France: mass demos rock employers
[Pouvoir Ouvrier, France]
Around 300,000 workers marched against the plans of the MEDEF bosses' organisation to increase the retirement age on 25 January. In an unprecedented movement that many observers are describing as similar to November-December 1995, all the union federations united in calling on private sector workers to come out on strike to defend their pensions.
All over the country, public sector workers, who will have their own one-day strike over pay levels next Tuesday (30 January) joined the protests.
Around 50,000 marched in Paris, 30,000 in Marseille, 20,000 in Lyon and the same in Bordeaux; in Lille violent scenes took place as the riot police viciously attacked firefighters protesting for their own demands - one demonstrator lost a hand as he hurled back a tear-gas grenade.
At the moment, the French economy, like that of most of the Euro-zone, is booming. Austerity and privatisation, adopted in order to meet the “convergence criteria” prior to the launching of the Euro, and often implemented by social democratic governments, have started to have an effect as the European economy was finally able to jump onto the coat-tails of the US boom.
As a result, profits are up and unemployment is declining at an unprecedented rate. Strangely enough, however, wage-levels are stagnant, and a large number of firms are still launching closure programmes, most notably Danone, the massive French food multinational.
On top of all this, the French bosses’ organisation, the MEDEF, has launched an all-out attack against all the structures of class collaboration that were set up in France after the war as a way of buying social peace from a restive working class.
And of course, the MEDEF are intending to remove anything positive that this system might contain, in order to increase the bosses’ control and reduce their spending.
The bosses have already scored a notable victory, with the imposition of new neo-liberal rules for unemployment benefit, similar to those that exist in the US or Britain. In doing so, they were supported by the leadership of the CFDT trade union, which argued that this clear attack against the unemployed represented a necessary “modernisation” of the benefit system.
The bosses’ current objective is the private sector retirement system, which allows workers who have contributed for 40 years to retire. They want to increase that to 45 years, and to reduce pensions to take into account death rates!
They want to reduce their contributions to the pension schemes and oblige workers to take out private schemes which will, of course, provide important sums of money for the capitalists to speculate with.
All the major unions - including the CFDT - have called for a day of protest on Thursday 25 January. Tens of thousands of workers will take to the street in the biggest demonstration of private sector workers for over a decade.
Spurred on by a large number of disputes over wages, and in a situation in which some sectors of the economy are crying out for workers, the private sector look set to play an important role in the French class struggle for the first time in decades.
At the same time, the massive public sector unions, which have a separate pension scheme, have also called for support for the day of action, rightly fearing that their turn will be next. Furthermore, last week negotiations with the government over the public sector pay claim broke down, and the unions have organised a nationwide public sector strike on 30 January.
While there is clearly the potential for a mass movement - the bosses' attack is widely unpopular, French workers have a long tradition of pushing back bosses' and governmental attacks by street protests, and there is the possibility of joint public- and private-sector action - for the moment the government is clearly indicating that it will not let the bosses' intransigence produce an upheaval, and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has stated that if no agreement is found, the government will introduce a law imposing an agreement.
The union leaders, who currently completely control all the protests would, of course, be quite happy with such a solution. However, there is little chance that any such law will be entirely to the workers' advantage! The next 10 days or so will determine whether the movement tails off or becomes a real mass movement with independent rank and file action.
In particular, the public sector know they have a good chance of winning: France has just entered 18 months of election fever, with key municipal elections in mid-march, followed in Spring 2002 by the Presidential and parliamentary elections.
Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin will not want to do anything to alienate workers - already the Socialist Party have supported the day of action on 25 January. Public and private sector workers must use this governmental weakness to press home the attack, organise themselves independently of the trade union leaders and adopt decisive demands that both push back the bosses’ offensive, make good the wage stagnation of the last 10 years and create real jobs for the millions of unemployed who remain in the dole queue.
