https://socialistaction.org/2018/04/12/french-workers-and-students-on-strike/
French workers and students on strike!
/ 24 hours ago
April 2018 French CGTBy MARTY GOODMAN
In a massive display of working-class power, workers throughout France
walked off the job on March 22 and on April 3, launching a long-term
series of one-day strikes. The strike wave is aimed at the
anti-working-class attacks of the neoliberal French president, Emanuel
Macron.
The strike action gained tremendous force on March 22, when over 500,000
demonstrators marched in the streets—65,000 in Paris alone. Thousands
upon thousands of teachers, nurses, and other workers joined rail staff
on strike.
Some are comparing the attacks on workers in France today with British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s war on coal miners in 1984—meant to
seriously cripple the entire labor movement. “We need to rid this
country of its strike culture,” said a very nervous Gabriel Attal, a
spokesman for French President Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal political
party, Republic on the Move.
Phillippe Martinez, head of the CGT (General Confederation of Labor),
said, “they’ve decided to break the Code du Travail [the massive French
labor rights code]. There will be fewer rights for workers.”
In recent weeks, an amazingly wide array of the French working class has
mobilized against the attacks. In addition to the powerful rail,
airline, and postal workers’ unions, others have struck too—nurses,
students, refuse workers, energy, supermarket employees facing layoffs,
and lawyers angry over the centralization and “streamlining” of the
court system. Students have gone on strike at a dozen university
campuses and have joined with workers in mass demonstrations.
April 2018 France mass demo
Rail unions have projected a series of 36 rail strikes beginning April 3
and lasting through June 28. The strategy calls for striking two days
out of every five during that period. Thousands of rail workers met in a
spontaneous rank-and-file general assembly in Paris on March 22, where
they discussed further steps to deepen their struggle.
Four of the unions on the SNCF rail system observed the April 3 strike.
Some 77% of SNCF drivers and 34% of its staff were striking, but unions
gave a higher figure of 60% or more striking on the first day. Only 40%
of high-speed TGV trains and only around a third of commuter trains were
running. One in five regional trains were operating. About 30% of
short-haul to medium haul flights out of Paris airports were canceled on
April 3. In Nice, up to 50% of flights were scrapped. Airline workers,
fighting for a 6% raise, are scheduled to strike April 7, April 10, and
April 11. Air France workers have not received a raise since 2011. Two
company executives had their shirts ripped-off during protests in 2015
against cutting 3000 airline workers.
Several unions, more conservative, have targeted April 19 for a massive
strike, while withholding—for now, at least—support for the larger 36
strike strategy. Airline and rail workers are preparing to go out
together on that date, along with many public and private unions.
President Macron: a yuppie on steroids
Stoking working-class rage is French president and former investment
banker Emmanuel Macron, 40, elected in May 2017. Macron, dubbed “the
president of the rich,” has championed frontal attacks on unions and
students, masking them as “reform.”
Macron and his new party, La République en Marche (Republic on the
Move), are a real horror show for French workers. For Macron, it’s mean
and lean—120,000 public worker jobs are to be cut out of 5 million
public workers by 2020; wages are to be frozen, at least for some;
bosses are emboldened to fire or lay off workers more easily or to
downsize the workforce; pensions will be slashed and the retirement age
rolled back. For students, the “reforms” mean limiting access to
France’s free college system.
Macron’s pronouncements were followed by large-scale layoffs.
Unemployment in France is about 9% overall and for youth 25%, higher
than the Eurozone average.
France is a member of the European Union, an alliance of mainly
imperialist countries dominated by German capitalism, and must comply
with the profit-driven agenda of the European banks. The watchword is
‘cost-cutting’ across the board, that is, cutting wages, health care,
pensions and implementing anti-worker measures by 2020. In addition,
France must face “competition” from private transportation firms, where
the goal is greed, not service.
May 2018 Macron
French President Emmanuel Macron
Macron and the French rulers are particularly keen on bashing mass
transit, the state-owned French National Railways, SNCF. Macron portrays
SNCF workers as being paid too much and with pensions that are too high.
