Three million French workers strike

Workers in huge numbers took to the streets on March 19 in 219 cities and towns throughout France. The unions that called this one-day strike/protest counted more than 3 million workers who participated. Many small towns and cities, where protests are rare, saw record turnouts.

Paris

The protesters want the government to protect their jobs in the face of rising unemployment and outsourcing of manufacturing. They want the money now going to banks and financial institutions to go instead for a higher minimum wage. They want high prices for housing, transportation and energy rolled back. They want the government to start bargaining around these issues.

In Marseilles, the second-largest city in France, more than 300,000 people marched—a record. Paris had at least 350,000 demonstrators. In some towns in western France, more people protested than live in the towns, as workers came from miles around to express their anger.

An unusually large proportion of the strikers were from private companies and generally do not take part in strike days. Even IBM-France, Hewlett Packard and the payroll processing company EDS had worker contingents.

Substantial numbers of train drivers, dockworkers, postal workers, teachers, university professors and students, municipal employees, car makers, oil workers, supermarket cashiers and many other professions all walked out.

The Web site of the CGT—one of the leading French trade union confederations—had a number of reports about nonunion workers in very small companies filling out the legal forms required to exercise a French worker’s constitutional right to strike.

This turnout showed a significant increase from the last one-day strike on Jan. 29. An opinion poll by BVA showed 74 percent of the French public supported this action.

The day of the protest, French president Nicolas Sarkozy went to Brussels for a meeting on the economy and avoided making any statements. François Fillon, the prime minister, stayed in Paris and stated, “I hear the protesters. Their concerns are legitimate.” But, he added, “Mobilizations will not resolve the crisis. The government has the duty to be responsible.” (Le Monde, March 20) He rejected a new stimulus plan, saying, “We have doubled the deficit this year. We cannot go beyond that.”

According to a statement of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA), Fillon is the designated voice of neoliberal rejection of any change in France’s economic policies. The head of MEDEF, France’s big-business association, and the head of the UMP, Sarkozy’s party, lead the charge while Fillon applies the final rejection.

The eight union confederations that called the strike met March 20 to plan for further actions but delayed any decision until another meeting, to be scheduled before the end of March. They want to conserve their impressive unity in the face of the government’s attempt to split them, but realize that the government has no intention of opening up any discussions on the unions’ social programs. There are also some significant contested elections for work councils, in which each union confederation runs a slate, coming up the last week of March, which will give a clearer idea about the mood of the workers and where they want to go.

May 1, a legal holiday in France, is likely under consideration for another day of action in the streets, according to some French journalists.

Olivier Besancenot, spokesperson for the NPA, responding to the question of what to do next and how to get the government to start negotiating, issued a call for an indefinite general strike, as was done in Guadeloupe.

Compared to the French Communist Party, the NPA is not a very large party on the French left. And both the CPF and the NPA are small compared to the major bourgeois parties. But Besancenot, according to a poll conducted by BVA, has as much French public opinion supporting him as supporting Sarkozy. Le Figaro, the leading conservative newspaper in France, published an interview with Besancenot March 16 in which he charged Sarkozy with having “a class-based policy,” with “celebrating an outmoded entrepreneurial capitalism” and with taking an extravagantly expensive vacation in Mexico.

The struggle in France is intensifying.