FRANCE was hit with a massive national strike last Thursday against spending cuts and austerity measures imposed by the socialist government of Francois Hollande, the hugely unpopular three-year-long austerity plan to cut public spending by 36 billion euros ($50 billion) to bring the French national budget deficit down to 3%.
Tens of thousands of workers and youth took to the streets in cities and towns across the country in a one-day strike called by five unions – CGT, FO, FSU, FA-FPT and Solidaires – in protest at the impact of austerity policies on jobs, services and the pay and conditions of public service employees.
They are also up in arms over the ‘restructuring’ that is taking place without consultation with the unions.
The demand of the unions is for a general pay increase, a moratorium on restructuring, including further increases to the retirement age and provisions to force workers in the retail sector to work on Sundays and an investment plan to boost the economy.
The call for a strike on these demands met with an overwhelming response from French workers with more than 300,000 taking part in demonstrations across the country.
More than 120,000 took to the streets in Paris with the authorities forced to close the Eiffel Tower for the first time since 2010 as employees walked out in support of the strike.
45,000 protested in Marseille, 10,000 in Bordeaux and 5,000 in Nancy and Nimes while 8,000 turned out in the southwest city of Toulouse and 4,000 in Lyon.
This call by the unions for strikes across the public sector, including teachers employed by the state, coincided with the second day of an air traffic control strike and another day in a long-running strike by workers in the publicly owned radio service, Radio France.
French air-traffic controllers, members of the SNCTA union, have been waging a lengthy series of strikes – after the last 48-hour stoppage they announced a further seven day of action from 16-18 April and from 29 April to 2 May.
The stoppages have caused chaos for the airlines, with Easyjet for one having to cancel nearly 600 flights and during the earlier action on the day of the mass strike 2,000 flights in and out of France were cancelled.
Behind the strikes is the determination of the Hollande government to drive through changes to working conditions and to raise the retirement age for air-traffic controllers from 57 to 59, a move that flies in the face of all safety considerations given the acknowledged demanding and crucial nature of their work – most EU states provide for early retirement for their air traffic controllers.
Employees at France’s public radio broadcaster, Radio France, have been on strike since the 18th March making it the longest work stoppage in the institution’s history.
The strike by technicians, ancillary staff and journalists has disrupted programmes and forced the station to replace news broadcasts with music from a ‘strike playlist’.
Again the strikes are being driven by a relentless regime of cost-cutting being insisted upon by the government aimed at getting rid of a 21.3 million euro deficit for 2015.
Under attack are the jobs of 300 employees, in addition to cost-cutting measures including merging the radio’s two symphony orchestras and two choral ensembles – moves that prompted one of the unions involved to comment, ‘Killing an orchestra is like burning books.’
What has further incensed workers is the fact that austerity has not been practiced by the management, pointing to money they say the broadcaster wasted on renovations at its iconic headquarters in western Paris.
Reconstruction of the headquarters was originally projected to be 175 million euros but is now forecast at 584 million.
Rubbing salt in the wound Radio France’s new executive was recently found to have spent 100,000 euros redecorating his private office on the building’s top floor.
The leader of FO union (Confédération Générale du Travail – Force Ouvrière), France’s third largest union, Jean-Claude Mailly, announced that the slogan for the strikes and protests was ‘Enough is enough!’
He added that: ‘The government should pay attention to what is happening today. Either it listens or it doesn’t – but it shouldn”t start complaining afterwards,’ and warned that further industrial action was on the cards if the government ignored the mass protest movement.
Phillippe Martinez, general secretary of the CGT union federation (the country’s second largest union) told French TV that ‘For months we have tried to explain to the government that it must change its economic policy because the effect of austerity is impacting on employment, public investments and wages.’
The protest however was not supported by one of France’s largest trade union federations the CFDT, which said the country’s austerity measures are far from being as bad as those imposed on the people of Greece, Spain or Ireland.
The CFDT, dominated by the Socialist Party, has close ties with the Hollande government and has been reported as even denying that there is any such thing as austerity in France.
Like the Stalinist-dominated CGT, the reformist CFDT, while professing ‘neutrality’ in the 2012 French elections, which saw Hollande sweep to power on a programme of ending austerity and ‘making the bankers pay’ for the economic crisis, gave their uncritical support to the Socialist Party campaign.
This support has not wavered since Hollande reneged on all his election pledges and is now engaged in a fight against the working class in order to slash the country’s budget deficit in line with the diktats of the eurozone and the European Central Bank.
French bankers have not noticeably been troubled by the Hollande government, generating an anger at his betrayals amongst French workers to such an extent that his approval rating in the country reached an all-time low of 13% recently (it did recover slightly on the back of the events surrounding the Charlie Hebdo attack on January, but started to fall rapidly after).
The CFDT is either denying that austerity actually exists in France – as one of their leaders is reported to have recently claimed – or saying that if it exists it is not as bad as in Greece or Ireland so doesn’t count so desperate are they to prop up the Socialist Party government.
As for the CGT, dominated by the Stalinists of the French Communist Party, they are equally desperate to keep this rising tide of anger amongst workers and youth against the government well within the bounds of one-day strikes and protests at the same time as holding out the reformist pipe dream that Hollande and the Socialist Party government can somehow be persuaded to drop austerity.
What last Thursday’s strike and mass protest, along with the determined struggle of air traffic controllers and France Radio employees, shows is that the French working class are most definitely on the move as part of the mass movement of workers across Europe against savage austerity measures imposed in a desperate attempt to bail-out a bankrupt capitalist system.
The urgent requirement is for a new revolutionary leadership to be built to lead these mass movements of workers and youth to power by calling an all-out indefinite general strike to bring down the government and go forward to a workers government and socialism as part of the European socialist revolution.
This means building sections of the Fourth International in every country.
