Workers and Bosses: Friends or Foes?

Denmark and France symbolize two opposing tendencies in the European labor movement today, writes Thomas Fuller in the International Herald Tribune.

…To the Danes, the strike is a weapon of last resort; in France, it is a means of expression.

Denmark and France, labor specialists say, symbolize two opposing tendencies in the European labor movement today. Their differences go much deeper than just strike tactics and ultimately illustrate both the worries and the hopes of organized labor on a continent where union membership is shrinking.

For those who believe that organized labor is still the best way to organize society, Denmark stands out as a model, a country where unions have an important day-to-day role in managing the workplace. Unions help run the unemployment insurance program, and their representatives sit on company boards.

In Denmark, unions and employers are partners. In France they are adversaries.

In Denmark, unions are proactive and help craft rules on things like maternity leave and working hours. In France unions react to, but rarely propose, new laws.

France also has a much lower rate of union membership: just 9.6 percent. By the standards of rich countries, this is close to extinction. France has the lowest level of unionization in the Western world — the average proportion of unionized workers is 30 percent in Europe and around 13 percent in the United States.

Unions in France appear to wield greater power than their numerical strength, labor specialists say, because they receive widespread attention in the French media, and the small minority of unionized workers, mainly in the public sector, strike relatively often.

The French government also buttresses the unions' power, inadvertently or not, by extending agreements reached between unions and employers to 90 percent of the working population, according to estimates by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Einar Edelberg, the deputy permanent secretary of the Danish Ministry of Employment, calls this arrangement "poison" for the labor movement. Workers lose their incentive to join unions, he said, and organized labor becomes less representative.

The situation is altogether different in Denmark, where 75 percent of employees are union members, one of the highest rates in the world.

In interviews in Copenhagen, union officials said the success of the Danish labor movement depended on keeping government interference to a minimum. Rules on working hours, pay and vacation time are negotiated between unions and employers, not in government ministries.

This contrasts with France, where the regulations of the workplace are laid out in Napoleonic detail in the Code du Travail.

By contrast, there is no government-set minimum wage in Denmark — the government sees no need to impose one because Danish unions represent such a large percentage of the working population. But a large part of Denmark's success in managing labor relations rests on something more intangible, an unusually harmonious relationship between workers and their bosses.

"Both we and the employers are very aware that we need to have trust in each other," Rasmussen of the trade confederation said.

Edelberg of the Employment Ministry said, "There is a spirit of 'we are in the same boat,"' an apt analogy given the country's Viking past.

…Labor specialists agree and say the notion of power is often confused with the frequency of strikes.

"You cannot always confront the government and shut all the railways," said Marino Regini, dean of the political science at the University of Milan. "That is not what I would call strength. Strength is the ability to influence."

Kverneland has a direct influence on her company's policies from her seat on her company's board, a post she was elected to.

In France, by contrast, Mahieux, the official with the labor union Sud, said co-management was not the type of unionization that he wanted.

"Our job is not to help organize the company," he said,

Mahieux, who works at a ticket window at the Gare de Lyon, a Paris train station, and is a secretary of Sud, said his main mission was to "defend the rights of employees."

Often for French rail workers this means calling strikes. …

The bottom line in the comparison of these two countries is that unemployment in Denmark is 5.2 percent, just over half of France's rate of 9.6 percent. Growth is anemic in both countries, but Denmark is marginally wealthier, with per capita gross domestic product of $30,700, compared with $28,600 in France.

Danish experts doubt, though, that their labor model could be exported.

Jesper Due, a labor specialist at the University of Copenhagen [whose name means 'dove'], said it came naturally for Danes to work out their problems by forming clubs, associations and unions. "There is a saying: 'If you have five Danes, you'll have 25 associations,"' Due said. If you have five southern Europeans, he added, "you'll have 25 arguments."