Signs of a Hot
Spring in France
Auto producer Renault declares profits up 350%, and proposes a wage increase of 2.5 % Managers of Crédit lyonnais bank squander billions of francs of public funds, and then propose
Sooner or latter, exasperation with the bosses had to combine with a favourable political situation to produce a growth in social
International Viewpoint #265 April 1995
2,500 redundancies ! unrest. Dominique Mezzi reports.
WE ARE SEEING A SHARP INCREASE in the number of wage-based strikes in small and medium-sized enterprises, strikes to protect public service at the railway company (SNCF), the electricity utility (EDF) and the Post Office. Employees of the regional airline Air Inter have struck to protect jobs. Social movements to protest against marginalisation and exclusion in society, to house the homeless, or to protect the retirement pension are all increasingly dynamic. And the effect of all these struggles is cumulative.
The great unexpected element of this presidential campaign is that all the candidates have been placed under popular control. All of them have had to take a position on provocation" to refuse salary increases in present conditions has been seized and used against Renault boss Louis Schweitzer by his own workers.
Of course, the bosses are only trying to help the capitalist machine regain coherence and start moving forward again. The more far-sighted of them see the instability of a system which allows private companies to be highly profitable, but creates "problem parts of town" which threaten to explode.
Faced with increasing demands for increased wages and creation of jobs, the bosses slogan is 'flexibility.' "No point in improving productivity inside the plant, if
NON PRIVATISATION A LA of the strikes under way at the moment. But at the top, it took the bosses' federation to bring the leaders of the trade union federations around one table. And the result is that the CNPF sets the agenda for the meeting. The unions did not meet beforehand to discuss strategy. They certainly didn't organise any public meetings to help draw up a common list of demands. Nor did they organise any debates in the enterprises on strike.
And yet, possible areas of convergence of workers' demands exist. The CFDT trades union federation adopted the call for a 32 hour week at its congress in March. Militants in the
[Communist-dominated] CGT federation are the most pressing social The unexpected element of this presidential campaign is that all the candidates... have questions. And the dynamic of a competitive election, under had to take a position on the most pressing this pressure, has exploded the social questions. The dynamic of a
"sensible" consensus common competitive election, under this pressure, to the whole political elite throughout the 1980s.
has exploded the "sensible" consensus
We shouldn't expect that common to the whole political elite left-wing political throughout the 1980s.
consciousness will evolve as quickly as the combative spirit of working people grows, in some kind of mechanical relationship. In fact, one of the aspects of the political struggle on the right in this election is precisely to determine which of the conservative candidates can best win the trust of the people for real change. And, frankly, the
Socialist Party candidate Leonel Jospin is much less convincing than either of them.
At the same time, the business elite is struggling to prevent the mass of corruption scandals casting a shadow over the image of big business as a whole. The president of the employers' federation
(CNPF) Jean Gandois now calls on entrepreneurs to make their companies
"corporate citizens." His warning to his colleagues that it would be "a it is immediately eroded by external factors," warns CNPF representative Denis Kessler (Le Monde, 29 March 1995). Current negotiations between the bosses' federation and the main trades unions show the limits of the employers? strategy for solving the current crisis. "There will be no generalised reduction of working hours in this company" warns Arnauld Leenhard, Director of the UIMM group. Instead, he threatens to stop calculating working hours on a weekly basis. No more right to a weekend, unless it's in your [new] contract!
So the bosses more or less know what they want. What about the unions? Pressure from the rank and file has forced the unions to unite on a local level in most debating similar a proposition. And the leader of the third federation (FO) has called for a 30 hour week by the year 2000.
A second element of the new consensus is the demand for an "across the board" 1,500 FFr ($US
200) monthly salary increase for all workers. All the local trades union representatives in companies on strike have had to adopt this slogan, spontaneously produced by workers in the various enterprises.
But despite all this, we still lack a common project, a list of inalienable social rights and demands for the transformation of society. Such a project is the only way to give the various anti-capitalist struggles a coherence, and to orient them against the right.
*
This article formed the 30 March 1995 editorial of the
French weekly Rouge (2 rue Richard Lenoir, 93108
Montreuil-sous-Bois, France, fax 48 70 42 22
France: presidental elections