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NEWS & LETTERS, June-July 2006Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch WeerthFrench labor unrest challenges capitalThis spring's student-worker protests in France constituted the largest popular mobilization of the Left in over two decades, at least in the industrially developed world. Not since the beginnings of the Reagan-Thatcher era in the early 1980s, when millions came out in Britain, the U.S., and Germany to oppose their militaristic and anti-labor offensives, have we seen such numbers hitting the street. While the 2006 events were confined to a single country, France, the issues were connected to the wider anti-globalization movement. The French protests began earlier this year, when the rightist Chirac-Villepin government made a two-fold response to last fall's ghetto revolts by Arab and African minority youth. First, the government proposed a series of racist anti-immigrant laws. Second, they voted to remove legal protections for workers under 26 years old, claiming that such "flexibility" would put a dent in youth unemployment, which stands at 20% overall and 40% for ghetto youth. The anti-immigrant proposal has met with some determined protests, the latest a march by 20,000 in Paris, May 13. These relatively modest demonstrations have been organized by United Against a Disposable Immigration, a new organization comprised of leftist and immigrant rights groups. It was the second proposal, for a First Employment Contract (CPE) that would have allowed employers to fire young workers on short notice, that touched off a mass mobilization of students and workers. On March 7, over 800,000 demonstrated against the CPE--students, workers, and leftist groups. The next mass demonstration, March 18, grew to a million. Then, on March 28, came the largest demonstration in decades, as around two million people hit the streets, even more than in the mass labor demonstrations of 1995. With public opinion solidly behind them, students had by then also occupied 1,200 high schools (out of 4,300 in the country) and 69 universities (out of 84). Karl Stoeckel of the National Union of High School Students declared: "The high school students are becoming aware that they can win." Jean-Claude Mailly of Workers' Force stated: "The unions haven't been this united in 20 years." These workers were evidently part of the 64% of the French population who, in a recent international survey, rejected the proposition that "a free enterprise system and a free market economy" is the best economic model. Such anti-capitalist sentiment is stronger in France than in any other industrialized country. To the French dominant classes, these are mistaken views, in need of correction. For example, Interior (Police) Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a likely presidential candidate in 2007, is both a notorious racist--he called the anti-police rebels who burned cars last fall "scum"--and a proponent of "free market" economics. If elected, Sarkozy would rule with a strong hand, creating more "flexibility" for capital by doing away with hard-won gains by labor. He would try to gain support for this by continuing his racist demagoguery on crime and immigration, taking advantage of the fact that a third of the French people have described themselves in recent polls as "somewhat" or "very racist." The labor gains being challenged by capital and its representatives include a legal right to strike, for which a worker can lose a day's pay, but not be fired. There are also restrictions on layoffs for economic reasons. However, Sarkozy is only the brutal face of a larger consensus among the political elite, here including the Socialist Party leadership as well. This elite consensus holds that the French economy needs to be "reformed" in a neo-liberal direction. This forms the larger context of the spring 2006 protests. After another large mobilization on April 4, again over a million strong, President Jacques Chirac capitulated, agreeing to withdraw the CPE. This came after this last mobilization drew large numbers of strikers in the government, telecommunications, media, banking, automobile, and energy sectors, but also after students began to blockade key economic institutions, like railroads and food distribution. On April 24, in one last action, radical students briefly re-occupied the Sorbonne, seeking to link the anti-CPE protests to those over the racist immigration laws that will soon be voted on. Unfortunately, this occupation did not garner enough student support and was quickly broken up by police. The failure of the April 24 action also points to a big contradiction: the inability of the student-labor Left to forge strong links with the most oppressed sector of French society, the immigrants and their descendants, who now form an impoverished ethnic minority in the suburban ghettos of Paris and elsewhere. And, as the corporate media have repeatedly noted, the spring 2006 protests were not marked, as in 1968, by an effervescence of openly revolutionary sentiment. |
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