Chirac buffeted by new strike wave NO SOONER had Jacques Chirac's government begun to breathe a sigh of relief that things were returning to normal after its ignominious defeat at the hands of the students, than another wave of strikes appeared to threaten it. (1)
This time it was the turn of tens of thousands of public sector employees, led by the railworkers, to launch a counter-attack against the right-wing coalition government's austerity and restructuring programme.
FRANCE
But it wasn't long before the national unions were singing another tune. At the base, trade-union militants who were members of the CGT or the CFDT in some areas began to organize and even lead the strikes, and when it became apparent that the movement was not going to be a flash in the pan, the unions did an about face and made the strike actions official.
But by this time it was too late for the official union machinery to take over the running of the strike on a day to day level. Local depots had already set up democraticallyelected strike committees, controlled by daily general assemblies of all the strikers, both unionized and non-unionized. Learning lessons from both past disputes and from the org anization of the student movement, the railworkers grew in strength and self-confidence through relying on these democratic forms of selforganization. It was truly the general assemblies of the strikers who led the strike, from decisions to continue the action to the day-to-day organizing of picketing and so on.
Through these mechanisms, the strike grew in momentum in the run-up to and throughout the Christmas holiday period. The strike caused chaos for travellers over Christmas, but the workers' demands still gained sympathy from wide sections of public opinion in spite of attempts by the TV and the media to whip up hysteria against them. National strike coordination
As the strike began to spread among all the railworkers, unions on the Paris metro and bus networks began the first of a series of spora. die strikes around pay and grading demands on Monday, December 22, this one lasting for four days.
The rail strike gained another boost when the train drivers organized a national strike coordination on December 28, with delegates being sent directly from local or regional strike committees. This was the first time in the history of the French workers' movement that a national coordination has been established outside the control of offical trade-union channels.
Throughout this first period of
1. On the December student strikes, see 'International Viewpoint' No. 111, December 22, 1986.
CGT Confederation generale travail, General Workers' Confederation; CFDT - Confederation francaise democratique du travail, Democratic Workers' Confederation.
3
HILARY ELEANOR
Although it had become common currency for the left in France to predict that the exemplary and victorious students' struggle would inspire the workers' movement, the rapidity and breadth of the strikes took everybody by surprise. And although the strikers' did not win their main demands on pay and conditions outright, they did succeed in forcing some limited concessions from the government and the manage. ment's of the nationalized industries.
The strikes began from a call put out by train drivers in the SNCF (the national railway company), in particular from the Gare du Nord depot in Paris and in the Paris-SudOuest region. Railworkers had already rejected a three per cent pay offer for 1987, not surprisingly as their pay had been falling behind the inflation rate since 1981. Under the rubric of running the SNCF profitably, management were proposing job reductions and cuts in services, greater flexibility of Sunday and rest-day working and reductions in bonuses.
But it wasn't just the question of basic. wages - and the related issues of bonuses and conditions -Chat led to the initial walk-outs. The SNCF bosses were also proposing bringing into operation a new merit-related promotion scheme that would replace the present seniority system.
It was this proposal, coupled with the defeat that the youth had inflicted on the government less than two weeks previously, that sparked off the unofficial action on December 18. The strike spread rapidly through the SNCF's 94 national depots, but for the first four days was mainly restricted to the train drivers who make up 18,000 of the 230,000 rail workers.
There were a number of factors that led to this becoming the longestrunning rail strike since 1968, lasting over three weeks. Perhaps the most important factor, as mentioned already, was the atmosphere of hope opened up by the students victory. For the first time in many years, it seemed as though it was possible to fight a struggle and win - always an important factor in shaping combativity and militancy.
Another important factor was that the strike was started and in general led by rank and file workers, and not by the traditional union leaderships. This in part can be attributed to the class-collaborationist approaches of the two main trade unions, the Communist Party-led CGT and the CFDT, whose leadership is pro-Socialist Party. (2) In a country that anyway has a weak level of trade-union organization, the claimed membership of the CGT has fallen from two and a half million in 1975 to just one million today, and the CFDT claims 687,000 members. Only 10-12 per cent of the working population in France belong to trade unions.
The attitude of these union leaderships to the strike at the beginning was not to welcome it with open arms and to throw their support behind it. The CFDT were wary of rocking the boat with only a year to go before next year's presidential elections, and with Socialist President Francois Mitterrand doing quite nicely in the public opinion polls. The CGT were suspicious of a movement that was outside of their bureaucratic control.
