Labor Charter | |
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| |
Signed | October 4, 1941 |
Repealed by | |
Ordinance of the Provisional Government of the French Republic on July 27, 1944 | |
Status: Repealed |
The Labor Charter (French: Charte du travail) was a French law on labor law in France, signed on 4 October 1941, by the Vichy regime under the German occupation of France. It sought to reorganize labor relations by abolishing class struggle and promoting collaboration between workers and employers.
The Charter was repealed by an ordinance of the Provisional Government of the French Republic on 27 July 1944.
The Vichy regime began reorganizing labor relations with the law of 16 August 1940, which established organization committees for industrial and commercial sectors. [1] This was followed by decrees issued on 9 November 1940, dissolving major trade unions and employer groups. [2]
The unions affected included:
Major employer organizations dissolved included:
The Labor Charter was influenced by several ideological and social trends:
Marshal Pétain often addressed social issues in his speeches, emphasizing the need for professional collaboration and national unity. [3]
The drafting of the Charter involved compromises between proponents of syndicalist-based corporatism and traditional corporatist supporters close to Pétain. Ultimately, the task of drafting the final version was given to Gaston Cèbe, a special advisor to the Council Presidency.
The final version was adopted by the Council of Ministers on 4 October 1941, and published in the Journal Officiel on 26 October 1941. [4]
The Charter introduced professional "families," or corporations, organized by industry. These included mandatory single unions and works councils to manage workplace relations. It also prohibited strikes and lockouts (Article 5) and introduced the concept of a minimum living wage (Article 54). [5]
The Charter served as a precursor to the post-war works councils and labor relations systems established after the Liberation. However, its implementation during the Vichy regime faced significant resistance, and its corporatist vision failed to gain widespread acceptance.
Maréchal, nous voilà ! is a 1941 French song dedicated to Marshal Philippe Pétain. The lyrics were composed by André Montagard; its music was attributed to André Montagard and Charles Courtioux but actually plagiarized from a song composed for the 1933 musical La Margoton du battailon by Polish Jewish composer Kazimierz Oberfeld, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1945, where he was murdered. Although La Marseillaise remained the official national anthem of the state, Maréchal, nous voilà ! was performed in many capacities unofficially as an alternative song for the public, being used as a popular song for events like sports and recreation. However, the song never dispelled the use of "La Marseillaise" as the official anthem, and it remained the main hymn of the Vichy State and had official support among the Vichy government. It had multiple performances during the Vichy France Era, often in a famous variation by André Dassary.
The French Social Party was a French nationalist political party founded in 1936 by François de La Rocque, following the dissolution of his Croix-de-Feu league by the Popular Front government. France's first right-wing mass party, prefiguring the rise of Gaullism after the Second World War, it experienced considerable initial success but disappeared in the wake of the fall of France in 1940 and was not refounded after the war.
A company or "yellow" union is a worker organization which is dominated or unduly influenced by an employer and is therefore not an independent trade union. Company unions are contrary to international labour law. They were outlawed in the United States by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act §8(a)(2), due to their use as agents for interference with independent unions. However, company unions persist in many countries.
The Bourse du Travail, a French form of the labour council, were working class organizations that encouraged mutual aid, education, and self-organization amongst their members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Anti-Jewish laws were enacted by the Vichy France government in 1940 and 1941 affecting metropolitan France and its overseas territories during World War II. These laws were, in fact, decrees of head of state Marshal Philippe Pétain, since Parliament was no longer in office as of 11 July 1940. The motivation for the legislation was spontaneous and was not mandated by Germany. These laws were declared null and void on 9 August 1944 after liberation and on the restoration of republican legality.
The Révolution nationale was the official ideological program promoted by the Vichy regime which had been established in July 1940 and led by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain's regime was characterized by anti-parliamentarism, personality cultism, xenophobia, state-sponsored anti-Semitism, promotion of traditional values, rejection of the constitutional separation of powers, and corporatism, as well as opposition to the theory of class conflict. Despite its name, the ideological policies were reactionary rather than revolutionary as the program opposed almost every change introduced to French society by the French Revolution.
Travail, famille, patrie was the tripartite motto of the French State during World War II. It replaced the republican motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité of the Third French Republic.
Vichy France, officially the French State or simply France, was the French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. It was named after its seat of government, the city of Vichy. Officially independent, but with half of its territory occupied under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany, it adopted a policy of collaboration. Though Paris was nominally its capital, the government established itself in the resort town of Vichy in the unoccupied "free zone", where it remained responsible for the civil administration of France as well as its colonies. The occupation of France by Nazi Germany at first affected only the northern and western portions of the country, but in November 1942 the Germans and Italians occupied the remainder of Metropolitan France, ending any pretence of independence by the Vichy government.
Pierre Besnard was a French anarcho-syndicalist. He was the co-founder and leader of the Confédération Générale du Travail-Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire (CGT-SR) and its successor the Confédération Nationale du Travail (CNT), and the principal theoretician of anarcho-syndicalism in France during the early 20th century.
Le Petit Provençal was a French provincial daily newspaper founded in Marseille in 1880. It took a Left Republican position, although it was never an official socialist organ. In the years before World War I (1914–18) many prominent politicians contributed to the paper. The paper opposed the pact between Germany and Russia just before World War II (1939–45), and after the fall of France opposed the Vichy regime. However, it managed to continue publication until 1944.
The French Constitutional Law of 1940 is a set of bills that were voted into law on 10 July 1940 by the National Assembly, which comprised both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies during the French Third Republic. The law established the Vichy regime and passed with 569 votes to 80, with 20 abstentions. The group of 80 parliamentarians who voted against it are known as the Vichy 80. The law gave all the government powers to Philippe Pétain, and further authorized him to take all necessary measures to write a new constitution. Pétain interpreted this as de facto suspending the French Constitutional Laws of 1875 which established the Third Republic, even though the law did not explicitly suspend it, but only granted him the power to write a new constitution. The next day, by Act No 2, Pétain defined his powers and abrogated all the laws of the Third Republic that were incompatible with them.
The Peasant Corporation was a Paris-based organization created in Vichy France to support a corporatist structure of agricultural syndicates. The Ministry of Agriculture was unenthusiastic and undermined the corporation, which was launched with a provisional structure in 1941 that was not finalized until 1943. By then the small farmers and farm workers had become disillusioned since the corporation had maintained the privileged position of landowners and had not protected them from demands by the increasingly unpopular German occupiers. The corporation, which was never effective, was dissolved after the liberation of France in September 1944.
The National Federation of Miners was a trade union representing miners in France.
The Government of Vichy France was the collaborationist ruling regime or government in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. Of contested legitimacy, it was headquartered in the town of Vichy in occupied France, but it initially took shape in Paris under Marshal Philippe Pétain as the successor to the French Third Republic in June 1940. The government remained in Vichy for four years, but fled to Germany in September 1944 after the Allied invasion of France. It operated as a government-in-exile until April 1945, when the Sigmaringen enclave was taken by Free French forces. Pétain was brought back to France, by then under control of the Provisional French Republic, and put on trial for treason.
The Second French Statute on the Status of Jews, of 2 June 1941, was an anti-semitic law enacted under Vichy France and signed into law by the Head of the French State, Marshal Philippe Pétain. It replaced the first Law on the status of Jews of 3 October 1940. It included an increasingly stringent definition of who was a Jew in France. It specified a legal definition, of the term Jewish race, broadening its criteria for inclusion and extending the scope of the existing professional prohibitions. From that point on, Jews in France became second-class citizens, while they had since 21 September 1791 been full citizens.
The Ordinance of 9 August 1944 was a constitutional law enacted by the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) during the Liberation of France which re-established republican rule of law in mainland France after four years of occupation by Nazi Germany and control by the collaborationist Vichy regime.
The Law of 3 October 1940 on the status of Jews was a law enacted by Vichy France. It provided a legal definition of the expression Jewish race, which was used during the Nazi occupation for the implementation of Vichy's ideological policy of "National Revolution" comprising corporatist and antisemitic racial policies. It also listed the occupations forbidden to Jews meeting the definition. The law was signed by Marshall Philippe Pétain and the main members of his government.
The Law of 4 October 1940 regarding foreign nationals of the Jewish race was a law enacted by the Vichy regime, which authorized and organized the internment of foreign Jews and marked the beginning of the policy of collaboration of the Vichy regime with Nazi Germany's plans for the extermination of the Jews of Europe. The law was published in the Journal officiel de la République française on 18 October 1940.
Organizational Committees were entities established by the Vichy regime to regulate and control the French economy during the German occupation of France in World War II. Initially intended to protect French economic interests, these committees soon became tools of economic collaboration with Nazi Germany.
The General Confederation of Independent Trade Unions (CGSI) was a French trade union confederation created in the aftermath of World War II. It disappeared in the 1970s. The CGSI was active in sectors such as the automobile industry, the postal service, and the City of Paris administration.