State Capitalism and the CGT
In retrospect it is hard to see how workers could have reversed government policy once the CGT had lost the "generalized strike" of November and December 1947. Since 1935 workers had prospered politically only under the aegis of a united left-wing front. Not surprisingly, then, the cold-war division of the left broke the momentum of reform. The split between FO and the CGT, though not as damaging in aviation as in some industries, nonetheless weakened the link between Parisian workers and their counterparts in the provinces, especially in Nantes, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, where Socialist militants and FO made some headway.[79] Moreover, once the Air Ministry shifted to a policy of demobilization, it became nearly impossible for aircraft workers, whatever their political affiliations, to preserve alliances in the work force across regions, factories, and firms—alliances that had proven so fruitful during the Popular Front and in 1944. Massive layoffs pitted workers against one another. For example, when workers at Dassault's new plant in Bordeaux advocated a plan to build the Dassault 450 as a new fighter for the air force, militants at SNCASO in Toulouse felt betrayed in their own drive to win government support for the SO 6020.[80] With everyone's job on the line, the competition between firms for contracts undermined the CGT's effort to unify workers behind a common strategy of collective defense.
These conditions also made it nearly impossible to coordinate strike strategies beyond single factories, much less between firms. When workers and technicians at a number of factories managed to stage brief strikes for wage hikes at various moments in 1948, especially in the rebounding private sector, their protests always (with the exception of one strike at Bréguet) remained confined to single factories.[81] Employers were quick to take advantage of labor's isolation. When a strike threat surfaced in January 1950 at SNCASO in Saint-Nazaire, the director
threatened to "transfer the execution of current of future orders to other factories."[82] Georges Hereil, the head of SNCASO, responded to a succession of brief work stoppages in his shops in Toulouse by threatening a lockout, adding that "this temporary closing will in fact become permanent because the Ministry cannot support all the existing factories. . . . If it sees a factory close, it will surely prevent its reopening."[83] Since company directors could count on the ministries to back up their threats, it became all but impossible for workers to build solidarity across plants.
Solidarity between blue-collar and white-collar employees suffered as well in the late 1940s. The Communist wing of the CGT had always had difficulty winning the support of office employees and engineers since it first tried to do so in 1936. Shop steward elections in the late 1940s and early 1950s showed FO and the CFTC gaining some ground in the white-collar ranks even as the CGT maintained its prominence with blue-collar workers.[84] It was one thing for left-leaning engineers and supervisory personnel to come under the thrall of the CGT during the spirited days of the Liberation, and quite another to stick with it after the cold war, anti-Communist purges, and the PCF's own increasingly doctrinaire Stalinism cast a pall over the CGT. Some middle-class employees, in fact, remained CGT supporters, but most took refuge by voting for representatives from FO, the CFTC, or, increasingly in the course of the 1950s, the even more moderate Confédération Générale des Cadres (CGC).[85]
Conservative stabilization weakened the CGT as a force with which managers and state officials had to contend. Without political allies in top management and in the Air Ministry the CGT lost influence over hiring and prestige on the shop floor. Active membership in the union declined, as it had after the defeat of the general strike in 1938. What happened in aviation corresponded to the fate of the labor movement throughout France, where the CGT lost at least half its membership by the early 1950s from its 1946 peak of more than five million members. Most of those who left dropped out of active involvement in unions altogether rather than joining up with the CFTC or FO, which remained very much minority confederations in the 1950s.[86] In aviation, as elsewhere, the French unions suffered a setback in 1947 and 1948 from which they never recovered, leaving French workers with one of the weaker labor movements in Western Europe.
