Working Lives Research Institute
Sylvie Contrepois, Steve Jefferys
Dans quelle mesure le modèle de relations sociales français est-il transférable?
Les multinationales françaises et leur influence sur l'évolution des relations professionnelles en Bulgarie, en Hongrie et en Pologne.
Download the final report in French (with English annexes):
DARES WLRI PECO Rapport 2009.pdf
December 2005 to September 2009
Ministère de l’emploi, du travail et de la cohésion sociale
Direction de l’animation de la recherche, des études et des statistiques
(DARES), Mission animation de la recherche (MAR), France.
Download the leaflet for the DARES conference on 27 November 2008.
DARES Conference Leaflet
This research aims to provide a detailed analysis of the ways in which French multinationals operating in the banking, retailing, hotel and energy sectors of three significant countries of Central and Eastern Europe have influenced the industrial relations systems of their host companies and countries through the transfer of procedural and/or substantive elements of the French social model.
The French social model is intimately linked to the European social model, which was largely inspired by it. Both may be regarded as emanating from a pluralist perspective where, in contrast with a unitarist perspective, the respect of the collective rights of employees is seen as an acceptable and necessary way of managing capital-labour conflict. Procedurally the French social model is a dual channel model of employment relations that provides legal rights to encourage employees to elect representatives within the workplace and to form independent trade unions outside the workplace. The former are legally entitled to consultation and information on a range of issues affecting company strategy at local, national and European levels; the latter are legally entitled to bargain at sector and national levels with their counterpart employer organisations, and increasingly may also be entitled to bargain at the level of the firm or the workplace. Substantively the French and European social models have developed minimum conditions or norms over low pay, over gender pay equality, over rights to access to training, over protection of employee health and safety and the avoidance of stress at work and over working time and many other issues. In recent years French multinationals have also often taken the lead in developing codes of social responsibility and of ethics.
The research focus is thus on the direction and nature of French influence and how it is channelled. Several key empirical issues have to be resolved:
The research will test four hypotheses concerning the transferability of this influence. One predicts a significant degree of social model transfer under certain favourable conditions; a second proposes that a partial transfer takes place creating hybrids, mixing elements from the French and the national systems; a third predicts that French MNCs will largely adapt to the local social model; while a fourth hypothesis suggests that both the French and the Central and Eastern European models are indeed being slowly transformed, at least in so far as the larger and more strongly inward-investment attracting sectors are concerned - but towards a dominant neo-liberal employment relations regime rather than towards either the European social model or towards a reinforcement of the pre-existing statist or ‘cowboy’ regimes of the early 1990s.
The research will seek to explicate employment relations behaviours in the host countries at three distinct although interlinked levels:
The extent of transference of the French social model within each of the target firms’ subsidiaries is likely to vary in at least three different dimensions:
The three-year project involves research partners in Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland working under the overall coordination of the Working Lives Research Institute. The Institute researchers in London and Paris will be all carry out the parent MNC fieldwork, the overall analysis and report writing. The deliverables will include three meetings of the partners with DARES and members of a wider Project Advisory Group and a book, in addition to the reports and article that are required by DARES (and which will all be written in French).
Our choice of countries from Central and Eastern Europe was determined by two factors. First we compared of the extent and significance of French inward investment and decided to sample within a range in which investment from France could be seen to be run from highly to less significant. This dimension appeared to be a significant one for the research, since one factor in shaping the extent of influence could possibly be the significance of the French presence as a whole. The following matrix illustrates the results of this classification:
Table 1: Choice of countries by significance of French FDI
|
|
Poland |
Czech Republic |
Hungary |
Bulgaria |
|
Significance |
||||
|
High |
Yes |
|||
|
Medium |
Yes |
Yes |
||
|
Low |
Yes |
At this point we entered discussions with research partners we have in these four countries. While such a four-country comparative study would have been ideal, particularly in order to compare the two ‘medium’ significance firms, it soon became clear that it would have also involved taking on at least one additional MNC and possibly an additional sector too. This would have added significantly to the cost of the proposal, so we instead chose those three countries where our partners responded most positively and in some cases already had contacts with possible target MNCs. The countries chosen were Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, where estimates of the total numbers working for French MNCs ranges from 3-4,000 to 50-60,000 and to over 100,000. The former is scheduled to accede to the European Union in 2006, while the latter two acceded in 2004. This difference also allows us to observe the impact of European transition processes on policies and practices, as well as observing different industrial relations institutional legacies between countries and whether country size makes any difference.
Having chosen one large and two smaller Central and Eastern European countries, two of which have already acceded to the EU, and one of which will do so next year, we then reviewed the hundreds of French firms present in these countries and finally selected four, each of which was active in a different industrial sector.
The choice of sectors reflected the two main forms of non-manufacturing businesses: those with comparatively low capital-to-labour ratios (hotels, retailing, food-processing) and those with higher capital-labour ratios (banks, energy, telecommunications). It may be hypothesised that the former are more likely to adapt to local low-wage employment systems and the latter more likely to attempt to transfer the French social model. Table 2 indicates the analysis of the French presence across these sectors in the three countries.
Table 2: Choice of sectors and firms
|
|
Bulgaria |
Hungary |
Poland |
|
Energy |
EDF |
EDF |
EDF |
|
Telecomms |
Alcatel |
Bouygues |
France Telecom |
|
Bank |
BNP-Paribas |
Société Générale |
BNP Paribas |
|
Retail |
M. Bricolage |
Auchan |
Auchan |
|
Hotel |
Accor |
Accor |
Accor |
|
Food processing |
Lactalis |
Lactalis |
|
|
Total French presence |
69 firms |
56 000 |
c100 firms |
We then examined the association of the MNCs which were present in two or more of these countries with their application of the ‘French social model’ in the parent organisation in France. This comparison led us finally to choose EDF to illustrate the more highly-centralised French model, Société Générale to illustrate the strongly-institutionalised sectoral model (14 per cent trade union density), and Accor and Auchan to illustrate the flexibility that operates in areas where trade unionism is relatively weak.
