Pension reform & the labor movement in France, 1993--2003

Exploring the question of why the French welfare-state landscape began to "thaw" in the 1990s, this dissertation examines the politics of pension reform in France between 1993 and 2003. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of the organized labor movement in shaping the policymaking process during the rise of neoliberalism. The dissertation provides a narrative of the political and social conflicts surrounding three key attempts at pension restructuring: the 1993 Balladur Reform, the 1995 Juppe Plan and the 2003 Raffarin-Fillon Reform. Basing itself on trade-union and left-party publications from the period, as well as reports, interviews and public opinion poll results published in the mainstream media, the study finds that the leadership of the country's main labor unions played a crucial role in limiting the scope and radicalism of working-class resistance to neoliberal pension reform. Standard political science models cannot easily account for the behavior of the trade-union bureaucracy, which in this dissertation is understood in terms of an alternative, Marxist-inspired theoretical framework.