But after the defeats of the late 1940s the unions did not revert to the state of extreme weakness that had crippled them in the 1920s and early 1930s. Nor did repression undermine the relative strength of the CGT vis-à-vis its trade union rivals in the blue-collar ranks of most industries, including aircraft manufacturing. On the contrary, by 1950 the Communist-oriented CGT had weathered repression well enough to remain en-
trenched in the industry. Government policy in the late 1940s, in fact, did more harm to FO and the CFTC than to the CGT. Union militants in these smaller, more moderate federations suffered the burden of their political affiliations with Socialist, Christian Democrat, and Radical governments that froze wages and eliminated jobs.[87] Force Ouvrière militants were well aware of this liability. One Socialist militant at SNCASE in Toulouse wrote Daniel Mayer, the Socialist labor minister, that further delay in adjusting the salaries of plant supervisors "will bring us ridicule and interfere with our propaganda."[88] When FO militants in Bordeaux appealed to the Ramadier government to spare their SNCASO factory from cutbacks, their efforts were of little avail.[89] Although FO militants tried to argue, with some justification, that the layoffs had begun under Tillon, there was no denying that the draconian measures of 1947–49 came at the hands of Socialists, Radicals, and Christian Democrats. Their policies, by pitting workers against the state, gave Communist militants the chance to function as uncompromising advocates for a threatened work force.
The CGT's criticism of the Marshall Plan, moreover, probably sounded more persuasive and less doctrinaire to aircraft workers than to employees in most other industries. American aircraft, after all, did represent a threat to French jobs; the procurement decisions of Air France, the air force, and the Atlantic Pact powers appeared to be leading, as militants warned, to "a vassalization of our aircraft industry."[90] Amid the hardships of the late 1940s it was easy to play on these fears. In parliament Tillon went so far as to question American motives during the war: "We must remember that French airplane factories were bombed particularly heavily by the Anglo-Americans throughout the last months of the war. Perhaps now we can better understand why."[91] Aircraft militants were among the more outspoken labor critics of American policy, as was FTM leader Henri Beaumont, who in 1949 before a crowd of workers at SNCASE in Marignane spoke with enough conviction to be arrested "for demoralizing the army and the nation."[92] Even though anti-Americanism diminished the capacity of the CGT to wield influence in parliament and the ministries, on the shop floor it helped CGT militants maintain their credibility as defenders of a work force under siege.
Sporadic reports in the labor press make it clear that CGT militants also managed, through their victories in factory elections for plant committees and personnel delegate posts, to remain a powerful presence on the shop floor despite firings, anti-Communist purges, and repression. In the Paris region they maintained their dominance, but even in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Nantes, where the Socialist Party was strong, the CGT held its own. In 1948 the CGT won elections for three personnel delegates at SNCASO in Nantes, matching the two the FO won and the
one that went to the CFTC. In the plant committee elections at SNCASO in Bordeaux a year later the CGT outpolled FO, 291 to 256, in voting by both blue-collar workers and nonsupervisory white-collar employees. And in Toulouse in 1951 CGT militants won eight delegate posts to FO's three in the blue-collar ranks of SNCASE.[93] These victories enabled militants to retain their influence as shop floor spokesmen as well as keep alive the ethos of CGT boosterism that had suffused the cafeterias, medical clinics, vacation camps, and retirement parties during the Tillon era.
The return to collective bargaining also lent legitimacy to the CGT. On 11 February 1950, after months of negotiation and a nationwide strike the previous November, parliament finally approved a bill restoring collective bargaining over wages throughout the economy. After years of wage and price controls, which by 1949 had done more to hold down wages than prices, it came as a relief to workers to renew the struggle for collective contracts.[94] Since the law authorized agreements between employers and "the most representative union," collective bargaining usually confirmed CGT militants as legitimate spokesmen for workers in the industry.
Yet the return to collective bargaining did not lead to the kind of showcase contracts that aircraft workers had won in 1936 and 1938. Militants in the CGT certainly maintained the practice of defending wage differentials within the skill hierarchy of metalworking that skilled workers had always wanted to protect, differentials that Communists in the industry had respected despite the egalitarianism of party ideology.[95] But militants were in no position to win the privileged wage base for aircraft workers that rearmament had provided in the Popular Front era. Even though employment in aviation expanded steadily again after the brutal contraction of the late 1940s, growing to more than ninety thousand employees by 1962, the industry never witnessed a return to a separate contract.[96] Employees in the 1950s had to bargain within the framework of regional contracts for metalworking as a whole, just as their predecessors had had to do after the CGT had been vanquished in 1939, Wages in the early 1950s in aviation tended to stick closely to the levels of those received by comparably skilled workers in other metalworking branches, rather than surpass them as they had in the 1930s.[97] After the strike failures of the late 1940s, not least a string of defeats over wage issues at Hispano-Suiza in late 1949, metalworkers and aircraft workers had to begin the new decade with mediocre agreements. The return to collective bargaining, then, completed the process of stabilization Maroselli and Pellenc had begun in 1947, even as the collective bargaining law gave CGT militants an aura of respectability at the negotiating table.
