Industrial tribunals election campaign slow to take off

The next elections for the Prud'hommes, the members of industrial tribunals, will take place on 10 December 1997. Although these courts, with equal representation of employers and employees, are often the only recourse for workers faced with dismissal, the elections hardly galvanise them into action. The unions have started campaigning locally, but on the national scale this has received no media attention.

The re-election of the members of France's Conseils de prud'hommes, or industrial tribunal s, which takes place every five years, will occur on 10 December 1997. On this occasion, around 15,000 members will be elected to the 271 tribunals spread across France.

A court in which employees and employers are represented

The Conseils de prud'hommesare unusual tribunals, in that the judges are elected by the people they judge. Voters are split into two different electoral colleges: one for employers and one for employees (excluding the civil service) and unemployed people.

What further distinguishes these tribunals is that their composition is divided equally between employers' and employees' representatives. The tribunals are split into five autonomous sections: industry, commerce, agriculture, miscellaneous activities and executive personnel. The presidency is rotated between employers' and employees' representatives. The members of the tribunal who are employees are paid to carry out their duties and protected against dismissals in the same way as all other employee representatives.

The last distinguishing feature of the tribunals is that the procedure takes place in two phases. The first stage seeks to achieve reconciliation or an agreement between the two parties. If this fails, the second phase is one of trial. The tribunals may judge all disputes arising over the course of, or the breaking of, employment contracts, and have become an increasingly important agent in the resolution of individual industrial disputes, to the detriment of traditional union action and the factory inspectorate. Since the elimination in 1986 of the requirement to obtain government approval for redundancies, the tribunals have also been dealing with litigation stemming from these redundancies. Such is the backlog of work in the different sections that an employee often has to wait more than six months for his or her case to be heard.

Access to the tribunals is cheap and simple. The assistance of a lawyer is never compulsory, and the employee can ask for help from trade union-appointed representatives, often called défenseurs prud'homaux(industrial tribunal defence lawyers). They often come into contact with employees not encountered by unions, especially those working in small businesses and many of those in the tertiary sector. This is a means of carrying out local union action and is a considerable source of unionisation. All unions attempt to set up "open hours" and legal advice services in union branches at both départementand local levels, by the défenseurs prud'homaux. The low rate of union membership at those levels makes carrying out this priority objective difficult.

General consultation shunned by employees

For French unions, the elections for the tribunals are at least as much an opportunity to prove how representative they are. While, in terms of employee representation, these elections are not comparable with those held in the civil service - in which employee representatives are elected and the national representativeness of civil service unions is determined - they are the only general workplace elections, since elections to the administrative bodies of social security funds ceased to be held. The result thus carries a great deal of strategic importance for the organisations involved.

The single-round voting system is open not only to the five representative union confederations, and the three main employers' associations, but also to all kinds of slates. This is why the far-right National Front (Front National), which gathers about 15% of votes in political elections, intends to run its own candidates. This wide-ranging freedom of candidature was confirmed by the Ministry of Labour at the outset of the election campaign in April 1997 (FR9703133N).

The turnout at elections has been falling from one election to the next. The last one, in December 1992, was largely shunned by the voters, as the turnout was 43% for employees and scarcely 29% among employers. Despite its vote being eroded by 3%, CGT remained the largest union confederation, with 33% of the vote, finishing ahead of CFDT (24%) and CGT-FO (20%). The vote for "various" union groupings rose from 2% to 2.5%. The Confederation of Free Trade Unions (CSL), which had run more candidates than in 1987, doubled its vote, from 2% to 4%, another striking feature of the 1992 elections.

The 1997 election campaign opened with the registration of voters, which constituted the first battle waged by the unions. It is actually the employers who declare their employees. Although punishments are provided for in the case of employers not fulfilling their obligation, many do not carry out this formality. In spite of reminders from the Ministry of Labour and campaigns by workplace union representatives, only slightly more than 50% of potential voters have actually been registered, a proportion comparable with that of 1992.

The unions' election campaign, whilst active locally, has not yet taken off on a national scale.

Commentary

Although unions will certainly launch a more media-friendly campaign for the Prud'hommeselections, after the October conference on job creation and salaries (FR9710169F), it is perhaps too late to turn the tide of employee abstention. This stems mainly from ignorance of the joint representative nature of the institution. (Catherine Vincent, IRES)