Organised Labour and Fluid Organisations: Insights from the Gilets Jaunes Movement

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, Colfer & Bazin consider the emergence of the “Gilets Jaunes” (yellow vest) movement in France in 2018 and the implications this has for trade unions. This disparate movement initially formed primarily to protest against a new petrol tax, as well as a long list of other grievances associated with President Macron’s reform agenda. After describing the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes, this chapter reviews the initial successes of the movement, as the aforementioned fuel tax was ultimately dropped. The emergence of such a movement could easily go unnoticed in France, a country known for its tradition of demonstrations and strikes. However, there were important differences with the Gilets Jaunes compared to what has gone before, most notably, as the movement manifested without the support and beyond the structures of any trade union, political party or civil society organisations, being coordinated almost exclusively via social media. The activities of the Gilets Jaunes are contrasted with the strike that was coordinated by the CGT union at SNCF—the French national railway—earlier in 2018. This chapter considers how the looser, leaderless structure of the Gilets Jaunes allowed for an effective but potentially unsustainable movement to emerge that engaged with a broad cross-section of society, in opposition to similar issues and grievances as the unions had opposed at SNCF. The likes of the Gilets Jaunes challenge key elements of social movement organisation theory. Building on Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of “liquid modernity” and the growing body of work on “fluid organisations”, this chapter shows how movements such as these challenge the traditional understanding of leadership and purpose within social movement organisations, and how this might present new ways to view distributed leadership in complex, fluid organisations more generally. This contribution ultimately considers whether there are lessons to be learned by the labour movement from the modes of communication, repertoire of activities and structure (or lack thereof) of the Gilets Jaunes, given that these two movements share many of the same goals, tactics, and indeed, activists and supporters.