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Article dans une revue Review of Social Economy Année : 2020

The power of (the) union. Trade-unionism and workplace democracy in a French recovered factory

Résumé

Since the 2000s, workplace democracy has become the vehicle of a new political imagination that may offer an alternative to the excesses of capitalist globalization. However historical and sociological research has regularly highlighted difficulties of establishing democratic structures in the workplace. What happens when a trade-union becomes the main actor of this democratization? Underlining the strong bureaucratization of the trade union field, studies on trade unionism seem to predict low potentials. The case of a cooperative takeover of a French company by the CGT union in the early 2010s gives us the opportunity to verify this claim empirically. The examination of the transformation of this printing company into a worker cooperative leads to two main results: firstly, we will see that while trade union bureaucratization allows the takeover of the companythanks to trained and professionalized organizersit also constitutes an obstacle when setting up the main cooperative schemes, as shown by the lack of participation in general meetings. In a second phase, however, it will be seen that trade unionism produces its own participatory mechanisms: by placing members from each sector on the board of directorsfrom the reception to the printing presses and the sales departmentthe union sets up a "sociological democratization" which has important effects on the functioning of the enterprise: the cooperative thus creates a continuum of interactions and the possibility to contest which constitute "worker control" over the new management.
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halshs-03097753, version 1 (05-01-2021)

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Maxime Quijoux. The power of (the) union. Trade-unionism and workplace democracy in a French recovered factory. Review of Social Economy, 2020, vol. 78 (n° 3), pp. 431-449. ⟨10.1080/00346764.2020.1775875⟩. ⟨halshs-03097753⟩
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