Neoliberalism is a protean project, not reducible to a single blueprint or institutional architecture, or achievable by a single pathway.

sudden gains in membership due to conjunctural political and economic conditions were lost in their entirety once those conditions passed. French trade unions have never been able to institutionalize their periodic gains and create a high and stable level of membership

Liberalization in France was quintessentially a state project. That is true of neoliberalism more generally, but never more so than in France. Neoliberalism is simultaneously a response to the crisis of the earlier Fordist growth model, and a response to the failure of classical liberalism; it is the institutional, political, and ideational infrastructure of the matrix of growth models that emerged to supplant Fordism. As such, it is a constructivist project that involves reshaping society to fit that market order. As Cahill and Konings put it, neoliberalism recognizes that a market order “needs to be actively constructed, institutionally and politically.” In this sense, neoliberalism can be understood as a terraforming project, and it is this that makes the state so central.

the favorability principle has been replaced with widespread “derogation,” meaning that firm-level agreements can, if negotiated, provide greater flexibility and less favorable terms and conditions of work than the Labor Code requires