Strikes, labor conflicts and firms' performances in France ; Grèves, conflits du travail et performances des entreprises en France

This thesis consists of three essays on the analysis of labor strikes in France, using recent data on workplaces and firms and applying various econometric methods. Very few quantitative studies, in economics, have been conducted on this issue in France, in contrast with a particularly large Anglo-saxon literature on the economic analysis of strikes. The decline of unionization and collective action of employees led however to a progressive shift in the interest of Anglo-saxon researchers, in labor economics and industrial relations, towards the study of individual labor relations between employees and employers. The individualization of jobs and labor relations is often considered as orthogonal to employee collective action. The decline of strikes and other collective disputes may have been linked, in the Anglo-saxon literature, to an increase in individual expressions of conflict and in the overall wage dispersion or inequality within firms. We propose, in this thesis, an original analysis of strikes in France, in connection with these two facets, linked to the individualization of jobs and labor relations in firms. The first chapter documents the relationship between the collective expression of conflict, including strikes, and growing individual forms of conflict in French workplaces, i.e. Employment Tribunal (or prud'hommes) claims and disciplinary action. It is shown that the collective expression of conflict and Employment Tribunal claims are substitutes in French workplaces, while strikes and other collective disputes increase the employer use of disciplinary action. The second chapter deals explicitly with this relationship, more specifically between strikes and employee absenteeism, in estimating and analyzing the effect of strikes on labor productivity in French firms. Strike occurrence during the recent past period tends to be associated with a surplus in labor productivity in firms affected by a low strike frequency, conditionally to a weaker employee expression of discontent (i.e. absenteeism). The ...