International Viewpoint 26 January 1987
CRS police used to intimidate and attack striking railworkers (DR)
the strike, the government was determined to remain intransigent. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in particular could not afford to be seen to give in to the strikers after his government's humiliating climbdown following , their attempts to reform the universities. But there wasn't just the problem of face-saving, with Chirac's popularity sliding and the presidential elections drawing closer. The rightwing coalition government headed up by Chirac's party, the RPR, and the UDF led by Raymond Barre, had other problems, not least of which was France's economic performance in relation to its main capitalist competitors. Thatcher-style economic restructuring
The government's long-term project can be summed-up as a Reagan or Thatcher-style restructuring of the economy - in other words a major offensive against the working class in order to make French industry more profitable and attractive to overseas investment. Among the suitable places to make a start was first of all the education sector -hence the doomed proposals that sparked off the student mobilizations. Next for the chop was the rest of the public sector, with the primary target being the rail industry.
France's state-owned sector is one of the biggest in Western Europe, with an estimated four and a half million employees and a budget equal to 30 per cent of the total gross national product. The railway system has a government subsidy of 30,000 million francs a year, and made a loss of over 3,400 million francs (500 million US dollars) in 1986. Aiming to reduce public spending, Chirac had announced a government ceiling for wage rises in the public sector of two per cent for 1987, with three percent rises where wage increases were tied to productivity deals.
Taking up the paring knife where the previous Sociaist government had left off, Chirac targeted the railways for public spending cutbacks. Hiding behind the SNCF management, the government chose "not to intervene" openly into the dispute, although undoubtedly the SNCF bosses were just carrying out instructions from their bosses in the ministry of transport.
But the government could not keep up its public stance of "non-intervention" for very long. As the strike began to bite and pressure built up in support of the strikers' demands for negotiations, they were finally forced to intervene as it became apparent that the strikers were digging in. On December 29, Junior Transport Minister Jacques Douffiagues announced that the SNCF proposals for the merit-related pay structure would be withdrawn, and he named a mediator to begin a process of negotiations with the unions.
But these manoeuvers failed to defuse the rail struggle. Railworkers continued to organize, and, in an attempt to stop the small minority of scabs running trains, began to occupy platforms and signal boxes, and organize sit-downs on the tracks. There were many local confrontations between the strikers and the CRS riot police.
The day after Douffiagues' announcement, metro workers in Paris began another strike, with workers on the Paris suburban transport system, the RER, following hot on their heels in pursuit of a better wage offer and to protest against proposed job losses threatened by a productivity plan.
Towards the end of the first week of January, the rail strike began to run out of steam slightly, with the first signs of a small but significant return to work. In an attempt to outflank their union rivals, the Communist-led CGT announced an all-out strike in the public sector for Wednesday, January 7. But this move by the CGT came too late. It was a cynical attempt to regain some credibility by putting on a radical left face at a time when other unions were throwing in the towel, and when there was no danger of being outflanked. New strike wave
However, a new wave of strikes began on January 7. On the Paris metro and the RER, stoppages continued, severely disrupting transport in the city and the suburbs. Power cuts heralded strikes by electricians for higher wages, and there were also renewed stoppages in the docks and naval shipyards against job cuts.
The following day, January 8, the SNCF announced further concessions on promotion rights and fringe benefits, and the next few days saw more railworkers drifting back to work. The following weekend, January 10-11, three of the tiny, unrepresentative and rightist electrician and gas workers' unions signed an agreement for a return to work. The largest union involved, the CGT, denounced the deal as a capitulation.
Monday, January 12, saw the beginning of an all-out return to work on the railways, with workers at some of the most militant depots voting for a return to work. Only parts of the Paris metro were still on strike, but this did not last after the right-wing Force ouvriere (Workers' Strength) union had called its members back to work, new negotiations were opened up and after the rail strike had collapsed.
As a wave of snow and ice enveloped France, it almost seemed as though International Viewpoint 26 January 1987
FRANCE the change in weather had marked the end of the strikes. But the arctic weather did a job as thorough as any mass pickets could have in disrupting road, rail and air transport, putting several nuclear power stations out of operation (the water-cooling systems were frozen) and preventing many people from working. Braving the cold in Paris on Monday, January 12, a couple of thousand right-wingers and shopkeepers sang the Marseillaise at belated demonstrations against the strikers called by the UDF/RPR and the fascist National Front.
If all these problems weren't enough to worry Chirac, another crisis had been building up. As a result of the student struggles in December and the current strike actions, the franc had begun to slide uncontrol-