France
Watch on the Doubs
Nicholas Richardson
You don't learn from your mistakes they say, you just repeat them. Some years ago a journalist asked the then Prime Minister Pompidou, what he thought his greatest error in government had been. His over-reaction to the miners' strike of Spring 1963, he replied. It had coverted a local issue into a national one, given the miners widespread popular support. And now we're seeing the replay. Until 1971 the Lip firm at Besancon had been a family one. Its administration had been eccentric in the extreme. As the president of Besancon's commercial court put it with commendable restraint, the last family director, M. Fred Lip, had uncommon gifts of repartee and was generally an accomplished prankster — it was unfortunate he had no such skill as an administrator. Lip was basically a watchmaking concern, with sidelines in armaments and machine tools.
So far as watchmaking went, Lip had committed about every sin in the book. The firm was overloaded and top-heavy; it had concentrated on the production of expensive watches and ignored the market for those shorterlived and therefore cheaper. It paid aboveaverage salaries and specialised in golden handshakes, more particularly for members of the family. As a result its costs soared while its share of the market slumped. Lip was given a breathing-space when a Swiss company, Ebauches S.A., became the major shareholder; but Ebauches in its turn appears to have milked the French company for its own profit. In April 1973 Lip went bankrupt. The 1,300 workers refused to accept the closure, took the factory over and locked management out. France's first work-in had begun.
This was one reason for the publicity that has surrounded Lip. Another has been the sheer time the crisis has gone on. In France trades' unions are relatively weak, and as a result relatively poor. This is why most strikes are short-lived. (The 1963 miners' strike was exceptional in lasting almost five weeks.) But at 8 am August 14, when the CRS went in, raffaire Lip, was in its 121st day. The apparent power of the workers was enough to worry French employers; that they should take over the stock and continue production, as happened from mid-June, was unprecedented: but the impossible was that they should have drawn on the proceeds and paid themselves their own salaries. Nor was Lip an isolated outrage. The workers in Europe's largest aluminium smelters, at the Pechiney factory at Nogueres in South-eastern France, went on strike on May 28. They then committed the unforgiveable, something that had taken place neither during the great strikes of 1936 nor of 1968: they allowed the plant to run down, the metal-aluminium mixture to harden in the vats.
French employers were frightened — and furious. Even the Communists were dismayed by Pechiney (their union, the CGT had three times proposed a return to work, and had been outvoted on each occasion). But Lip was different. Some of the responsibility was the Government's, which had known of the firm's troubles for some time (there were those who said that the closure had been considered way back, but that the government persuaded Ebauches not to carry out a policy which would involve massive lay-offs before the March elections). Ebauches too was a convenient bogey-man, since it was not just a multinational firm, but one in which the Swiss government had a strong if indirect interest. Then Lip revived the discussion over autogestion, whether this was taken to be worker control of industry, or worker participation in its management or profits. Autogestion frightened the Communist party and the COT, mildly attracted the Socialists, but was warmly supported by the increasingly radical and successful rival to the COT, the non-Communist Confederation of Democratic Labour. It was the latter who led the dance at both Besancon and Nogueres. To debate worker control, however, was one thing; to see it in practice another. Hardly a left-wing voice was raised to propose some kind of permanent solution of the struggle at Lip along the lines of a worker democracy. Instead the left has preached various degrees of state control, and given the government the opportunity to point out the danger of throwing good (taxpayers') money after bad, of creating a precedent for public funds being used to refloat lame-duck companies.
It would probably have been to the government's advantage to let the Lip work-in continue, so that divisions within the left became more obvious and the originality of the workin less evident: labour agitation has a tendency to take August off as a sabbatical but pick up again in September. It looked briefly as if the government was playing it this way, when M. Charbonnel, the minister of industry, produced his long-awaited plan on August 1. Since it was almost identical with one the Lip workers had refused to consider in May, he can hardly have been surprised at their reaction, But, at least in a platonic sense, the government had made its offer. From then on, although Charbonnel sent his man to negotiate in Besancon, action was on the cards.
For the Government, a holiday month like August is an excellent opportunity; police ac
tion on the eve of a public holiday (August 15) and long weekend an even better one. Nor can the present government be said to dislike a tough solution. But there are two things that don't quite jell. The strike at Pechiney had been resolved by the intervention of Charbonnel's colleague, the Minister of Labour. A government may wish to appear two-fisted, but surely one fist should know what the other is doing? Then the Gaullists have always prided themselves on not being a party like the others, on assembling "the rush-hour crowd in the Metro." The Lip imbroglio made them look like the prisoners of the patronat, of the employers. They had always preached 'participation,' the so-called third way between an unacceptable capitalism and an unimaginative socialism. In downto-earth terms, and benefits, the idea had not got very far, although M. Messmer was to extend it.
The crack-down at Lip makes this penultimate piece of surviving Gaullist doctrine look a little foolish. As they said five year ago, "1 participate, you participate, he participates, we participate — they rule."
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