Three weeks in France
CGT-CFDT-FO-CFTC-FMC
CHEMINOTS EN GREVE
POOR LE SERDICE PUBLIC
E MAINTIEN DE LEUR STATIN- PUMICITE DELA SACE
CONTRE LE DEMANTELEMENT
IE LEUR REGIME DE RETRAITE ET DE PREVOYANCE
Banner lists the participating trade unions, and continues "railway workers on strike for public service, the protection of their [special public sector social security] status, the universal nature of the
SNCF [railway network] and against the dismantling of their retirement pension and social security system".
SNer (railway network and against the dismantling of their retirement pension and social security system".
THESE EVENTS MARK THE END OF A period of liberalism, in which social advances won over decades were sliced away. The major industrial centres were dismantled. The index-linking of salaries to inflation was abandoned. Salaries came under constant downward pressure, under the pretext of austerity. The government finally began to make tentative moves towards dismantling core programmes of social protection.
Hard battles were fought against government and employers during this period, but they generally ended in defeat. This provoked a decline in the fighting spirit of the working people. The number of days "lost" to strikes in 1994 was the lowest since the end of World War Two. Workers Millions of working people and students participated in the events of December 1995. Christian Picquet analyses France's widest social movement since 1968.
seemed to have given up the fight against the system. The Socialist Party, in power for 14 years, had convinced them that there were objective, "impassable limits" to the social market economy. A FEW SHORT WEEKS OF STRIKES AND demonstrations have led millions of men and women to question the neoliberal, monetarist conception of "post-Maastricht Europe". Any illusions in Jacques Chirac's proclaimed (pre-election) concern about the "social fracture"1 in society have been dissipated Since his election as president in June 1995, Chirac has presided over strict, liberal orthodoxy in economic policy. Reducing the public deficit has been the top priority. The goal is to meet the "convergence criteria" according to which European Union countries will be judged ready to adopt the common currency or "Euro" 2
The rigidity of these criteria have panicked part of the French bourgeoisie. Conservative (RPR Deputy Pierre Lellouche campaigned for the "Yes" vote in the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. He now worries that "People's lives are completely different from these robotic [automatic timetables]. Even the most rigid legal mechanism cannot resist for long against the kind of social contradiction which we can see forming all across Europe, and particularly in France". 3
The big mistake of Chirac, and Prime Minister Alain Juppé, was to ignore the catalytic effect on social discontent of their simultaneous attacks on the public sector, working conditions in the public sector and, above all, the social security system, the social advance which symbolises the "Welfare State".
Margaret Thatcher's strategy for beating Britain's miners was the model Chirac and Juppé chose to follow. They thought that the workers' movement was so weakened after
January 1996 3
* France years of failure, so impotent, that all they would face would be a strike in one sector, the public railway network
SNCF. They did not realise at all that twenty years of social disaster provoked by economic policy had brought the country to the verge of an explosion. 4 They also underestimated the encouragement which the highly visible, tangible strike of transport workers would give to the rest of the social movement.
1986-87
In students, train and drivers
Electricité de
IUS: EN
France workers fought one after another, without really finding elements of convergence in their struggles. This time round, government clumsiness made it easier for workers in struggle to link up with each other. AT THE START OF THE SCHOOL YEAR, university students began agitating against cuts in the education system, and the resulting restrictions in access to certain courses. At about the same time, civil servants and public sector workers held two one-day strikes to protest the freeze in their salaries. Then came Juppé's statement on social security, the release of his plans for reforming the retirement pensions of public sector workers, revelations about measures to close 5,000 km of rail track and shed 15,000 jobs at the SNCF, and leaked plans for "reform"
Document CFDT: Unity and action! 1995, signed by 400 local and regional CFDI representatives. WE DECLARE OUR TOTAL SUPPORT FOR the actions the Juppé plan, for the defence and the renovation of social protection, old age pensions, employment and salaries, and the public sector. We welcome and support the extension of these actions accross the whole public sector, and in the private sector too. FOR HIGH-QUALITY SOCIAL PROTECTION High-quality health insurance for all! Abolish payments for hospital treatment! Old age pensions after 37.5 years of contributions. Private sector pensions to be based on the ten best years of earnings! Finance part of social security by taxes on capital! Employer's contributions to be based on the wealth of the enterprise! Control health care spending through at Electricité de France/Gaz de France and France Télécom. This could only favour the convergence of struggles in the various sectors. A large number of workers understood that, given the size of the government's attack, only a determined and massive movement could hope to win.
The first to join the railway workers' struggle were the employees of the Paris bus and metro company RAPT. Then there was almost a contagious jump to the electricity workers, postal sorting workers, civil servants at the tax office, and some teachers. Withdrawl of the Juppé plan quickly became the element which united the various sectors, and the slogan most able to spread the struggle to new sectors. GENERAL STRIKE?
For the first time in years, a general strike became objectively possible. It didn't happen, for three reasons.
