Vol. 80/No. 14 April 11, 2016
Big protests in France oppose anti-labor ‘reform’ law
In addition to labor slogans, some demonstrators carried banners demanding an end to the French government’s “state of emergency” law that limits protests in the name of fighting terrorism.
As production and trade contracts worldwide, capitalists in France want to solve their crisis on the backs of workers. With official unemployment above 10 percent, bosses claim the labor law “reforms” will make it easier for them to hire.
In France industry-wide agreements are binding in every workplace, with or without a union presence. The draft law would allow bosses to unilaterally impose changes in working hours and overtime pay, lengthen the 35-hour workweek and secure local agreements inferior to those won industry-wide. It would also limit severance pay bosses must provide in case of a layoff.
“Earlier generations of workers fought for these gains and it is up to us to defend them,” Vivien Casado, 26, a Peugeot auto assembly worker at the Poissy plant, told the Militant, as he marched with 80 co-workers.
Erosion of workers’ power
The demonstrations show the determination of workers and youth to fight the bosses’ attacks. However, the framework put forward by the leadership of all three major union federations — defense of the 3,400-page labor code and the huge bureaucracy that comes with it — evades the central challenge facing the working class in France today. Decades of collaboration with successive capitalist governments by labor officials has led to the erosion of workers’ power and dependence on state regulation.Only 8 percent of workers in France are union members, but many support one or another of the unions, which are affiliated with competing political parties. Union offices in major workplaces and “union time” for officials are paid for by the bosses.
The union tops have focused on the “permanent” workers who make up their base in workplace elections, which helps determine the resources each union gets from the employers and municipal government. Meanwhile, the working class faces growing unemployment, particularly among young people, and the mushrooming of temporary, short-term and agency work contracts.
No massive union-led worker mobilization has sought to organize “temporary” workers and fight for a massive public works program to build housing, roads, schools and rural medical facilities. That kind of fight would be a working-class answer to the bosses’ propaganda that the way to create more jobs is to give the capitalists even more power.
“The longest job I’ve had lasted one year,” Jerome Kinzel, 25, who took part in the demonstration in Marseille, told the Militant. Kinzel has worked as a chef at restaurants and once briefly at a hotel. “I’ve never worked in a place that had a union presence. We work on weekly contracts. At the hotel some of my co-workers were in their 50s and had been trying to support a family working on weekly contracts for over six years.”
Following the March 9 demonstrations, the government said they would consider some “tweaks” to their draft law. Some 100,000 students, joined by many trade unionists, demonstrated March 17. Another national day of actions has been called for March 31.
Derek Jeffers and Claude Bleton in Paris and Marc Kinzel in Marseille contributed to this article.
Related articles:
On the Picket Line
Lessons of 1934: Gov’t mediators are no ‘friends of labor’
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home