In 1988-89, negotiations on “revalorising the teaching profession” between Jospin’s ministry of Education and the teachers’ unions led to considerable progress in terms of salaries and professional statuses. Studying these negotiations allows us to better understand the workings of the main federation of teachers’ unions at the time, the FEN, just before its scission, and to have a better look at its relationship with the ministry of Education, a relationship often described as one of “joint management”. The FEN indeed comes out as an unavoidable partner for the Minister and his advisers, who acknowledge its capacity to mobilize its members even as they distance themselves from its systematic defence of its members special interests, which they see as verging on corporatism. But this episode also reveals a federation weakened by its internal tensions, especially between Unité Indépendance et Démocratie (UID) (Unity, Independence and Democracy) and Unité et Action (UA) (Unity and Action), tensions which the ministry also exploited in order to negotiate revalorisations a minima by systematically pitting the primary school sector against the secondary school sector.