HRMWE Research Community Seminar

Human Resource Management, Work and Employment (HRMWE) Research Community Seminar

Title: What can unions learn about solidarity from social movements? The case of the gilets jaunes in France

02 February 2022
Time: 14:00 – 16:00
Location: Zoom

Guest Speaker: Heather Connolly, Associate Professor of Employment Relations at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM)

Registration link: https://forms.ncl.ac.uk/view.php?id=13408105

Abstract

The gilets jaunes movement started in 2018 as protest against a planned fuel tax rise, which the President, Emmanuel Macron, insisted would aid the country’s transition to green energy. At the time polls suggested that the price of fuel was becoming a key concern for French citizens. The emergence of a collective identity was initially facilitated by the focus on the fuel tax rise, which resonated with a diverse group of French people online and led to collective actions and protests. The state, and specifically Macron, was attributed directly with the blame for the fuel tax rise and after several weeks of protest the government backed down on the fuel tax rise. The high levels of participation in the protests and the outcome (forcing the government to back down on the fuel tax rise), need to be set in context of the multiple failures of trade union-led collective action to force the government to back down on major welfare and labour reforms since 2006, even where there has been high levels of participation and disruption and strong public support. In 2018, in the same year as the gilets jaunes movement emerged, trade unions in the railways, the bastion of French trade unionism, experienced an historic defeat over reforms to their status.

For industrial and labour relations scholars the movement’s explicit rejection of links with trade unions – despite commonalities of interests – exposes limitations in the current model of trade union representation in France. Yet, the movement also exposed the possibilities for widespread collective action and resistance to state policies affecting working-class people, and is evidence of a wider fertile territory for solidarity that remains a dormant potential until activated by ‘moments of collectivism’, sparked by a sense of injustice and/or crisis (Atzeni, 2009).

Using documentary and online social media sources, this paper maps the emergence of the movement and explores the shifts and complexities in the framing of injustices and attribution over time. The paper contributes to our understanding of how collective identity and solidarity develops and is maintained drawing on the conceptual framework of Morgan and Pulignano (2019) to support their argument that the more moral, political and performative elements of solidarity overlap and reinforce each other, the more potentially powerful such movements can become.