He says that their retirement is too early—for what is often a dangerous
job. Legal safeguards against layoffs are too strict, says the
president. Based on manipulated data in the “Spinetta Report,” the
bosses say that the public transportation system is too expensive and
its fares “uncompetitive” with that of other countries.
One Macron tactic is to divide and conquer the unions—particularly the
more conservative ones—with closed-door “negotiations” in which each
union’s bureaucrats are unaware of what Macron promised the others.
After “negotiations,” to the surprise of dumbfounded union officials,
Macron publically unveiled a detailed anti-worker program that had been
apparently kept under wraps all along.
Moreover, Macron has used his parliamentary majority to rule essentially
by decree, drawing criticism for an authoritarian style not unlike that
of U.S. President Donald Trump.
With little doubt, the French authorities will resort to repression and
violence if they feel it is necessary to break the labor movement. A
harbinger of this tactic was seen on March 22 when students were
attacked after they had occupied a college auditorium in Montpellier, a
city in the south of France. A school dean allowed a group of masked
men—armed with bats, Tasers, and reinforced punching gloves—to beat up
the students and evict them from the auditorium. Security guards at the
university stood idly by and watched the beatings, according to one
account. Several students were hospitalized. Some of the goons were
revealed to have been professors and teachers at the university,
eyewitnesses said.
Debate on union strategy
Sebastien Menesplier, head of CGT Energy, said, “We haven’t been this
close to an unprecedented social revolt for years.” Nevertheless, top
union officials have failed to try to mobilize all sectors of the
working class in a unified and massive strike protest. Laurent Berger of
the CFDT union federation, aligned with the timid Socialist Party, said
he was not interested in building a united front with other forces
against austerity and cuts: “the convergence of struggles is not the
CFDT’s cup of tea.” Jean-Claude Mailly, general secretary of the Force
Ouvriere (FO) union federation, also opposes any convergence.
But one union is seeking a more aggressive strategy. In an interview in
the March issue of Jacobin magazine, Bruno Poncet, federal secretary for
SUD Rail, an independent left-wing union affiliated with the national
labor organization Solidaires, explained it this way:
“The method of two days of strikes every five days, it allows for the
preservation of unity between the four labor unions. For us, SUD Rail,
we think we need a tough movement. That is to say a full and
long-lasting work stoppage, right away. And even for that, it’s not SUD
Rail that will decide, it’s not the other unions. What will happen is
that in general assemblies that will take place every day during the
strike, people will decide for themselves the conduct of the strike.”
Many in the French left and beyond see the possibility of the return of
the mass militancy of 50 years ago, during the epic May-June 1968 revolt
in France, which threatened the capitalist order with over nine million
workers on strike and giant student mobilizations. Today’s rulers are
trembling at the thought! The first wave of current strikes began on
March 22, the 50th anniversary of the first protest that ignited the
1968 rebellion.
The last time the French capitalists made a frontal assault on public
workers, particularly SNCF workers, was in 1995 by Prime Minister Alain
Juppe. Then too, unions struck and mobilized massive protests. Juppe,
after a fierce battle, threw in the towel in the face of sustained
working class anger.
Striking by public employees in France is not illegal and not outlawed
as it is many U.S. cities, such as for workers in New York City’s
transit system. Striking is a constitutional right in France. However,
in France, strikers must notify management in advance of strikes.
Moreover, public workers must maintain a minimum of public service.
Unfortunately, French unions comprise only about 9% of the workforce,
similar in size to the U.S. labor movement. But French unions,
particularly rail, can still deliver big blows against the
rulers—especially when unions are united, willing to fight, and resolved
to work with other social forces around common demands.
The broad resistance in France gives the international workers’ struggle
more power and reveals the depth of the crisis that capitalism has
spawned worldwide as a reactionary, destructive force. Our ability and
willingness to strike will be key to rolling back the agenda of the
capitalist rulers and building a movement that can ultimately replace
their destructive system with socialism.
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April 12, 2018 in Europe, International. Tags: France
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