France

Michel Husson, Estelle Sommeiller and Catherine Vincent

Chapter 11 in Minimum Wages, Collective Bargaining and Economic Development in Asia and Europe, 2015, pp 188-210 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The wage determination process in France is affected by two institutional forces. The first is the statutory minimum wage (SMW) set unilaterally by the government, and the second is a decentralized system of collective bargaining. The linkages between the two benefitted workers for three decades in a row but have changed significantly since the mid-1990s. In the aftermath of World War II, the minimum wage (MW) was a powerful tool to level social inequalities, while the social benefits collectively bargained in large companies spread to similar branches of activity and, to some extent, from one sector to another. Since the 1990s, however, this mechanism no longer functioned well due to the changing economic environment. On the one hand, the casualization of labour has undermined the benefits of lifting the MW. On the other hand, collective bargaining has been gradually reshaped through a decentralization process whereby plant-level settlements have become the standard. Accordingly, the key question for us concerns the extent to which this fundamental change in French industrial relations has affected both the wage distribution over time and the long-term dynamics of wage development.

Keywords: Minimum Wage; Trade Union; Real Wage; Collective Bargaining; Wage Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-51242-0_11

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137512420_11

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