But the key to the CGT's survival as the leading faction of the labor movement lay at a deeper level, in the ability of its militants to respond
to the expanding role of the state. Communist militants came to predominate in the labor movement in aviation in large part because they were better equipped than their rivals, organizationally and ideologically, to respond to the emergence of state capitalism. Once the PCF became committed to a united-front strategy in 1934, its militants adjusted quickly to the tasks of lobbying government officials, pressuring the ministries to state officials as well as employers. Two rounds of their grievances to state officials as well as employers. Two rounds of left-wing innovation in the aircraft industry, first under Blum in 1936 and second under Tillon in 1945, confirmed for workers how sensible it was to view the state as an instrument of reform. Likewise the episodes of retrenchment, under Daladier in 1938 and Maroselli a decade later, taught workers how much it mattered who ruled. Under these circumstances it made sense for workers to support local militants who could promote a strategy that linked shop floor agitation with a political movement at the national level.
Not only did the bureaucratic centralism of the CGT and the PCF make it easier for Communist militants to respond to the government's increasing presence in the industry; the statism in French Communist ideology helped as well. Bolshevization of the PCF in the 1920s had weakened the anarchist sensibilities that had initially inspired some party militants, and by the late 1920s a state-centered vision of revolutionary change, rooted both in Guesdism and Leninism, had come to prevail. In contrast to trade union moderates and revolutionary syndicalists, who still defended the Amiens principle of separating unions and parties, Communist militants entered the Popular Front period unencumbered by the antipolitical and antistatist views many non-Communist militants still shared. It was easier for Communist militants to build organizational links between union locals and plant cells, on the one hand, and the FTM and the PCF, on the other. In a technologically advanced industry where the degree of capitalization had become great and the market was shaped by international politics, it made sense to jettison the syndicalist tradition for a Jacobin, statist orientation. It served militants well locally to be part of a coherent movement focused on policy and power nationally.
By the same token the politicization of life in the aircraft industry created fundamental strategic problems for the CGT's rivals, FO and the CFTC. These minority confederations formally rejected the notion of linking unions to parties. In any event they suffered from the failure of the SFIO and the MRP to cultivate extensive organizational roots in working-class France. Not surprisingly, CFTC militants argued explicitly for ways to depoliticize the aircraft industry—to insulate it from the political upheavals that had rocked aviation so profoundly since 1936. J.-M. Loge, a leading CFTC militant involved in aviation, argued that
"these perpetual changes in orientation" had led to "an enormous loss of authority for managers. . . . We think French aviation will develop fully when our political leaders stop trying to make our industry an antichamber of parliament and content themselves with appointing people solely on the basis of technical competence to head our companies and factories."[98] L. Desgrandes, another leading CFTC militant, even went so far as to suggest "the possibility of appealing to private capitalists, with participation in the management of the enterprises, to limit this risk of politicization. Certain factories could even return to the private sector."[99] Although the CFTC supported the nationalizations, these militants clearly understood that state intervention and the politically charged atmosphere in which it had occurred in the 1930s and 1940s had made independent trade unionism all the more difficult to pursue.
