France: Unions come to Villepin's rescue

Three views of events in France
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Naima Bouteldja: Expect More Confrontations
March 24th 2006 Posted to France CPE, Analysis
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An abridged version of this article was published in the Guardian this week, however Naima Bouteldja sent the full version to http://www.libcom.org/blog.

Naima Bouteldja is a French journalist and researcher for the Transnational Institute.

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Last Saturday, an estimated 1.5 million people surged into France’s streets in protest against Dominique de Villepin’s faltering Republican government. Sparked by weeks of growing student opposition and of tear-gassed occupations and demonstrations, the current scenes have revived memories of May 1968.

France’s universities are once again centre-stage with 64 out of 84 institutions currently blockaded shut with increasing numbers of secondary schools following suit. Just as before, the main players are an angry student population, a battle-hungry police force and an unpopular Republican government. And now, like then, comes the imminent threat of a crippling general strike called by the trade union movement as workers join in the anti-government wave.

But this is perhaps where the comparisons should end. May ‘68 stemmed from an ideological rejection of conformity to French bourgeois society by its own children, and only mushroomed into a general strike following the brutal repression such opposition engendered.

Hot on the heels of last year’s ‘Non’ against the European Constitution and November’s riots, today’s uprising is more complex, its denouement far more uncertain. There is, however, no doubt that a ‘multitude’ of social forces is growing in direct opposition to both the authoritarian market society France has become and the elite that wishes to take the Thatcherite project even further.

The match that lit this latest fuse is the Contrat de Première Embauche (CPE) or ‘First Employment Contract’, an innocuous sounding law that allows employers to fire the under-26s immediately without reason during the first two years of their employment. For the government, the CPE is deemed necessary to tackle France’s chronic 10% unemployment rate, and in particular the fortunes of its under-25s for whom joblessness is more than double the national average. According to the OECD, a young French person takes on average between 8 and 11 years to find a stable job after leaving school or university, compared to an average of 5 years across other OECD countries.

Economists, however, refute the government’s claims. Michel Husson of Paris’s respected Institute of Economic and Social Research, is adamant: ‘there is simply no available evidence to suggest that higher flexibility translates itself into the net creation of long-term employment’. Even employment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, now publicly concedes that the new contract ‘will concern only a small number of new recruitments.’

Armed with such ammunition, the student protesters believe the CPE has little to do with tackling youth unemployment and is instead about further embedding the ‘flexploitation’ model among a section of society increasingly scapegoated for the ills of France’s economy and society.

As sociologist François Dubet explains, the uneasiness is more deep-seated that just job insecurity: “The widespread perception in French society is that the gulf separating those ‘inside’ society (even if when they are badly paid) from those on the outside (in particular people who live in the suburbs)” has become more accentuated over the past 20 years. The middle class student flirts perilously close to this frontier and amidst unemployment lives in increasing fear that at any moment they too may end up on the wrong side of the line. In this sense, “the anti-CPE movement is for the middle classes what last November’s riots were for the suburban youth”, whose unemployment rates of 40% in some areas finally became intolerable.

In this context, the government has attempted to play one side of France’s youth against the other, saying that the CPE is precisely designed to encourage employers to take on those from deprived areas. But France’s ghettoised youth is no one’s fool. They know that the CPE is just one part of a package of labour market and law and order measures designed to discipline the young and reverse centuries of social progress. For instance, the government has reduced the minimum legal school leaving age from I6 to 14 in order to revive its apprentice scheme and legalised night work for 15 year olds, removing a law protecting minors first introduced in 1871.

The reforms leave Antoine Germa, a history teacher in Clichy-Sous-Bois where last November’s riots began, in no doubt as to the likely impact on the young: “If you are 14 years old, poor and on the margins of society, there is now every chance that your school days are numbered. You might get 13 weeks of education a year; for the rest of the time, you will more than likely be transformed into cheap and flexible labour for employers. The CPE has thus become a symbol of protest against all policies relating to précarisation.”

Aida, a 54 year old student who came out on strike with other students from Paris Montreuil University admits: “It’s not even that I really support these young protesters but their resistance is in the interests of everyone. The degradation of their working conditions will ultimately spread to others, eventually affecting us all.”

