Matignon Agreements

What Was Agreed?

On the evening of 7 June 1936, three days into his government, Blum summoned the leaders of the employers' confederation and the CGT to the prime minister's residence. Strikers were approaching two million and thousands of factories were occupied. The agreement signed around one in the morning was short but unprecedented: wage rises averaging 12 per cent, from 15 per cent at the bottom of the scale to 7 at the top; collective agreements by industry; no penalties for union membership or activity; elected workers' delegates in every workplace of more than ten employees; no reprisals against strikers. Paid holidays and the 40-hour week were not in the accords themselves; parliament added them by statute within days.

Why Did the Employers Yield Overnight?

The reason employers who had refused even collective bargaining a few weeks earlier now conceded everything at once lay outside the negotiating room. The factories were already in the workers' hands, the strikes were spreading to new trades daily, and it was the employers' organization, admitting it had lost control of its member firms, that had first asked the government to mediate. One employers' delegate later recalled that 'we paid the price of getting our factories back'. That the government, the CGT and even the Communist Party stood behind an orderly return to work was part of the calculation. The agreement was an exchange made on the threshold of revolution: the workers gained institutions, the employers got back their factories, and the state got back order.

What Came After?

In the short run the accords and the laws that followed changed French working-class life. Six hundred thousand people left on their first paid holidays that summer, CGT membership swelled from one million to four, and the number of collective agreements multiplied dozens of times over within a year. But the rollback was fast too: inflation ate the wage rises, the Daladier government's decrees of November 1938 dismantled the 40-hour week in practice, and the defeat of the general strike called against them ended the Matignon balance of forces within two and a half years.

Yet the form the accords created, a national social compromise brokered by the state and signed by peak labour and employer organizations, and the institutions of collective agreements and workers' delegates, remained in French labour law. The Grenelle agreements that ended the general strike of May 1968 copied Matignon down to the style of their name, and paid holidays grew to three weeks in 1956, four in 1969 and five in 1982, becoming part of French life.