The worker's collective representation. Normative procedures in France, 1936-1968
Comité d'histoire des Administrations chargées du Travail, de l'Emploi et de la Formation Professionnelle (CHATEFP), Ministère du Travail, de la solidarité et de la fonction publique
Deadline: 01.09.2010
If the history of labour law developed a lot since around thirty years, the elaboration of the relative texts remains a very widely underestimated question. These take the shape of laws, of parliamentary or governmental origin, statutory orders, prescriptions, regulations, circulars. Multiple actors and institutions intervene in theirmanufacturing: parliament, government, Council of State, councils or consultative committees, social partners, experts, lobbies, etc. As Jean-Daniel Reynaud wrote it: "the legal rule takes its sense only brought back to a collective action and to an actor. It thus has the variety, the complexity and sometimes the incoherence of all collective actions".The complexity of the manufacturing process of texts has to take into account the fact that institutions, taken separately, are themselves composites. In the elaboration of a bill, what is the part of politics (the Minister and his personal staff) and that of the administration?
Within the administration, how articulate the respective contributions of a redactor, an office manager, an assistant or a manager assistant or of a manager of the Central Administration? What about the interministerial arbitrations, which seem to be particularly frequent in labour law? What is the contribution of the consultative organs in the process?If it is about a private bill, it is also necessary to take into account the various aspects of the parliamentary activity.
The nature of the text and the institutional configuration also appear as determining elements to understand the relations that weave between the actors, and the result it ends to.