CHRONIC. Faced with the right to strike, a duty to work?

Clément Viktorovitch returns every week to the debates and political issues. Sunday February 18: the social movement at the SNCF, about which the Prime Minister spoke of “the duty to work”.

The strike movement of SNCF controllers is “incomprehensible” for Christophe Fanichet, CEO of SNCF Voyageurs, “surprising” according to Patrice Vergriete, the new Minister of Transport. That the Minister of Transport is surprised by a transport strike, we can perhaps be surprised ourselves…

The fact is that, according to SNCF, most of the controllers’ demands have already been met. There would therefore be no reason to bother the French on the eve of the holidays. Arguments contested en bloc by the striking controllers. According to them, certain essential commitments have not been kept, in particular the promise to open a discussion on the end of the careers of controllers, and on the integration of bonuses in the calculation of their retirement.

It is in this context that the Prime Minister spoke, during a trip to Villejuif on Wednesday February 14: “When I put myself in the place of the French, I can sometimes have the feeling that there is a form of habit of having the announcement of a strike movement every holiday period. I think that the French are very attached to the right to strike, which is constitutional. But I believe they also know that working is a duty.”

The first part of this statement is factually false: the last social movement dates back more than a year, in December 2022, and it is precisely because certain promises made at that time would not have been kept that the controllers decided to go on strike again. We therefore have here a deliberate exaggeration intended to caricature the opposing position, so as to give the impression that it refutes itself. In rhetoric, we call this a “straw man ploy”: it is a blatant case of fallacious argumentation.

And then there is above all this very strong sentence on the “right to strike” and the “duty to work”. We observe here an old rhetorical principle, which says that in an antithesis, it is always what comes after the “but” which predominates. If I say “It’s true that there is a duty to work, but the right to strike is constitutional”, everyone understands that it is the right to strike which must take precedence. Gabriel Attal says the opposite: “It’s true that the right to strike is constitutional… but there is the duty to work.” This is a way of implying that certain strikes would be unacceptable. Here he uses the implicit dimension of the speech to make us understand what he could not take the risk of saying: an attempt to delegitimize certain strikes.

The “duty to work” does not exist

From a legal point of view, work is not a duty, it is a right. It is recognized by Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of work, and to fair and satisfactory conditions of work”. However, if work is a right, by definition it is not a duty. The definition of a right is that we have the right not to exercise it.

Certainly, in the preamble of 1946, which has constitutional value, it is specified in article 5 that “Everyone has the duty to work and the right to obtain employment”. But the “duty to work” can only be understood here in the sense of a moral duty, not a legal obligation. Did Gabriel Attal go looking for the Euromillions winners, or the rich heirs who live off their pension, to explain to them that they have a duty to work? Surprisingly no… And this for a simple reason. From the point of view of economic thought, in a market economy, work is not a duty, it is a necessity. You work because you need to earn a living.

Furthermore, let us specify, since it has clearly become necessary, that the controllers are working! They have simply temporarily ceased their activity, as the law allows them to do. This is perfectly legitimate! The labor market, from the point of view of liberal economic theory, is the expression of a balance of power between employer and employee. The strike is one of the weapons that employees have at their disposal to try to influence the balance of power with their employer. I insist on this.

To oppose a so-called “duty to work” to the right to strike is to attempt to delegitimize one of the few tools that employees have to assert their interests in the labor market.