Struggles in France Against the Latest Attacks on Job Security

The bourgeoisie’s demand for greater ‘flexibility’ in the rules governing individual and collective dismissals has been becoming ever more insistent during the latest economic crisis. Whilst the Anglo-Saxon world – the USA and Great Britain – has taken the leading role in this respect, the bosses in Europe are going down the same road. The Treu Law in Italy, which was voted in by ’left-wingers’ in 1997, and especially the Biagi Law in 2003, have introduced an arsenal of employment contracts ranging in duration from just a few days to a few years, and they can be instantly revoked at a moment’s notice. This is the French Bourgeoisie’s take on things: ‘France is getting left behind! You must accept short-term contracts for the good of international capital! You must work more for a lower wage for your ’right to work’, but without any right to maintain it! Let us simplify labour law, and above all the laws which protect the worker! ’Liberalism’ is the future of humanity!’

Let us take a look at the situation in France.

Since the end of the seventies, the labour market has undergone profound changes. In 1975 over 6 million people were working in the industrial sector. In 1986, after ’restructuring’ had taken place in the steel, car and textile industries, this figure dropped to 5 million and by the end of 2005 it was 4 million. There has been a massive increase in the number of women workers. Whilst the number of men in work hasn’t changed (14 million between 1980 and 2005) the figure for women has gone up from 9.6 to 12.3 million, with the newly employed having to adapt to jobs and working conditions which are more insecure. And finally, the third big change, there has been an exponential growth in the tertiary sector, from 9.5 million posts in 1975 to 16.8 million in 2003, with flexitime in the I.T., telephone services and volume retailing sectors and so on becoming the norm.

The level of unemployment continues to rise. It has gone up five-fold from the end of the seventies, from 2% of the working population in 1970 to 9.5% of it in 2006. The official figure is 2.4 million unemployed whilst the real figure, taking into account all types of unemployment, including those ’between jobs’ and those not registered unemployed, is about 4.5 to 5 million, that is up to around 17 to 19%. According to official statistics youth unemployment stands at 23% (a bit lower than Italy, which has the highest rate of youth unemployment in Europe).

For two years, same as in Italy and Germany, the French economy has been in recession. In 2005 there were 2.5 million ’Smicards’ (workers on the minimum wage of 1,000 euro) which is the highest figure for 20 years, i.e.,16.8 % of the workforce, (not including agricultural and part-time workers).

We are not going to list here all the measures taken by the French bourgeoisie as it seeks to come up with a legal framework for short-term working. In France, as elsewhere, the legal machinery is extremely complicated and often incomprehensible to the worker. The fact is that the labour legislation is slowly, but inexorably, being emptied of content: not in terms of the intricacy of the laws, certainly, but rather in terms of the effectiveness of the protection it offers to workers. Such is the situation after decades of complicit silence by the major trade unions, who have participated in each and every government manoeuvre. The mass media would have us believe that the labour legislation in France favours the workers far more than in other countries, and that the workers must therefore make concessions. They tell us that in order to fight international competition we need to help the bosses by accepting reduced wages, cut backs in social security costs and allowing less secure employment contracts so as to ease up the ’taking on’ and ’letting go’ of manpower. As though the more than 6 million hiringsand firings a year in France weren’t already enough!

Let us turn to what is happening now. What lies behind the current movement?

Whether of a right or left complexion the State, since 1974, has favoured hiring young people in compliance with the contrat emploi-solidarité, in which the providers of work are exempted from social security costs and the State pays a portion of the salaries. The last contract of this type back in 2002 was called the New Youth Contract. But lack of job security nevertheless continued apace. According to official studies the average time a young worker can expect to wait before getting full-time work is between 8 and 11 years.

But the bourgeoisie has set its sights even higher: it aspires to individual contracts for all workers, whatever their age! The Contrat à Durée Detérminée, the CDD, and the Contrat à Durée Indetérminée, the CDI, which provided the legal framework for fixed term and open-ended permanent contracts, have expired!

And so new designations appeared. The New Employment Contract, the CNE, was passed in August 2005… when everyone was on holiday! Meanwhile in France the voting in the European elections indicated a widespread rejection of the so-called liberal political economy, which has been invoked by both right and left ‘in the name of a Greater Europe’; and, incidentally, another reason why the propaganda in support of the CNE has fallen on deaf ears. A small demonstration against the CNE and against the rise in the cost of living took place in October. The new type of open-ended contract applied to businesses with less than 20 employees for workers of all ages, a contract which could be broken for no reason within the first two years. The Government said it wanted to encourage employment by introducing ’greater flexibility’ into the regulations protecting the worker against instant dismissal, making the costs of ’golden handshakes’ for workers who are ’let go’ less per business than under the CDI, and so on and so forth. The CNE, as opposed to previous subsidised contracts which cost between 5,000 to 50,000 euros per worker, costs the State nothing. As expected this CNE doesn’t encourage new applicants for jobs, rather it makes it much easier to sack those already in work according to the fluctuating requirements of the business, and without any need for further justification.

But there are still a few additional steps the Government and employers have to make before they can impose the individual contract (i.e., total insecurity) on workers. Thus prime minister Villepin’s government is simply continuing the work of previous governments. The unions, including the CFDT, faithful friend of every government and every ’reform’, has been excluded from the consultations.

