THOUSANDS of French workers have blocked a key highway around Paris and have stepped up strike action at oil refineries in a new massive demonstration of anger after ‘dictator’ Emmanuel Macron and his government adopted a pension cutting reform plan without a parliamentary vote.
Furious French workers have condemned Macron as a dictator. Their protests have encouraged masses of workers to block traffic on the ring road outside Paris on Friday morning, just hours after massive overnight protests saw hundreds of arrests nationwide at the hands of the riot police over Macron’s establishment of a parliamentary dictatorship.
Yesterday workers stopped production at a large refinery, with CGT representative Eric Sellini confirming that the strikers continued to deliver far less fuel than normal from several other sites. Workers have already been on a rolling strike at the northern site of TotalEnergies de Normandie.
Millions of workers are now determined to rid themselves of the Macron dictatorship after he imposed his pensions overhaul by decree without a vote in the French parliament.
The move sparked violent uprisings across the country, with police firing tear gas at some 7,000 protesters on the Place de la Concorde in Paris and arresting 310 people around France, including 258 in the capital.
Soumaya Gentet, a 51-year-old CGT union member from supermarket chain Monoprix, told reporters that she was incensed and would continue to protest until the bill was revoked. ‘They’re not taking into account what the people want,’ Gentet added.
‘Macron doesn’t give a fig about the people,’ said her colleague, Lamia Kerrouzi. ‘He doesn’t understand the language of the people. It needs to be repealed.’
Macron is determined to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, saying it is vital if the country is to avoid the collapse of the state pension system. He is threatening that if there is no raising of the pensions age then there will be no pension.
Raising the retirement age by two years and extending the pay-in period would yield an additional 17.7 billion euros ($19.18 billion) in annual pension contributions for the Treasury.
Opinion polls show that two-thirds of the French people oppose the reform and support the massive movement of workers organised by trade unions, who have unified behind their opposition and have warned they will continue their mobilisation.
The opposition warns that the reform will penalise low wage-earners and will force people who started manual jobs at lower ages to work longer. Trains, schools, public services, and ports have been halted by strikes over the last six weeks.
The movement has now spread to Germany. Strikes at four German airports led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights on Friday. The latest round of strikes on Friday, described by the German union Verdi as ‘warning strikes’, brought to a standstill airports in Dusseldorf, Cologne/Bonn, Stuttgart and Baden-Baden over pay and working conditions and resulted in the cancellation of at least 144 flights.
Dusseldorf airport said earlier in the week it was working on a ‘significantly reduced flight schedule’ from that it originally had of 368 take-offs and landings for Friday.
Earlier this week, Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg airports cancelled all commercial flights because of walkouts.
With the day-by-day soaring living costs throughout Europe, workers are demanding a hike in their wages, matching inflation, so that they can feed their families and buy daily-life necessities as inflation continues to soar. There are now uprisings of the working class taking place all over Europe with the British mass strike actions showing the way forward for the whole of the working class.
France, Britain and Spain are having a series of huge strikes impacting various sectors and services, as they continuously struggle with rising energy and food prices caused by the imperialist intervention into the Ukraine.
Several trade unions in Germany have warned of the severe consequences of soaring energy costs in the country, saying hundreds of thousands of jobs are at risk due to high electricity prices.
The German trade unions are calling for nationwide strike action against massive price inflation.
Workers all over Europe are now on the march. Many workers are demanding the scrapping of the European Union and instead going forward to a Socialist United States of Europe, with a nationalised and planned economy, replacing production for profit with production to satisfy people’s needs.
