When Strikes Make Sense - And Why: Lessons from Third Republic French Coal Miners.

Losing strikes--the more the better--benefits workers. To present and defend this conundrum the historical sociologist Samuel Cohn has produced a creative and thought-provoking analysis of the outcomes of coal miners' strikes in France between 1890 and 1935. Cohn was attracted to this study by the extensive data available on miners' strikes and the mining industry in France and by the particular history of miners' unions in that nation: for Cohn French coal miners' strikes are "like a sea slug that receives attention from biologists for its unusually visible liver cells." (6) First, there were 20 comparable individually-documented coal-producing departments. Second, French miners organized in a single national union until after World War I (with small syndicalist offshoots in a few coal basins early in the century). In 1922, the union split into the majority reformist confederes and the minority Communist-led unitaires. While the confederes were virtually the sole union in several major basins, in others unitaires dominated or competed with the majority confederes. Confederes favored negotiation over strikes; unitaires pursued a policy of frequent strikes. The history of miners' unions in Third Republic France thus allows Cohn to explore his hypothesis about frequent striking in periods of syndical unity and schism.

Cohn interprets strikes less as individual tests of will than as cumulative indicators of labor combativeness. His basic argument is that more combative labor forces lose a higher percentage of strikes than less combative ones--because they put forth more radical demands--but that ultimately they profit from unacknowledged preemptive offers of higher wages made by employers who hope to limit future striking. "In all periods, the greatest advantages came to workers who generated long strings of losses." (85) Cohn measures these advantages in "residual wages." He argues that market forces largely determined miners' wages during this period: strikes had about 1% of the effect of market variables on wages. (206-7) Through strikes, miners could win a small residual wage over that predicted by market variables (3.1% per strike in the optimal pre-schism period). Cohn's initial conclusion is that when the labor movement was united, miners in departments with high strike rates earned higher residual wages than did their counterparts in less combative regions.

While Cohn sees his argument as having direct relevance for many contemporary American labor unions, he is careful to place his findings in the economic and political context of Third Republic France. He explains that French coal companies were less concerned with lost sales during a strike (which they could make up in the tight domestic French coal market at the conclusion of the strike) than with increased labor costs that would result from giving in to strikers' demands. In the period before World War I, the Third Republic, suspicious of the conservative ownership of mining firms and influenced by the strong support given the republic by deputies elected from mining districts, was much more strike-averse than the coal companies. Cohn notes that the state pursued an "accomodationist" policy of intervening to end strikes by pressuring firms to make concessions to strikers.

With the division of the French labor movement after the war, however, Cohn shows that the state encouraged a policy of "steering" benefits to the strike-averse confedere departments as a way of undercutting the strike-prone unitaires' appeal. (The role of the state, hostile to the Communist-led unitaires, was crucial since most firms operated in only one department and therefore would have seen little advantage in rewarding their workers to affect the behavior of workers in competing firms in other departments.) In such a divided labor movement, miners' residual wages were highest in departments in which non-striking confederes competed with striking unitaires, since the benefits steered to confederes went by law to all miners in a firm's employ. However, when confederes joined unitaire strikes their residual wages fell, since in these instances they were no longer candidates for steering. During the period of the labor schism the total residual wage paid French miners remained at the pre-schism level, but each strike produced a residual wage of -1.8%. The second lesson of Cohn's study then is that the effectiveness of strike strategies in forcing wage concessions from management is dependent on the unity or disunity of the labor force.

Several elements of Cohn's analysis are rooted in the particular history of French coal miners' unions. Before 1914, the national miners' union favored limited national strikes called well in advance as a means both to put pressure on parliament to pass legislation of special interest to miners and to bring about government intervention in wage negotiations without necessarily directly confronting employers. Since Cohn interprets nonpay strikes as "represent[ing] a greater commitment to radicalism" than strikes over pay (102), he describes the prewar union as "very militant" (11) and "radical" (63)--stronger terms than are usually used to characterize it. In fact, one could argue from Cohn's account that since French mining firms were union-averse rather than strike-averse, the primary lesson of tle pre-1914 case was the value of mobilizing political resources to assure political support when strikes took place and only secondarily the advantage of frequent strikes.

