27.10.2010

Workers' protests continue despite pension law vote

Mass conflict is leading to broader political conclusions, reports Jean-Michel Edwin

The powerful movement of strikes, occupations and demonstrations that has shaken France for more than a month shows no sign of ending despite the national assembly vote to raise the retirement age on October 27. While the number of those mobilised has dropped since three and a half million workers took to the streets on September 23, the October 28 day of action will show that protesters are not about to capitulate.

The confrontation between the government of president Nicolas Sarkozy and the majority of the population of France over pensions and retirement began when the elected monarch decided to use his large majority in parliament to impose a new law forcing workers to work for more years. The hard-won right to retire at the age of 60 and receive a full pension at 65 has long been targeted - and the economic crisis provided the pretext for a full-scale assault.

Previous governments - both rightwing and Parti Socialiste - had already tinkered with the rules, making it impossible for workers to retire on a half-decent pension unless they had worked 160 ‘terms’ (ie, 40 years), as against the 37.5 years that previously applied. But Sarkozy and his prime minister, François Fillon, decided to go further. Under the new legislation, which will come into effect next month unless a legal challenge succeeds, workers will have to wait until they are 62 for a partial pension and 67 for a full one.

The movement of resistance has been gathering strength since the beginning of October, with thousands of workplaces hit by strikes, primarily in the public sector. Firefighters and post office, electricity, rail and refuse workers have been amongst the most militant. But the private sector has also been drawn in to a greater extent than has usually been the case over recent years - even more than in the huge strike wave of 1995. As the saying among - traditionally very militant - railworkers has it, ‘We are a locomotive - but the locomotive is no good without its wagons!’

One of those ‘wagons’, which has in fact proved to be a driving force in the current conflict, are the refinery workers, whose pickets cut off supplies from France’s fuel depots, starving between one-quarter and one-third of petrol stations of deliveries: vehicles have remained stuck where they were parked and school buses left in their depots, and the effect has been felt in every industry. While the action has stopped short of the general strike called for by most of the left, it has nevertheless proved to be a generalised and lasting mass action.

It has been given added force by the enthusiastic participation in the strike movement and street demonstrations of youth, particularly school students. While some universities have joined in, hundreds of high schools all over France have been blockaded, and their students have come out in force whenever a trade union demonstration has been called.

This has provoked complaints from rightwing politicians about extremist “manipulation” of students, who are simultaneously accused of ‘just taking an extra holiday’ rather than being on strike. Only in France, runs the complaint, would school students act in this way. After all, what has the retirement age got to do with 15-year-olds? But an extraordinary feeling of class solidarity across the generations has found its way into the youth’s consciousness: now older students have to rely much more on their parents for cash, due to the shortage of jobs in the context of lasting mass unemployment. “When the eldest retire, they leave their work free for us,” said one young comrade. “If they are made to retire later, we will have to wait even longer to find a job.”

The mass conflict, despite being focused on the specific question of retirement and pensions, is in fact leading to broader political conclusions: ‘We are fed up with Sarkozy. What will come next if he wins this fight?’ - that is the sentiment of many: not only trade union leaders, but more importantly rank-and-file workers.

There is a growing awareness that a more wide-ranging assault, on the British model, lies ahead if Sarkozy, whose popularity rating is now languishing at an all-time low of less than 30%, succeeds. Government plans include cuts of €7 billion and a general ‘austerity programme’ aimed at slashing jobs and imposing lower wages.

Sarkozy, who likes to describe himself as “the French Margaret Thatcher”, the man who will break the unions and the left, hopes the pension battle will be like the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain: an opportunity to destroy the organised strength of the working class for decades.

After having tried to seduce a number of people with his anti-Roma racist demagogy, playing in addition on widespread chauvinist and anti-European Union feelings, Sarkozy thinks he now has the opportunity to achieve a major victory for his class, two years before the next presidential election.

Meanwhile, the Parti Socialiste leaders, who concede the ‘necessity’ of pension ‘reform’ and some kind of austerity plan, suggest it would be more astute to delay the more unpopular aspects of the new law for the moment, at least until after the next elections. The changes will not come into effect until 2016 anyway, so why not leave the question until the next president is in place?

However, the real problem, which France’s working class shares with workers across the world, is the absence of a fighting proletarian party able not only to coordinate their struggles, but to lead them towards the vision of an alternative society under democratic workers’ rule. The Parti Communiste Français is now a shell of its former self, even more dependent on an alliance with the centre-left (the Socialist Party or the tiny Left Party of the former PS deputy, Jean-Luc Mélenchon) just to stay on the electoral map.

As for the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), it has lost a good number of members since its foundation in February 2009. However, its militants are certainly playing an active role in the current class battle. Olivier Besancenot, former leader of the Fourth Internationalist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and the NPA’s principal spokesperson, goes further than mobilising behind union demands and insists on a return to 37.5 years to qualify for a state pension.

NPA comrades have been active at key locations, such as the Grandpuits refinery picket line, for instance, when it was attacked by Sarkozy’s police trying to break the blockade. “This aggression against strikers is an attack against all wage-earners and the right to strike itself,” the party stated. The assault that was mounted under the pretext of “national defence” is indeed a symbol “of a war - a social war!” - the conclusion of which, the NPA says ironically, should be the “anticipated retirement of Sarkozy and Fillon themselves”.

Its October 27 statement calls on workers to prepare an “anti-capitalist alternative” to the current “completely illegitimate” regime. The present situation demands a debate “in terms of programme and power”. It is a debate “not confined to existing political organisations, but of massive interest to all those engaged in the movement” against pension ‘reform’.

If that movement does not arm itself with a programme “based on the social appropriation of the great means of production and the sharing of wealth”, its energies will end up being diverted into support for “a coalition government with the PS in 2012. So the NPA is calling for an open-ended “regroupment” uniting all those engaged in the current struggle and urging them to “find the means to debate together”.