered too much damage? Here Mediapart explains the background to recent events and examines the state of France’s leading trade union.
What is Thierry Lepaon being criticised for?
The attacks against the union chief have come in waves, all via press revelations, as noted by the media website @rrêt sur images. It all began on October 29th, 2014, when the investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné revealed that the CGT had spent more than 100,000 euros on renovating the flat that the union rents for its leader in a chic district of Vincennes, an eastern suburb of Paris. The following week the same publication added to the union's discomfort by disclosing that the flat's owner had already had it renovated. On November 29th Le Canard enchaîné published a third revelation, this time detailing the renovation work to Lepaon's CGT office, which cost 62,000 euros. In October Lepaon had proudly displayed his new office to television station France 5 (see video below).
However, the story that has most damaged Thierry Lepaon is the latest revelation from L'Express. Even if it is perfectly legal, it is hard to justify the Lower Normandy region of the CGT giving 30,000 euros as a pay-off to its own senior official who had just been promoted to the union's top job. “Here we're in the realms of personal enrichment and, moreover, using union dues paid by the members!” points out one senior union figure.
It is now open season for attacks on the leader, and past doubts about Lepaon's probity have begun to resurface. Le Point magazine went to question Lepaon's former colleagues at the electrical household appliance manufacturer, Moulinex, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Thierry Lepaon created a branch of the CGT at the firm, which at one time employed 4,500 people in Lower Normandy. According to ex-workers the magazine spoke to, Lepaon was close to the management there and may even have been helped by the then head of personnel, Alfred Sirven, to create the CGT branch in order to break the grip of the rival CFDT union on the company. Sirven was later to earn national notoriety as one of the executives at the heart of the Elf Aquitaine oil company slush fund scandal. In 1997 management lent Lepaon a limousine to take him to the funeral of the former general secretary of the French Communist Party Georges Marchais. “Thierry Lepaon always dreamed of being a senior executive. He got the wrong union: he was more suited to the CGC [editor's note, a management union] than the CGT,” one former colleague at Moulinex says, cruelly.
Who wants to bring the CGT general secretary down?
Thierry Lepaon and his increasingly-rare supporters claim there was a plot to destabilise the CGT in the middle of the campaign for the public sector workplace elections which took place last Thursday, and which are key in determining a union's power and bargaining strength. But it is more likely that the attacks come from inside the union itself. Only a handful of CGT leaders had access to the building estimates on which Le Canard enchaîné based its stories. And one week before the details were published copies of those estimates had already been sent anonymously to a large number of the union's 33 federation bosses.
These attacks have certainly hit the target. “We've been receiving lots of indignant letters from our members for a month now,” says a source at CGT headquarters. “And since the revelations about the pay-off our leaders have received hundreds of insulting emails. Some people are returning their [membership] cards or threatening to refuse to pay their dues as long as Thierry Lepaon remains in post.”
Interviewed by Le Bien public newspaper in eastern France the trade union historian René Mouriaux summed the situation up this way: “Traditionally CGT activists and leaders pride themselves not only on having integrity but also for being cautious, even austere. The scandals that have hit Thierry Lepaon … give an image of someone who's very concerned about his own interests, who doesn't set an example.”
A number of departmental branches of the union – a département is roughly akin to a county – have withdrawn their support from the national leader. For example the Loir-et-Cher branch in central France has, since November 5th, attacked the “intolerable internal activities, at the highest level of the confederate leadership, which have created a media outpouring that has damaged the CGT's unity, image and stance”. On December 4th the branch from the Seine-et-Marne département south-east of Paris said in a statement that it was “outraged that such sums should have been spent in this way with little chance of getting it back, and note the excessive character of this expenditure”. Then on Friday December 5th the SNJ-CGT federation – the branch of the union that represents members in the media – criticised actions which were “unacceptable given the confederation's history and values” and called on the general secretary to “draw the consequences and resign”.
A leader who was elected in unpromising circumstances and who is not well-liked
The early demise of Thierry Lepaon as CGT leader has been regarded as inevitable by several leading figures in the union ever since he was elected, as he is seen as someone who was chosen by default, and who only got picked because of the debilitating impact of the long and bloody internal war to succeed Bernard Thibault. “In choosing him we shot ourselves in the foot,” says one official. When in 2012, after 14 years in post, Bernard Thibault first started to prepare his departure, he had absolutely no intention of getting the man from Lower Normandy appointed in his place.
The “sphinx”, as Thibault was nicknamed, wanted his successor to be his protégée Nadine Prigent. But she was rejected by the CGT's national confederation committee (CCN). Another declared candidate, Éric Aubin, was one of Thibault's sworn enemies, and the latter used all his influence to block him. Another union figure, Agnès Naton, was then named as a candidate but she was rejected too; today she is in charge of communications for the confederation committee and is Lepaon's last high-profile supporter. The war of the union barons proved merciless and the only potential anti-Aubin candidate left standing on the battlefield who was acceptable to Thibault was Thierry Lepaon. His name was put forward and he was duly elected. “We were so at the end of our tether when his name came out of the hat that we told ourselves we no longer had a choice, and that if we rejected him we would have run out of solutions,” admits a member of the CCN who backed Lepaon's nomination in 2013.