Cohn notes that data on union membership in French mines are woefully inadequate and in response adopts very loose criteria for the identification of union presence. There were few direct advantages to joining the union; union membership was generally low and difficult to estimate. Perhaps 1 in 5 miners belonged to unions in the period of the schism. In France more than elsewhere then, union-called strikes functioned as referenda. Repeated short strikes may therefore have played a more important role in France than in other industrial nations where unions felt less need to demonstrate their ability to mobilize workers. After the schism, the unitaires' primary goal in striking--and this helps to explain the government/employer strategy of steering--was to win the allegiance of confederes and the unorganized; attaining higher wages was secondary.

When Strikes Make Sense--And Why makes an important contribution to the study of industrial conflict in France in both empirical and methodological terms. Cohn's emphasis on the outcome of strikes measured in terms other than simply the satisfaction of strike demands explores an area largely beyond the purview of fundamental works on strikes in France like Michelle Perrot's Les Ouvriers en greve, 1871-1890 and Charles Tilly's and Edward Shorter's Strikes in France, 1871-1890. Cohn's calculation of residual wages provides evidence of the success of the prewar national miners' union strategy of short strikes, often ostensibly called to influence parliament, in obtaining economic gains for miners. His analysis of coal company attitudes toward strikes is also quite perceptive. And I think that Cohn's argument about "steering" in the period of the labor schism is on target. Finally, Cohn has done an excellent job drawing provocative hypotheses from his study--the importance of short, repeated strikes with non-economic demands and the pitfalls of divided labor movements for radicals for contemporary union leaders to consider.

Of course, any statistically-based study like Cohn's raises questions about the use of data. Cohn treats all coal-producing departments equally--from marginal producers like the Cantal to the leading Pas-de-Calais. He does little to factor in the size or strength of unions at various times and places. Cohn views as secondary the growing split between the richer northern coal basins--with their more institutionalized labor relations in which the parameters for wage negotiations throughout the nation were increasingly set--and their poorer southern cousins in which "lightning strikes" could be seen as taking the place of established bargaining procedures. (154-155) Cohn gives all strikes in a department equal weight, whether of one pit, one firm, the whole department or the whole nation; whether peaceful or violent; whether 50 or 5,000 miners struck; whether 5% or 100% of the mine labor force participated; and whether the strikes--whatever their ultimate duration--were called as limited strikes or not. These are all factors worthy of further study. To the extent that Cohn sees his work as suggesting strategies to contemporary American labor, these are matters that would be difficult for union leaders not to take into account in their calculations.

In fact, Cohn may assume too much about union leaders' control over events. The sociological and cultural "resources" available for strike mobilization as well as the impact of strike strategies on these resources--major foci of the works by Perrot and Tilly and Shorter--have little place in Cohn's account. Nor do union leaders necessarily have as much say about strike outcomes as he suggests in using the resolution of strike demands to indicate union choices. Thus Cohn explains that "The grievance that was most likely to override monetary demands was union security. Here it seems quite likely that union officials were particularly willing to give up cash benefits in the present in return for future strategic advantage." (101) Perhaps, but earlier Cohn contended that "union security issues were relatively cost free [to employers] in France." (72) Employers may have had as much to do with such "union choices" as union leaders.

Even organizational issues are relegated to secondary status in When Strikes Make Sense--and Why. Cohn argues that centralized unions hurt workers' interests on the grounds that their leadership is more likely to form tacit relationships with employers which impede their will to call the frequent strikes necessary to maximize workers' residual wages. However, one could equally well argue that the most highly centralized union Cohn examines--the unitaires--maintained the highest strike rates in part because its highly centralized organization could exert the discipline necessary to prevent union leaders from establishing relationships with employers.

