"French trade unions and the impact of multinationalisation in a state-owned company: Renault, 1944-1975"

It is often argued that during the postwar boom years French trade unions were unable to get interested in multinationalisation or, when they developed positions or initiatives, they had no influence on the practices of their own company. The case of the Renault company is interesting for three reasons: before the war it was a private multinational and after the war it became a state-owned multinational ; out of the three main trade unions the larger one (the CGT) was communist-oriented ; the risks of multinationalisation were perceived by labor and by part of top management. This case, based on company archives, one union archives and printed sources, challenges conventional wisdom in several ways. It shows that the unions were not powerless and had several tools or compasses to face these new developments. The CGT initially was bold enough to suggest borrowing from Soviet management techniques. The company did not follow suit. The other unions, after accepting the American-inspired technologies of productivity in exchange of bonuses in the new world competitive order, accepted further multinationalisation so as to increase the number of jobs and the level of wages. They also benefitted from the participation of their confederations into various national and international organisations, like the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC), born even before OECD, in 1948. However, this differentiation between the two groups of unions was deeply eroded by the impact of multinationalisation on the lives of the workers. The sharp criticism by the CGT against the American-born job evaluation methods, introduced in 1959, was soon shared by the many of the rank and file, and by part of the Human Resource Department. The CGT opposed to Renault’s penetration of the US market, but its failure in 1960 led to the layoff of 3000 workers, and to a spontaneous demonstration against the main computer which had selected these workers. Archives show that the Manufacturing Department had also opposed the multinationalisation. The paper concludes not only by showing that these reactions contributed to Renault’s blue and white collars participation to the mass strikes of 1968