This class consciousness explains last weekend’s huge national demonstrations in which students were joined not only by trade unionists but also many youths from the troubled banlieues who reject a political discourse that denounces young people as a burden on society, a mere ‘variable’ to be adjusted in times of crisis.

The protests are also fuelled by a sophisticated understanding of the underlying political game in play, namely de Villepin’s race with Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, for the Presidency and their party’s aim to present the electorate with ‘favourable’ short-term official statistics before the next general elections in 2007.

Through his determination to show an inflexible firmness in the face of the student uprising, mirroring Sarkozy’s handling of the November riots, de Villepin has backed himself into a corner that he may now not get out of. A recent public opinion poll revealed 68% want the government to repeal the CPE, while 63% support or have sympathy with the movement. Worryingly for de Villepin, the French press is currently sympathetic to the protests and his administration is now faced with the united might of the trade unions who agreed unanimously to hold a day of action with work stoppages, strikes and demonstrations on 28 March.

If the trade union movement doesn’t split during negotiations, the government has only two options. Either renounce the law outright, or, to save face, use the constitutional council to the law as unconstitutional and revoke it. But such a retreat will have an immediate casualty. As one government minister has warned: “If de Villepin steps back, he is finished.”

Whatever path is chosen, however, the mood of people across different sectors of French society indicates more confrontations ahead with a dramatic political change of direction a distinct possibility. As one of the many bloggers reporting from the unrest warns: ‘in 1968, the riots took on another dimension when thousands of young workers decided to go to the centre of Paris to the occupied Sorbonne – the epicentre of the 1968 revolts – to see for themselves who deserved the cobbles-stones, the police or the students. This explains the determination of the Villepin government to expel with such violence the students occupying the buildings of the Sorbonne on the 11th March. Beneath the ashes of the riots in the suburbs burn some embers and we are only in March, not May yet!”
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Comments by Alyn Gruffydd
March 25th, 2006 | 10:06 am

Naima Bouteldja`s contribution to the debate around the origins of this major conflict within French Society is correct to the extent she makes the connections between Acts I, II, and III of this political melodrama, (2002 elections, E.U. constitution referendum and “banlieues” disturbances), and to suggest that “a dramatic political change of direction in France is a distinct possibility”. But either she is pandering to a lack of political sophistication in a non French audience or she has moved a long way from the action in France and this movement of movements.
Working with people like Susan George at T.N.I. she should know that Thatcherism was the match which lit the neo liberal globalisation project. It has its heir in the U.K. with New Labour, and has been exported throughout Europe and the World. A chic intellectual on the Left Bank was recently quoted as saying “France is the last bastion against this neo-liberal globalisation.” Although that might be an inflated view of “l`Exception Culturelle” this is the crux of the current political events. Events which have provoked right wing newspaper France Soir to warn “What started as an imitation of 1968 is now looking 1000 times more dangerous”

The arithmetic of revolt is complex and almost certainly chaotic, but from high-school occupations in the “banlieues” to the creation of Free, Autonomous Universities, disruption of rail services to occupation of state tax offices, the raising of the red flag on Marseille Town Hall to potentially mortal police attacks on law abiding demonstrators, the country is alive with political creativity and state incomprehension, ineptness and repression. Couple that with an elite in the advanced stages of political narcissism, far more concerned with their personal careers than listening to the people, running a country or contributing to global progress it is no wonder we are living through what we are.

A “distinct political change of direction” is not a “mere possibility”, it is a reality being lived by many of us on a daily basis. So when we learn that a cultural icon like Sharon Stone has raised her voice to support elements of the movement, or that the Financial Times(http://news.ft.com/cms/s/7b2acc18-b949-11da-b57d-0000779e2340.html) is quoting Lenin to head off the possibility of copy cat revolts in Germany where more radical flexploitation and casualisation legislation is being planned, it must be time to ask ourselves whether the movement is becoming too predictable and credible. Even M.P.s close to the French Interior Minister are now coming out to say that Nicholas Sarkozy would be less hardline if given the top job. The abject absurdity of this peculiar game on the political spectrum being played out by our so called ruling class only helps to support the predictability thesis.

So “what should be done?”...