The four firms proposed by this partnership have very different cultures with more or less highly-structured industrial relations systems. While the trade union tradition is very strong at EDF, with its highly developed representative institutions, they are somewhat less so at Société Générale and at Accor, although all three French multinationals are quite closely identified with the French social model. In the case of Auchan there is a less clear formal commitment to the French social model, with the company stressing the role of its ‘collaborators’ rather than that of ‘social partners’, but there remains a strong commitment to social responsibility. The four companies initially chosen here thus make provide a broad range of different ‘typical’ parent French social models. During the course of the research we extended the study to include Carrefour and Axa.
The objective of the literature review (of both the English and French literature as well as of the Bulgarian, Hungarian and Polish sources) and of the interviews in France will be to locate the industrial relations model used by the target French MNCs. In this phase we will expose the principal elements of the company culture and seek to understand the Group’s human resource strategy as well as understanding the unions’ perspectives and influence and the extent of cooperation between staff representatives from different countries. The interviews will enable us to clearly classify the parent MNC in terms of its degree of proximity to the predominant features of the French industrial relations model. They will also allow us to identify a few benchmark issues that the actors consider will be very important over the next period.
Issues:
Interviews:
The aim of this phase is to analyse the recent evolution and the current state of industrial relations in the target firms, to ascertain what they were like at the outset and what impact the French social model has had on them to date. We would also wish to know whether the MNCs are participating in any social dialogue at the sector or national level in the host country.
Issues:
Interviews
The aim of this phase is to analyse the evolution of the industrial relations model since the earlier interviews 18 months previously. We will do this partly through our local partners maintaining occasional contact with the first round of interviewees, and partly through following developments in the local and international business press. We are particularly concerned here with the direction of any changes detected, whether towards a greater or a lesser resemblance to the parent’s own system, changes to which will also be monitored. We will additionally focus a limited number of key company issues that can provide greater insight into the company’s functioning and that were raised by the actors at the first interviews.
Issues
Interviews
This phase will probe for any evidence of feedback on the French parent multinational from the experience of managing subsidiaries in Eastern and Central Europe - either in terms of management practices in general or on how the MNC’s own industrial relations system now operates in France.
Issues
Interviews
The research design proposes a central research team from the Working Lives Research Institute based in the UK (Professor Steve Jefferys) and in France (Dr Sylvie Contrepois). Dr Contrepois will be responsible for the project coordination and for carrying out the fieldwork into the four French MNCs in France and the targeted European Works Council meetings, as well as for the joint (with our local partners) French- or English-language interviews with key respondents in each of Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria in both the second and third phases of the research. In each of these three countries our local partners will be responsible for providing a brief literature review concerning the effects of FDI on their national industrial relations system, providing brief case study histories of the target MNC, interviewing in the national language in the local fieldwork stages of the research and with monitoring the company’s policies during the intervening 18 months. The Working Lives Research Institute researchers will be responsible for writing in French three reports for DARES, one in the second month, one delivered in month 18 and the concluding report in Month 36.
The Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (FEBA) at the St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia was re-established after the 1989 changes in order to respond to the development of market economy and democratic society in Bulgaria. Fourteen years later the Faculty was recognised as one of the leading institutions for teaching and research in the field of Economics and Business in Bulgaria according to research papers of experts of the World Bank. It offers a four-year B.A. program in economics, an M.A. programme in collaboration with Erasmus University, and Ph.D. research programmes. Two to four Fulbright professors teach economics at the university each year. Since 1997, a consortium of four French universities has cooperated with the faculty.
Violetta has been the acting director at the Center for Policy Studies at the Central European University since 2001 and the director since September 2003. In addition to her work at the Center, she continues a variety of other related occupations including as part-time programme manager for the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiatives with the Open Society Institute in Budapest, tutor at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration and visiting lecturer at Janus Pannonius University, Pécs. Violetta is also Chair of Board and spokesperson for MONA (Foundation for the Women of Hungary) and an editor for Café Bábel, an interdisciplinary critical quarterly in Hungarian. She teaches courses on economic and political anthropology, gender issues and post-socialist transformations. The Center for Policy Studies (CPS) is an academic unit within the Central European University, an internationally-recognised graduate research-intensive university in the social sciences and humanities. The university aims at excellence in the mastery of established knowledge, excellence in the creation of new knowledge in the social sciences and the humanities, and excellence in developing the policy implications of both. CPS is dedicated to improving the quality of governance in the region by the provision of independent public policy analysis and advice. It is a member of a number of European and international research consortia dealing with topics such as social diversity and equal opportunity, economic culture, good governance and globalisation. CPS has published several volumes of policy research, offers an on-line library of policy documents from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, delivers a Master’s Program in Public Policy, and, in partnership with the Open Society Institute, supports an annual fellowship program.
Bernard Brunhes Polska (BBP) was established in 2002 in Warsaw, Poland and is a branch office of Bernard Brunhes Consultants (BBC). BBI provides advisory services to businesses in the scope of strategic management, human resources management and change management, with a special attention paid to the social aspects of introducing change. From the very beginning the firm has been involved in the process of economic transformation by participating in the projects financed by the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and by supporting major economic reforms (i.e. the pension system reform or the Social Insurance Institution (ZUS). BBP offers a unique combination of a French expertise in restructuring-related areas and a sound knowledge and understanding of a Polish reality.