I’ve done a surprising thing. Something I never imagined myself doing. But there you have it, my first action of the new year, or rather, my first militant action: I’ve joined the French labor union, Force Ouvrière!

ouvrière means ‘worker’.

A brief background –

With 300,000 members, the General Confederation of Labor – Workers’ Force (or simply Force Ouvrière, FO), is one of the five major union confederations in France. It was founded in 1948 by former members of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) who denounced the dominance of the French Communist Party over that federation. 

I can just imagine my dear, deceased parents looking down at me in astonishment, my father saying to my mother, “She did what??”

“She joined a labor union, dear. I’m sure there’s good reason for it.”

It should be known that my entrepreneurial parents were resolutely anti-socialist and libertarian; one reason they immigrated to Canada from England was to flee the post-war Labour government there.

But trade unions aren’t necessarily socialist or communist-minded. And even if they were, so what? What is the purpose of a trade union, you might ask?

• to provide collective bargaining in profit distribution negotiations between  workers, business managers and owners,
• to avoid productivity gains going to executive compensation (example: CEO and executive pay continues to rise as typical workers never see significant raises),
• Justice, in one word. A union is stronger than a single person, so banding together to establish fair working conditions and pay is a good idea, in theory,
• In a just world we wouldn’t need trade unions. Profits would be shared amongst workers and not skimmed off by corrupt CEOs and executives and the company shareholders.

And that’s exactly what’s happening in the company that employs me. I work for a small, investment bank whose future is worryingly uncertain. Budgets have been cut, salaries for non-managerial staff frozen; bonuses and profit-sharing are a thing of the past. I’ve seen my purchasing power plummet. I have also come to the harsh realization that I was a lot better off a decade ago than I am today.

However, the three senior managers for whom I work and all the other senior managers continue to enjoy their yearly salary raises and big year-end bonuses (and I mean BIG). Where I work, there’s much disgruntlement and serious wage inequity.

Last week I was working on a translation when Pascal, a guy from the IT department, came into my workspace. He started fiddling around with my telephone. After a few minutes, I said “Can I ask what you’re doing to my phone?” He replied, “Oh, didn’t they tell you?” “Tell me what?” I said. “That they’ve gotten rid of the receptionist-switchboard operator and from now on all outside calls will come to your phone and the phones of four other people?”

I stared at him, speechless. “No,” I finally replied, “No-one told me.”

The next day, the senior manager who runs the Operations Department sent me an email instructing me to attend a training session that very afternoon, a training session to show me how to operate the new phone system and how to receive and field phone calls from outside.

I refused.

I sent the senior manager from the Operations Department a return email with a terse, one-line message – Nulle part n’est mentionné dans mon contrat de travail ou dans ma description de poste que j’assume le rôle de standardiste. (Nowhere is it mentioned in my job contract or my job description that I am to assume the role of telephone operator.) I am a bilingual legal assistant/translator.

Fortunately for me, my direct boss was vacationing in the Caribbean last week (thanks to that big Christmas bonus of hers), so nothing was done. But this week she’s back and she hauled me, like a recalcitrant child, into her office. And suddenly I was a schoolgirl again, sitting on a chair outside the principal’s office awaiting disciplinary action for being disobedient and defiant. I felt like swinging my legs and sticking out my tongue.

“Why did you refuse to go to the training session?” my boss asked me.

“For the reason I evoked in my email,” I said. 

“Y’know,” my boss said craftily, “If you’re expecting a raise this year, this is a heck of a way to show your bonne volonté (goodwill/willingness). In any case, this is just a test for a month to see how this new phone set-up works.”

She had me cornered. In other words, no goodwill, no salary raise. And the “test for a month” bit?  An outright lie.

Within the bank there’s a Force Ouvrière union representative and a small membership of around twenty people, all employees of the bank and my colleagues. I knew they met regularly, somewhat covertly, so I made enquiries. There was a meeting yesterday and I attended. It was an eye-opening experience and I learned a lot of things. I’m in.

Of course there are other, more serious issues at the bank that, for obvious reasons, I cannot mention. The future is not bright, but one thing is sure: if the bank does end up closing, the brass will walk away with sizeable compensation packages, while the rest of us will get just the bare legal minimum.