Despite the opposition of thousands of French workers, who took to the streets in protest, right wing President Nicolas Sarkozy drove through parliament a law aimed at crippling the right to strike in public transport. The law requires workers to declare themselves as strikers 48 hours before taking action, and obliges unions to maintain a minimum level of service. They even have to facilitate the deployment of scabs to break their own strikes!
The new measures represent a historic restriction of the right to strike and are directed first against rail, bus and Paris metro workers because these sectors have proved, alongside the teachers, the vanguard of militant trade unionism over the past 10 years.
Sarkozy’s goal is to take away workers’ sharpest weapon: the strike. He needs to break the vanguard of the French workers and put legal shackles on the unions, as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain in the 1980s.
Only then will the government have free rein to attack pensions, the health system, schools and universities, the youth of the sprawling suburbs – the banlieues – and undocumented migrants – the sans papiers. He has promised the employers’ organisation, Medef, that he will make the 35-hour working week “more flexible”, i.e. make employees work longer for the same or less pay
First three months of Sarkozy
Since his election, Sarkozy has paralysed the left parties and convinced the trade union tops that a negotiated surrender is the best they can hope for. He has co-opted into his government several Socialist Party bigwigs: Bernard Kouchner, rewarded with the Foreign Ministry, Dominique Strauss-Kahn as French candidate for the IMF, Jacques Lang to head a parliamentary reforms commission.
The trade union leaders, too, have been embroiled in a series of discussions with Sarkozy over his “reforms”. They are frightened of appealing in the workplaces and streets ofr resistance to these neoliberal attacks. They are reconciling themselves to a long Sarkozy era, hoping to find a place, albeit a reduced one, in his new system of incorporating the unions. Bernard Thibaut, leader of the CGT, the most militant of the large union federations, expressed his desire to meet Sarkozy. Shamefully, the CGT has stated that that it is neither in “opposition” nor in “resistance” to Sarkozy.
Sarkozy’s first measures directly benefit the employers. His recent tax package includes
• A new “fiscal shield” setting a cap at 50 per cent of income for the total taxes to be paid to the state by a single person (this would only benefit the 93,000 richest families!)
• The effective abolition of inheritance tax
• Exemption for the bosses from paying insurance (social security, pensions, etc.) for employees’ overtime.
The cost of these measures is 13 billions euros. So Sarkozy aims to balance the budget by creating a new levy on health expenses. Every year, the first 50 euros that a citizen spends on treatment will not be reimbursed. This will hit the lowest income families, forcing them to choose between necessary medical treatment and other vital expenses.
In the autumn, Sarkozy will press on with the bosses’ agenda. He intends to reintroduce the first employment contract (CPE), allowing a boss to fire a worker at will, even though this was defeated last year by the mass action of young people and workers. This time it will be extended to all workers.
LCR and the new party
In the face of these attacks the reformist left has been parlysed. Even the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” parties have not outlined what they believe is the strategy to resist and defeat Sarkozy A partial exception is the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. Since the election, it has correctly called for a national movement of resistance.
Having won nearly 1.5 million votes for their candidate Olivier Besancenot, the French section of the Fourth International, has a major responsibility to initiate the resistance. But this requires clarity on the action that is needed, particualrly the solidarity action up to and including a general strike with every section under attack – particulalry the youth of the banlieues and the railworkers. If the guards regiment of the French workers movement is defeated because it do not get assistance from the rest of the unions, then a disorderly retreat could unravel. Bold action now, in the first phase of Sarko’s attack, is vital.
The LCR has also called for the foundation of a new party,based on all those “defending an anticapitalist programme in struggle and in elections, politically independent from the Socialist Party and refusing to manage the [governmental] institutions with it”. Meetings will be held in September – in towns, workplaces, schools and universities – to debate the forms and means to fight back against the government. After the LCR congress, a second phase is foreseen with general meetings in every region, building towards a national congress to found the new party.
Members of the League for the Fifth International in France welcome this development as a step toward the formation of a new workers party in France, based on a revolutionary programme. But we argue that the LCR must link these discussions to active resistance to Sarkozy. This way we can win new layers of activists to a new fighting party.
This party should be based on a programme with clear “transitional” demands, leading from the struggle to meet the urgent needs of the masses to the overthrow of the entire capitalist system, i.e. private ownership of the means of production, and the smashing of the bourgeois state.
The LCR, however, argues that the new party should focus on the local elections next year. While this may be a good way of popularising its programme, it should not be the absolute priority. The party should rather be “launched” in the resistance to Sarkozy’s attacks. The local branches should organise actions and campaigns against them, uniting the various partial fightbacks into a general strike to bring down Sarkozy and replace him with a revolutionary workers’ government.