The strike paralysed the railways, and bus and metro transport in Paris, Marseilles, Grenoble, and other towns. But it was never total in the civil service and the public sector. More importantly, the private sector did not strike. There was sympathy, complicity, even walkouts from private sector workers on the days of major demonstrations. But the weight of the crisis, and of the defeats of recent private sector struggles, the extent of prioritising preventitive medicine, and through a struggle against the super-profits of the pharmaceutical industry, and the abuse of the system by independent medical practices! Renewed democratic control! AGAINST UNEMPLOYMENT AND PRECARITY, AND FOR A REDUCTION IN THE WORKING WEEK! A framework law covering a gradual reduction to a 32 hour week, together with new hirings, and the right to work for all! FOR THE DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR Yes, the time is right for general, global action! It is time to widen the strike! Time to prepare a large, unitary, national, interprofessional demonstration, like the 16 January 1994 demonstration in support of the state school system. All the structures, all the militants, and all the members of the CFDT should take part in this action! should take nart in this action! 4 International Viewpoint nº273
"restructuring", the growing proportion of workers on insecure contracts, the omnipresent fear of unemployment, and the terrible decline in trade union presence in private sector workplaces, all combined to exercise a terrible pressure the majority of private sector workers, who sympathised with the movement from start to finish. US: ENSEMBLE P
The second obstacle to the general strike was the lack of leadership. The trade union confederations (CGT, CFDT, FO, FSU) never called for a general strike. Such a call would not have guaranteed success. But it would have given the most militant workers an indispensable guarantee. They would have been able to throw themselves into action, in the conviction that this would start an avalanche. But there was no leadership. There wasn't even an inter-union co-ordination at the national level. Centralisation, coordination between sectors, the dates and routes of demonstrations were set in parallel by each union (with the occasional fax or telephone call). The movement was so strong that union leaders were obliged to "behave" in public - shaking hands with each other at demonstrations, and so on. But their ambivalent attitude to cooperation was a major factor in the lack of self-organisation.
The strike movement basically worked on the basis of general assemblies in each enterprise. But there were few strike committees at the sector or national level. Nor did we have the inter-union co-ordination committees which carried forward the railway strike in 1986 or the nurses' strike in 1988.
The third reason why there was no general strike was the lack of a political alternative to the left of the government. The Socialist Party refused to do anything which might "politicise" the strike, or disrupt the electoral calendar. Socialist leader Leonel Jospin counts on being elected in 1998, if things go smoothly. The in 1990, it things go smoothly. The
This declaration appeared in Le Monde, 12 December undertaken against the negative consequences of
most he has been willing to do is criticise the authoritarian style with which Juppé is introducing his reforms. It was left to Juppé to point out that his proposals are only a continuation of the policies implemented by successive Socialist Party governments under President François Mitterand between 1988 and 1992.
The Communist Party (PCF) might have ended its strategy of "constructive opposition". But it was clearly worried about the new movement going beyond social protest over social security. Party leader Robert Hue refused to support "anything which would bring into question the Juppé government, or open the possibility of the dissolution of the national assembly". As for the left alternative, Hue still insists that the rest of the left "is not ready... for the progressive alternative".]
So there was no general strike. A few days before Christmas (25 December), there was a return to work in most of the paralysed sectors. SHOCK WAVE
Hundreds of thousands of "ordinary" women and men participated in the strike. On 12 and 16 December, more than two million people demonstrated against the Juppé plan. In many towns, these were the largest demonstrations, not just since May 1968, but since the liberation of France at the end of the second world war.
The strength of the movement in Marseilles, Rouen, Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Rennes and other towns also suggests a refusal of the centralising, elitist domination of French life from Paris. Geographer Hervé Le Bras argues that "this was the refusal of a Paris scheme, imposed by elites less and less connected to the social body. For the demonstrators, Alain Juppé is the incarnation of this 'arrogant' authority" 8 PARTIAL VICTORY
Even if the Juppé plan has not been scrapped, the withdrawl of proposed reforms in public sector retirement pensions and plans for cuts in the railway service, and the freezing of a number of European Union Directives on the liberalisation of telecommunications and electricity provision do represent a partial victory for the social movement. So do
France * the promises of new credits for the universities. And a partial victory makes a real change from the catalogue of defeats of the 1980s and early 1990s!
The class struggle is back on the national stage. Solidarity between different categories of workers seemed to have been destroyed by the crisis. Not any more. The mobilisation renewed the traditions of struggle of the labour movement, and refreshed peoples' memories of past struggles. Demonstrations bristled with red flags. You could hear the Internationale again.
Where they existed, interprofessional strike committees had an incredible effect. In Rouen, the general assembly of railway worker delegates
C public appeal calling on CFDT militants to join the mobilisation. Notat has responded by starting expulsion proceedings against a number of militants. There will probably be pressure for an extraordinary CFDT congress, which will only accentuate the polarisation in the federation.
New trade unions like SUD (posttelecom) and FSU (teaching), formed by those expelled from the CFDT for "excessive" militancy during the 1980s, played a key role in the struggle.
France's leftist intellectuals were deeply divided in their response to the strike. Some of those who have recently been carried away by fashionable theories decided to
ENSEMBLE DANS L'ACTION
SOLIDAIRES ET_RAS MBLES POUR
Sinti rapidly incorporated other sectors in struggle, becoming the crucible of the struggle in the region.
Political debates on the need for a left alternative, the European dimension of the current crisis, and the place of women in society blossomed, no longer the preoccupation of a hyper-active minority!?
[..] The cards have been shuffled, and are being re-dealt. Take the trade union movement: there is greater unity than ever at the base of the various federations (CGT, FO, FSU). The shameful support of CFDT leader Nicole Notat for the government has provoked a real polarisation in that federation. There is now, to all effects, a second CFDT, symbolised by the five hundred shop stewards and regional representatives who signed a
"augmentation des salai rés IBLE support the government's "modernisation" drive. Many more vocalised their support for the striking workers. THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING...
The end of the strike is not the end of the social movement in France. Juppé is planing to implement his reforms by decree, avoiding a debate in parliament. First on the list will be the imposition of a new tax on all incomes (including social security benetits and pensions). It will be followed by a reform of the public hospital system. Each measure is a challenge to the social movement. There are plenty of opportunities to re-launch the struggle, if we can find the right initiatives to bring people together again. *
January 1996 5 plein Une Sécu
* France
CGT Congress, 5-8 December