MAY DAY in France erupted into state-organised violence when riot police attacked workers and youth in what was a blatant attempt to crack down on the massive wave of protests against the new anti-labour legislation being debated in the French parliament today.
The 70,000 strong demonstration in Paris was progressing peacefully on Sunday afternoon when they were stopped by a huge number of anti-riot police and found themselves cordoned off.
Then the police proceeded to ‘disperse’ the mass of demonstrators using CS gas which was fired indiscriminately into the crowds according to local media reports. At least six people were, according to medical sources, hospitalised, suffering from serious injuries.
The ‘socialist’ government of Francoise Hollande, had mobilised vastly more police than usual this May Day, while in a leaked communiqué the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, called upon all police units to be ‘firm’ against protests.
The French state was determined to stamp down and intimidate a mass movement of workers and youth against the new labour laws being proposed, a movement that has been growing for over two months in opposition to laws designed to strip workers of their employment rights.
The measures voted in after the November terrorist attacks in Paris – measures that vastly extended the powers of the security forces and police in the name of the ‘war on terrorism’ – are now being used to impose on French workers the diktats of the bankers.
These laws, if passed, would tear up the legal 35-hour week that the majority of workers enjoy while at the same time abolishing the strict labour rules governing the right of employers to dismiss workers out of hand.
The capitalist class, through the banks and Eurozone leaders, are demanding the abolition of all legal protection to French workers, the introduction of zero hours contracts, and the right of bosses to sack workers and to cut pay and overtime rates as they see fit.
Wage-cutting, driving up working hours and labour casualisation is the demand being insisted upon by the Eurozone and banks in response to the economic crisis gripping French capitalism.
Unemployment in France is running at 10.2%, the second highest among the G7 leading developed economies, with massive youth unemployment of one in four under 25s out of work. This reflects an economy that is stagnant at best, as its manufacturing base struggles to reach pre-2007 crash levels, making France (the second largest economy in Europe) the ‘weakest link’ in Europe according to the financial markets.
The answer by the capitalist class is to smash employment rights, cut unemployment benefits to drive youth into work paying poverty level wages. A report by the HSBC bank stated: ‘The labour market is weighing on competitiveness and consumption, and helps to explain why the French economy is underperforming.’ The bank went on to demand: ‘Something has to happen domestically to resolve this impasse.’
French workers and young people learnt on Sunday how capitalism intends to resolve this impasse – by unleashing the para-military police against them. What is happening in France gives the lie to the claim by the TUC and Labour Party leadership that the EU represents the only way to safeguard workers rights.
While TUC leader, Francis O’Grady, was claiming in her speech to the May Day rally in London that the capitalist EU offers workers protection, the French working class was being battered and gassed on the instructions of the same EU determined to smash the rights of every single worker in Europe in order to try and save a bankrupt capitalist system.
The French working class along with the youth are rising up in a revolutionary struggle with the Hollande government, the bankers and the EU. The way forward for British workers is to join hands with this powerful movement that is erupting not just in France but across the entire continent for the revolutionary overthrown of the capitalist EU.
British workers must vote to leave the bankers and bosses EU on June 23 and unite with the working class of Europe to fight for a Socialist United States of Europe. This is the only way forward.