If the PCF benefited in these years from the politics of state intervention, the party also changed in the process. By adapting so shrewdly to state intervention, CGT militants made Communist trade unionism a more reformist movement that it had been in the early 1930s without completely eliminating the revolutionary self-image of the PCF. The Tillon experiment, and the struggle to defend it, served to domesticate the PCF and the CGT, just as the Popular Front experience had done before the war. The day-to-day experience of interacting with state officials—on company boards, national councils, and conciliation committees as well as within the ministries—acclimated militants to the gradualism of industrial reform. After the Liberation plant and production committees drew large numbers of militants into this process of adaptation. "Through plant committees," Benoît Frachon, the general secretary of the CGT, said in 1946, "our trade union organizations are today to a large degree schools of education, administration, and management for the working class."[100] Productivism, the work ethic, a respect for hierarchy—none of the basic values of the industrial enterprise came under criticism. To be sure, Communist militants upheld an anticapitalist vision. Tillon, Jean Breteau, and other militants remained biting in their criticism of the self-interested entrepreneur. L'Union des métallurgistes , the monthly newspaper of the Fédération des Métaux, with its periodic references to the Soviet Union, Stalingrad, and "the valiant Red Army," made no secret of its solidarity with Moscow. Moreover, throughout the 1950s Communist militants would become unrelenting in their ideological attack on "state monopoly capitalism" in a rapidly modernizing France. But in practice the Communist-oriented CGT came across at the grass-roots level as the one institution that was prepared to defend workers within the politicized, centralized industrial world of state capitalism. In this respect the aircraft industry, though atypical in its market structure, was nonetheless an important arena of working-class formation, for it was
here and in a few other nationalized sectors that workers developed a style of trade union militancy geared for the dirigiste economy of postwar France.
It is now clear in retrospect, however, that the achievement of building an enduring state-centered and Communist-oriented trade unionism in French aviation carried a price for workers. For one thing, it tied their prospects to the political fortunes of a Communist Party that would continue to be victimized by the anti-Communism of the 1950s and to party leaders who proved ill disposed toward de-Stalinization. The CGT's strategy of depending on party influence and channeling grievances toward the ministries made sense so long as the PCF could wield influence within the government and so long as the left was united behind a Popular Front strategy. Once the left broke in two in 1947, most CGT supporters, who had little desire to shift their loyalties to FO, were stuck with a Communist movement that was particularly vulnerable to the ill effects of the cold war. Ironically, the very expansion of state control in the industry that CGT militants had promoted since 1936 made it relatively easy after 1946 to purge labor from the company boards and national planning bodies, to say nothing of informal access to the ministries, that had become vital to CGT strategy. To make matters worse, although it was beneficial to have linked the CGT to a rising Communist Party during the Popular Front and the Liberation, after 1947 partisan connections subjected the labor movement in aviation, as in all other industries in France, to bitter internal divisions. Rivalries between the CGT, FO, CFTC, and CGC weakened worker solidarity and widened the cleavage between blue-collar and white-collar employees. In the end close ties to the Communist Party made it tougher, not easier, for militants to overcome the long-standing sources of trade union weakness in France—political divisiveness, employer hostility, an underdeveloped collective-bargaining system, and the open shop, all of which stood in the way of recruiting reliable, dues-paying members.
Furthermore, those features of the CGT that made its militants so effective in representing workers in the 1930s and 1940s—its hierarchical organization, its discipline, its affiliation with the Communist Party, and its focus on the struggle for state power—also undercut its capacity to respond flexibly to the rank and file. As Communists, militants were expected to subordinate workers' immediate concerns to the larger political priorities of the party. After 1948, as the PCF's political line hardened, Communist militants had to agitate against military production in accord with the party's peace campaign, and they found themselves, like their predecessors in the early 1930s, in the awkward position of opposing the immediate bread-and-butter interests of their fellow workers.[101] Similarly, CGT militants were ill prepared to respond to demands for
employee autonomy and trade union democracy, which cut against the grain of a Communist movement whose leaders remained committed to party-dominated unionism and "democratic centralism." If Stalinism served as an asset in the 1940s for militants in a state-led industry, it would eventually become a liability, especially when a new generation of skilled workers responded enthusiastically to notions of autogestion (self-management) in the late 1960s. Not surprisingly, given the skilled nature of aircraft and the legacy of working-class radicalism that had developed there, the first wildcat factory occupation in the great strike wave of May 1968 would take place at Sud-Aviation in Bouguenais.[102]