But as one CGT leader told Libération, a virtual unknown had become head of the union: “No one knows what he thinks about the CGT and its internal reforms. He has never expressed himself on his vision of democracy and about the model for how the organisation should develop.” Following his appointment several journalists have come to the conclusion that he has not fully mastered his brief. There is even a persistent rumour that officials at the union's headquarters avoid sending him for TV appearances if he is likely to have to be on screen for any length of time. His many opponents in the union's different federations claim that he lacks political sense and that he over-compensates for this by being too authoritarian. This then prevents him from understanding what is at stake in union meetings that are sometimes rather jesuitical in nature.
The symbol of a CGT in crisis
- The symbol of a CGT in crisis
In their statement issued on December 4th, the leaders of the Seine-et-Marne section stated that “the 'flat' scandal is just the pointer to an internal dysfunctioning that certainly involves financial issues but also touches on our ability to debate, to decide and to act collectively, and to drive forward collective action to achieve social progress”. Many others in the union feel the same way.
It seems that many public sector employees are also disenchanted with the union. Last Thursday all of France's 5.4 million public servants (including civil servants and local authority and hospital staff) voted on the same day for the first time in workplace elections. The results were announced on Tuesday, December 9th, and though not disastrous, they still make grim reading for the CGT. The outcome leaves the CGT as the leading union among public workers, with 23.1% of the votes, but this represents a fall of 2.3%, while rival unions the CFDT, on 19.2%, and the FO, with 18.6%, saw small increases in their share of the vote.
This will come as a bitter blow to the CGT hierarchy. As the financial daily Les Échos has pointed out, the CGT lost two points in workplace elections among railway workers in March, down to 35.6%, and it is losing support, too, at energy giants EDF and GDF. At telecoms giant Orange, meanwhile, the union has just had to concede first place in workplace elections to the CFDT.
Over and above these election results, the CGT's activists have lost their bearings in a union landscape that is already bleak; France has the lowest rate of union membership among wealthy countries at just 9% of the population. As Mediapart itself noted during the CGT's congress in March 2013, the union urgently needs to attract activists who are younger and with a more diverse profile. As for the union's stance, it is dealing with the same equation it faced during the final years of Bernard Thibault. How does the union steer the right course between engaging in negotiations and compromises with the government and businesses on the one hand, and signalling opposition to reforms largely seen as unacceptable by its rank-and-file members on the other? Ever since Thibault's legendary predecessor Louis Viannet broke ties between the CGT and the French Communist Party in the mid-1990s, the union's political line has remained undefined.
In Libération Bernard Vivier, the former head of the French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC) – which has traditionally been hostile to the CGT – highlighted the “difficulty” faced by the CGT in “giving itself direction, a position, a clear line”. He cited as an example the fact that despite its traditional stance of opposition to reforms and change “the CGT signs 85% of the agreements put before it in companies. And Lepaon, following in the wake of Thibault, has signed some major agreements, even if he has had to give way on certain points, such as the reform of professional training.”
If there is one prime example of how the CGT has found it difficult to position itself, it is over the question of so-called workplace 'thresholds'; the level of worker representation in a French company is determined by the number of people it employs. The government wants to remove some of the obligations that companies are under when the number of employees passes 11; and also the additional rights that companies have to implement when the number of staff reaches 50. In mid-November the CGT head office announced that it was in favour of removing the obligation to hold elections for staff representatives when the number of employees was more than 11. Yet at the end of August Lepaon had given assurances that his team would give away “nothing” on these workplace thresholds. A member of the CCN committee notes: “In terms of union democracy it is unacceptable not to be informed of the CGT's thinking on this fundamental issue.”
The return of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring
In the last few days senior union figures have been of one mind: Thierry Lepaon is “finished” or “destroyed”. On the key ruling body, the confederation committee, we are told that all those who were once loyal have now deserted him. At a meeting on December 2nd, no one apparently stood up for the embattled leader, with his one supporter Agnès Naton being absent. The result was that a declaration was sent to members of the CCN to indicate that there would be “complete transparency” after the executive committee's meeting on Tuesday December 9th, so that “all the necessary measures” could be taken.
There was really only one interpretation of this: either Lepaon resigned after Tuesday's executive committee meeting or a meeting of the CCN would be called to force him to leave. That CCN gathering has now been scheduled for January. However, Lepaon is not going without a fight. An article in Les Échos by the well-informed Leïla de Comarmond states that Lepaon sought to strike a last-minute deal that would save his head – for now at least. On Wednesday December 3rd the general secretary met with the heads of the federations representing workers in metallurgy, energy, transport, the public authorities and health, who between them make up more than a third of the CGT's 680,000 members (based on 2010 figures). He offered to “give way to the metallurgy workers' federation secretary general Philippe Martinez … but at the next congress, which is currently scheduled for 2016”.
Lepaon's argument, it seems, is that if he resigns now that would simply trigger a new internal war. Those who want him to quit now are fully aware of this argument, but say they do not believe there would be a fresh conflict given the way the earlier infighting ravaged the upper echelons of the union. They would instead like to see an interim leader who would hold office until the 2016 congress – or a collective leadership. They claim that this approach, too, would help to ease tensions. Others, however, fear it could simply prolong the uncertainty.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter