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Following the recent annulment by the courts of a sectoral agreement introducing the 35-hour week in the French banking industry, a company agreement on the reduction of working time was signed in July 2000 at the BNP-Paribas group. The deal was signed by three trade unions - CFDT, CFTC and SNB-CGC - with CGT and CGT-FO refusing to sign. However, the banking federation of CFDT has contested the signature of its representatives, and will consult before deciding whether to endorse it .
An agreement on the reduction of working time was signed on 20 July 2000 by the management of the BNP-Paribas banking group and three trade unions, CFDT, CFTC, and SNB-CGC. The deal came in the wake of the annulment in May 2000 (FR0006168N) by the Paris Appeals Court (Cour d'appel) of a sectoral agreement on the reduction of working time covering all banks affiliated to the Association of French Banks (Association Française des Banques, AFB), signed on 4 January 1999 by only one trade union, SNB-CGC (FR9901151F). The annulment of this agreement, which had sought to implement the law on the 35-hour working week (FR0001137F), meant that company-level negotiations had to take place on the 35-hour week.
The BNP-Paribas agreement will apply to all 38,000 employees of the group, from 1 January 2001. It provides for a new annual working time of 1,600 hours - ie 205 working days of 7 hours 48 minutes. All staff of the BNP-Paribas group covered by the general banking sector collective agreement (FR0001133F) will be granted 25 days paid holiday plus all bank holidays. The 35-hour week will be implemented by giving employees 12 extra days off per year on days set by the management, plus 10 to be taken at their own convenience. Employees will be granted one extra day off, out of the 205 days worked, to compensate for the fact that holidays will broken into several periods over the year, with a second day possibly to be added. Wages will remain at their previous levels and the management has committed itself to the creation of 1,000 extra jobs and the recruitment of 1,300 young people on apprenticeship-style "qualification contracts". These measures will attenuate the consequences on employment of the recent merger between BNP and Paribas (FR9903169N). Some managerial and professional staff will have an annual "package" of 210 working days and thus be given 17 days' extra holidays.
The signatures of CFDT (the largest union in the company), CFTC and SNB-CGC mean that the BNP-Paribas deal is a majority agreement, thus automatically releasing the state funding for working time reductions provided for by the law, which will be worth around FRF 150 million for the company.
However, it seems that the CFDT representatives at BNP-Paribas signed the agreement without the endorsement of CFDT's banking federation (Fédération CFDT-banque), and even against its advice. The federation feels that the agreement is similar to the sectoral agreement signed by AFB and SNB-CGC, but annulled in the courts at the request of the non-signatory unions - CFDT, CGT-FO, CGT and CFTC. It has decided to consult its union sections at BNP-Paribas and its federal council before validating the signing of the agreement. A response will be given on 4 August 2000. If the bodies consulted give the agreement the green light, the delegates' signature could be made official. Otherwise, the federation will overrule the signatures of its representatives. In this case, the agreement would not be suspended, but would lose its majority character. BNP-Paribas management has already stated "that it would not risk reaching an agreement which might unbalance its management of human resources just to get some government funding."
However, it is not clear whether the federation will be able to challenge its delegates' signature. Indeed, in a ruling made on 19 February 1992, the industrial relations chamber of the Cour de cassation (France's highest civil and criminal court , which verifies whether judges' rulings comply with the law) validated an agreement on reorganising working time at the Crédit Lyonnais bank that had been signed by a union delegate acting in defiance of his own union (SNB-CGC). This was because the procedure for the suspension and revocation of the delegate's mandate had not been correctly followed before the agreement was signed.
For their part, CGT-FO and CGT rejected the BNP-Paribas agreement for two basic reasons. First, the agreement provides for other formulae for reducing working time, in place of the general mechanism (see above), at the instigation of company management, which could "leave only 25 statutory days' holiday and the day(s) off for splitting holiday periods". Second, the agreement might generate discrimination between the various categories of managerial and professional staff. CGT also criticised the small number of jobs to be created, compared with the job losses stemming from the merger.