While Cohn's relative inattention to the sociological, cultural and organizational preconditions for strikes runs against the grain of much recent labor history, his work ultimately directs historians back to earlier work on subjects like syndical ideologies. Cohn's reliance on residual wages (rather than raw or real wages) throughout his analysis suggests a kind of hermeneutics at work. While government and employer strategies can be interpreted without recourse to residual wages, Cohn's reliance in assessing strike outcomes on residual wages--unknown to the historical actors and potentially too arcane for them to differentiate from changes in raw wages--serves as a kind of secret subtext to the history of coal miners' strikes. As Cohn remarks, the multivariate analysis necessary to determine residual wages "is simply beyond the capacity of most unionists" (5); after the 1902 Loire miners' strike, Cohn points out that miners could not see that "statistical analysis and historical hindsight [would] suggest that the strike averted a more severe salary reduction" than actually took place. (167) Cohn writes a history based on the relation of strike actions to outcomes, but since these outcomes (higher or lower residual wages) are unknown to participants (even at the strike's conclusion), he implicitly makes the case for the importance of studying union ideologies since only a union with a certain ideology would repeatedly launch strikes which appeared to leaders and the rank-and-file as losing ventures. More generally, Cohn's emphasis on the importance of "generating a reputation for militance" (28) meshes well with William Reddy's argument in Money and Liberty in Modern Europe that a male-coded sense of honor rather than a market mentality formed the core of nineteenth-century working-class culture.

When Strikes Make Sense--And Why is an exceptionally interesting and provocative book. Cohn leaves a few loose ends, but the cumulative effect of his writing is, well, to generate a reputation for militance in which "kamikaze" (Cohn's metaphor) writing can be seen as a key to winning concessions from the reader. Charles Tilly's brief admiring foreward to the book can be read as revealing the effects of this strategy. "Cohn and his findings repeatedly challenge common sense," writes Tilly. (vi) He presents a Cohn as uncompromising as the union leaders Cohn admires. "Cohn is not content merely to tear down conventional wisdom" (v); "Cohn was not content merely to tidy up the cluttered space Shorter and I left behind...." (vi) Ultimately Tilly negotiates as Cohn would predict. Cohn couples the potentially winnable demand that his work on French coal miners' strikes be accepted with the revolutionary demand that his model is more or less universally applicable. It is the latter, as the book's subtitle--"lessons from Third Republic French Coal Miners"--makes clear, which constitutes Cohn's primary demand. This radical demand gives Cohn's text a kind of confidence and assertiveness which cannot help but influence assessment of the more limited findings. In response, Tilly offers Cohn a net positive residual wage in assessing his analysis of French miners' strikes--not the explicit "raw wage" statement that Cohn is correct, but the admission that Cohn has achieved something more than the market wage represented by the account in Tilly's and Shorter's work. Faced with "the most extensive and sophisticated analysis of strikes' outcomes that anyone has ever done," Tilly concedes that Cohn is "much closer to the strategic calculations of workers, unions, employers, and governments than Shorter and I managed to come." (vi)

But, of course, Cohn has asked for much more than this. In the final paragraph of the foreward, Tilly draws the line and reasserts his authority by refusing to give in to Cohn's radical demand. "Informed readers," he writes, "are likely to wonder how widely conclusions drawn from the experience of French miners between 1890 and 1935 apply to other times and places." (vi) Cohn would seem to have blundered. He is the apparent loser because his central contention is placed in doubt by the most informed reader he is ever likely to have; certainly Tilly does not seem prepared to follow Cohn's lead in suggesting the transferability of the study's findings to contemporary American unions without extensive further testing. Yet Cohn's success in gaining Tilly's acquiescence to his counterintuitive arguments about Third Republic miners' strikes may actually make him the winner in the sense that he uses the term in When Strikes Makes Sense--And Why. In sum, Cohn's book adds greatly to our understanding of labor conflict in France while proposing important hypotheses about the effects of repeated strikes and union schisms for exploration in other settings.

Donald Reid University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill