La solidarité et ses limites: La CFDT et les travailleurs dans “les années 68”

Abstract

Despite important recent work, US historians still have much more to learn about the interaction between unions and immigrants in the years since the 1960s. One indication of this lacuna is that it is difficult to cite a US study that combines both a national narrative and a fine-grained local analysis of the subject as well as Cole Stangler's revealing new volume does for the case of France in the 1960s and 1970s.Stangler's story is enlightening on multiple levels. He focuses not on the largest French union federation, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), but on its smaller rival, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), which, he convincingly demonstrates, took a much more aggressive approach to defending immigrant workers during the crucial years between 1965 and 1979.The CFDT was founded in 1964 when the bulk of unionists in the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (CFTC) broke from the Christian orientation of that federation to establish the CFDT on a secular footing (déconfessionnalisation). The timing of this founding was propitious. The Algerian War had recently ended; immigrants were moving to France from Eastern and Southern Europe and North Africa, increasing the proportion of immigrants in the French population from 4.7 percent in 1962 to 6.5 percent in 1975; and the nation was on the brink of the upheaval of 1968, which would famously bring workers and students together into the streets of Paris.Holding a “conférence nationale des travailleurs immigrés” in 1966, the CDFT set out to study the problems of immigrant workers and define a plan for organizing them. It then made a historic accord with the rival CGT that allowed each federation to influence the other on the immigration issue over the ensuing decade. The upheaval of 1968, which saw immigrants take to the streets alongside the French-born, crystallized sentiment among the CDFT's leaders to make immigrant organizing a priority.In the early 1970s, the CDFT strengthened its position on immigrants around the notion that “in the realm of capitalism, we are all immigrants” (au royaume du capitalisme, nous sommes tous des immigrés; 67), setting up “groupes de nationalité” to bring workers together in caucuses of their country of origin and joining with the CGT in a campaign against racism that in 1972 helped achieve passage of the Plevin Law, which criminalized racially discriminatory hate speech. That same year, the government agreed to an expansion in labor rights, allowing all foreign workers to be elected as shop stewards. By 1973, the CDFT was supporting the demands of Tunisian immigrant strike leaders threatened with expulsion for being undocumented (“sans papiers”) and was making immigrant rights central to its program (76).During these years, Stangler shows, the CDFT led the CGT in embracing the cause of immigrant workers. Unfortunately, however, the work of both federations was thrown on the defensive by the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to the presidency in 1974, and his suspension of immigration and family unification policies. As the CDFT struggled with the new administration, it also faced internal problems. Although the federation embraced the cause of immigrants, it made little progress elevating immigrants into positions of union leadership. Of 1,298 delegates at its 1973 congress, only 18 were immigrants.The economic crisis that began in the mid-1970s further set back the CDFT's efforts, initiating a process of refocusing (recentrage) that saw it shift its emphasis away from immigrants’ labor rights toward a defense of their cultural integrity (droit à la difference) (124, 122). Increasing defensiveness effectively ended the period of the CDFT's most active engagement on the immigration issue by 1979.In his volume's second half, Stangler shifts from a national overview to a close examination of how key CDFT unions in the construction trades, chemical manufacturing, and public employment responded to immigrants and investigates immigrants’ participation in some of the prominent strikes of 1968 and the early 1970s, supplementing CDFT archival records with interviews with those who engaged in the struggles he documents. His examination of key CDFT unions reveals how uneven interest in the immigration issue was within the federation. The construction union, the Fédération du Bâtiment, operating in an industry where immigrants were providing a growing share of the workforce (12 percent overall in the sector, but nearly 40 percent in the region around Paris by 1973), embraced the immigrant workers’ cause most fully, while the chemical workers’ union, the Fédération de la Chimie (later the Fédération unifée de la Chimie), operating in an industry with fewer immigrants, never explicitly engaged the immigration issue. If immigrants received a varied reception among CDFT unions, Stangler shows that they played an increasingly important role in strikes during a militant moment in French labor history, including nontraditional strikes (des greves non traditionnelles) at Girosteel and Margoline, in which immigrants made demands for equitable treatment central to those fights (166).He concludes with a detailed case study of labor struggle at Renault's factory in Flins-sur-Seine, where immigrants led important strikes in 1973 and 1978. This rich case study tells the story of young militants such as Moussa Diallo of Senegal, Jamaa Ourami of Morocco, and Daniel Richter, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, who became the CDFT's leader in the plant and took a strong stand against the racism endemic among the plant's French-born workers. Symbolic of how seriously Richter took the concerns of his immigrant comrades was his defense of Islamic workers’ demands for the establishment of prayer rooms at the plant, a demand that soon spread to other auto factories. The CDFT's defense of that demand was “We Are All Shiites” (Nous sommes tous chiites; 215).Stangler ends his narrative in 1979. In the decades that followed, shifting economics, politics, and culture would make it harder to rally workers around proclamations like “Nous sommes tous chiites.” Over time, the immigration issue receded from the prominent position it occupied on French labor's agenda in the 1970s. Today French labor, like its US counterpart, still suffers from the limited progress it made in building a more inclusive movement during the crucial years before neoliberalism tightened its grip.We can learn a great deal from the French experience described by Cole Stangler—especially from his smart, creative, multilevel method of analyzing that experience.