On Thursday 10 March France was hit by another huge day of action. This combined strike action by large numbers of workers, both private and public sector, with huge demonstrations in all the major cities.
In Paris 150,000 participants, marched from Place d’Italie to Place de la Nation behind a giant banner reading “Higher wages, shorter working hours, against deregulation and unemployment.”
The demonstration across France was twice the size of the last day of action on 5 February: 100,000 in Marseille, 40,000 in Bordeaux, 30,000 in Toulouse, Nantes, Rennes and Lyon, 25,000 in Clermont-Ferrand and 15,000 in Rouen.
This mass response was the result of a united call by all the major union federations: CGT, CFDT, FO, l’UNSA, G10 Solidaires and SUD.
The reasons for this response are clear enough. France’s jobless rate exceeded 10 percent in January – its highest level for five years. Real wage levels remained the same whilst profits rose by 10 per cent over the last year. Across the private sector the employers have been pressing hard for job flexibility and to raise the 35 hour week to 40 hours.
Public services are— as in the rest of Europe— faced with savage cuts and privatisation. Education faces a serious attack (the Fillon law). Recent declarations of record profits from the top companies quoted on the stock exchange have incensed the workers.
On March 8 between 150,000 to 200,000 school and university students held nationwide demonstrations to protest at “reforms” to the curriculum in universities and lycées. In Paris police responded by tear-gassing students.
The radicalism of young people is not restricted to students either. At the Citroën-Aulnay factory (Seine-Saint-Denis) on March 3, dozens of young workers used their mobile phones to organise a stoppage to say no to a longer working week and wage flexibility.
For all these reasons the March 10 day of action, unlike other recent ones, saw real unity between workers in the private and public sectors, as well as between school students and teachers. In Limoges demonstrators chanted “Y en a ras le bol de ces guignols qui ferment les usines, qui ferment les écoles” (We’re fed up with these clowns who close schools, who close factories).
According to the CGT, there was strike action in a wide range of private firms including Coca-Cola, Exxon, L’Oréal, LU, Lustucru, Michelin, Nestlé, Renault, Rhodia, Rhône-Poulenc, Sanofi-Aventis, Total and Yoplait.
At Valenciennes, 5000 metal workers struck. One métallo was reported as saying: “Everyone is fed up. There is enormous anger. The métallos have to work very hard, The noise the fumes, they kill a man…But the bosses don’t respect you. For them this means nothing.”
The CGT reports that between 30,000 and 40,000 metalworkers struck in Nord-Pas-de-Calais department. In Lille, the main city of the north, 25,000 public and private sector workers teachers and secondary school students demonstrated together.
The government of prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin vowed not to back down, claiming “courage means reform.” Then he promised to encourage wage negotiations in the private sector and begin them itself in the public sector too.
Chirac and Raffarin will be most alarmed by the clear signs of a public-private workers’ alliance. They will do all they can to break it up, since this division has been the Achilles heel of all the great social upheavals that have wracked France in the last few years.
The government is also terrified that growing dissatisfaction by workers might snowball into a protest vote against the neoliberal European Union constitution in the referendum set for May 29.
Will the union leaders snatch another defeat from the jaws of victory? They are eager to get into negotiations. Will they let Raffarin spin them out and demobilise the movement once again? Yes they will … if rank and file workers let them get away with it.
The G10 Solidaires union correctly calls for keeping the movement going by coordinating the struggle at a workplace and local level.
Everywhere French workers need to form co-ordinations, across unions, involving non-unionised workers willing to take action as well as union members, drawing in secondary school and university students. Above all the unity of the public and private sector has to be turned into an organised form at local as well as national level. The union leaders have to be put under control so that they cannot sell out yet again.
The struggle has to go beyond isolated days of action into an all out battle. Agitation has to be launched for an indefinite general strike to force the withdrawal of the attack on the 35 hour week, to defend the public sector, for an across the board wage increase agreed by workers, for a programme of socially useful public works paid at full union rates to abolish unemployment.
On March 19, large contingents of French workers will travel to Brussels to join workers from across Europe demonstrating against the assault on our social gains. The militancy of French workers, like that of the Italian and German workers over the past few years, is an inspiration to those countries where the struggle is still fragmented and at a low ebb.
But everywhere we face the same problem. The appalling misleadership of the trade union bureaucracy and the reformist parties, whether “Socialist” or “Communist”. We need to unite the militant and revolutionary vanguard to solve this crisis of leadership. We need a permanent democratic coordination of struggles across Europe. And we need a new political party, transcending national borders, to unite our resistance and mount a struggle for the only thing that will prevent the capitalists from attacking our social gains again and again: the overthrow of the profit system and the establishment of a Socialist United States of Europe.