Here's a revolutionary Trotskyist view:
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Revolutionary Communist Internationalist http://groupecri.free.fr

The leaders of the trades unions and the « left » parties want to contain the strike of the students and high school pupils. To avoid a new defeat it is necessasry to extend the strike to the workers.
Enforce the call for a General Strike !

Despite the deepening of the student strike and its spread to thehigh-school pupils, despite the success of the demonstrations of 7, 16 and 18 of March, despite the increasingly massive opposition of the population to the CPE (68 % for its withdrawal according to surveys'), despite the widening cracks in the governing UMP, despite the obvious weakening of the Government, Villepin re-affirmed on Tuesday March 21 his determination not to give in to the students.

How to explain such a firmness? It is not due to «deafness », « autism » or « irresponsibility » on his part as some claim: He « hears » perfectly well the demands of the demonstrators, he calculates very well the determination of the striking students and the high-school pupils, but, by being inflexible, he assumes his « responsibilities » as a servant of the bourgeoisie!

If Villepin is inflexible it is because the leaders of the Trades Unions and the « Left » refuse to call for a general strike until we win.

In reality, Villepin showed his determination on Tuesday night because he is able to count on the leaders of the main trade unions, the Socialist Party (SP) the Greens and the Communist Party (PCF). The day these leaders refused to call for a general strike to defeat the CPE, or to back the students call for a national demonstration in Paris on March 23, making it clear to the government that it had nothing to fear from the unions.

While calling a new « day of action » without any further action for March 28, already ten days after the huge demonstrations of the 18, these leaders continue to use the tactics they have used since February 7. They are trying to quarantine the demonstrations, to isolate popular discontent, and divert these actions towards a hypothetical electoral victory of the « left » in 2007.

They absolutely refuse to build an unlimited general strike until the CPE is defeated, because they fear that a mass strike will get out of their control and lead to a general political crisis and destabilize French capitalism which they support (as we saw already in 1981-86, 88-93, 1997-2002...).

This tactic of the trade-union leaders and the parties of « left » has already led to many defeats. In particular that of the great movement of May-June 2003, when just as today, they refused to call for a general strike. Raffarin-Fillon did not yield to the striking teachers, whose strike lasted two months, nor to the successive "days of action" called by the trade-union leaders.

Nearly three years later, Villepin will not concede to the limited strikes of the students and high-school pupils or the threat of sporadic demonstrations, powerful they are. He is neither deaf nor blind : he simply notes, like everyone, that neither the strikes of the students and high-school pupils, nor an isolated series of demonstrations can paralyse the country.
Consequently, he gambles on using repression to weaken the movement, knowing also that the Easter Holidays approach. Why would he choose differently, so long as the trade-union leaders and the « left » parties, even the extreme left, continue to refuse to call with a general strike to defeat the government?

Even from an electoral point of view, he has no reason to yield. If he wins on the CPE, he becomes a solid candidate to win 2007, because the capitalist owners, the petty bourgeoisie, and even part of the less conscious working class, will admire his determination « to reform » the labour law by attacking our hard won conditions.

Only the unlimited general strike of the youth and the workers will defeat the goverenment. The trade union leaders must be forced to call an immediate strike!

Only a general strike, or at least the real threat of a general strike, can defeat Villepin. He will not concede short of a strike that paralyses, or threatens to paralyse, the country, by workers in the key sector-keys of the economy: transport, energy, telecommunications, large companies, and teachers, in support of the students and high-school pupils.

Combative strikers, trade unionists and trade unions everywhere, workers who have had enough of the limited "days of action" and wait for the call to the general strike to mobilize... all those who refuse to accept that the movement that has begun will end in defeat must fight together for the extension of the strike to the workers, to start with those of the public services and the large companies.

To do this, it is necessary to fight in AG and the trade unions for :

• To form flying squads to take the demand for a general assembly and a general strike to the workers in the companies and with the rank and file of the trade unions.

• To vote on motions demanding that the trade-union leaders call for an immediate general strike until the CPE us defeated. This was the main demand agreed at the national students congress in Dijon, March 19.

• To form massive delegations of students, high school pupils and workers to take these resolutions to the leadership of the trade unions, at all levels.

CRI 23 March 2006.