A report by French economists aiming to sum up the first six months of the CNE has pointed to its ’instability’ in terms of providing new jobs (!) and proposed that in order to be more effective it needs to be extended to all businesses, of whatever size. The State has adopted this proposal, but only applied it to under 26 years old. It is called the First Employment Contract (CPE), and it is described as an ’equal opportunities contract’ (seeing that young workers have ’less opportunity’)! Poor proletarian ’young people’, the things you have to put up with!

And now we come to this February.

A certain malaise spreads through the lower classes and begins to be expressed in the typical objectives, and typical ways of achieving them, of the different strata: the proletariat, petty bourgeois, and lumpen proletariat. Young workers, currently unemployed or under-employed because of the crisis, have been betrayed and left to their own devices by the regime’s trade union organisations, which neither defend them, organise them, nor mobilise them. Those emanating from the families of the petty bourgeoisie and worker’s aristocracy find themselves ’parked’ in the colleges and universities. And it is these young workers and these ’students’ who are currently protesting against the new law on the CPE.

The university students take to the streets. The main unions and ’left-wing’ parties finally wake up: they denounce the ’institutionalisation’ of insecurity at work (even if the process has been going on for years and they have actively contributed to it). Demonstrations take place with a growing number of participants. To begin with it is young people abandoning their schools and colleges, then the workers. The Government doesn’t budge.

Monday, February 7^th: 400,000 demonstrate throughout France (218,000 according to police figures). Thursday February 23^rd: millions of young people demonstrate against the CPE in Paris, Rennes, and Toulouse as the bill goes before the Senate. Tuesday March 7^th: the unions (CGT, CFDT, FO, SUD, FSU-teachers), the UNEF student organisation, and various political parties headed by the Social Party all demonstrate in support of the workers, university, college and secondary school students. 20 out of 84 universities are blockaded for several weeks. ’Public opinion’, the press informs us, is hostile to the CPE! According to the CGT there are a million demonstrators (396, 000 according to the police), including 125,000 students in 160 towns and cities across France and 200,000 in Paris. However there is little participation from the transport sector.

The Government remains indifferent: on March 8^th the law would be put to Parliament for the final vote. Saturday, March 11th: the Sorbonne, by now occupied for three days, is evacuated by the police. More and more rectors take a stand against the CPE.

The unions reconvene on March 9^th in the headquarters of the CFDT, which has assumed leadership of the strike. The organisations taking part include the CGL, FO, CFTC, CFE-CGC, FSU, UNSA, Solidaires, Unef, student confederations, and UNL and FIDL for the secondary school students. A day of demonstrations is set for Thursday March 16^th and Saturday 18^th (with the workers’ unions insisting that it is ‘better’ to demonstrate on a Saturday than a weekday). According to the organisers, 500,000 people attend the Thursday demonstration. There are violent confrontations with the police and fights break out amongst the demonstrators themselves. Whilst the extremist ‘wreckers’ target the police, the lumpen proletariat of the ‘banlieues’, mainly young immigrants, also target the police but mainly the demonstrators. The Saturday demonstration is attended by 1,500,000 people (500,000 according to the police) 100,000 of them in Paris marching behind the union leaders and the Socialist Party. There are further confrontations with the police and a militant in the SUD trade union is badly wounded and at the time of writing is still in a coma.

Villepin still won’t budge. The unions refuse to take part in any negotiations until the law is withdrawn and threaten to call a general strike. The inter-union organisation which had been created calls for ‘a multi-sector day of action, with stoppages, strikes and demonstrations’ on March 28^th. It carefully avoids uttering those terrible words General Strike after it had been rejected… by the CFDT!

Still the Government refuses to back down. Nevertheless on March 20th Villepin receives a deputation of employers’ representatives who press for changes to a couple of the more ’prickly’ paragraphs of the new law: reasons for dismissals should be given, and the CPE should only be for one year. In fact the CPE only affects small businesses whilst the main problem for the property owning classes is rationalising labour law as whole, which it considers far too complicated, and much more favourable to the workers in France than it is in other countries.

Thursday March 23^rd: 450,000 demonstrators take to the streets (police figures: 220,000). There are violent incidents involving the ‘youth of the banlieues’ who fight with both police and demonstrators. Villepin, and the unions, are afraid the struggle will become too radicalised and that they will be sidelined by the demonstration on March 28^th. On March 24^ththere is a farcical meeting in Matignon between some of the union organisations (CGT, CFDT, FO, CFTC, CFE-CGC) which had previously ruled out negotiations until the law was annulled, and Villepin, who also met student representatives on the following day. But Villepin refuses to back down, not even on the point of the reform’s proposal to give employers the right to sack workers for no reason.

On the eve of the big day, stewards appointed by the union and student organisations to police the demonstration meet with Sarkosy, the French Home Office minister, to outline a strategy to prevent young people being attacked during the march by the ‘wreckers’: plain clothes police officers would be welcome… The main concern is to do with possible congestion. What the bourgeoisie and the official unions fear is not the anger of the ‘wreckers’ from the ‘banlieues’, which an efficient police operation could easily control, but the workers’ anger! All the unions would do was put up a feeble protest against demonstrations being hemmed in by walls of corrugated iron! But aren’t they, when it comes down to it, jailers in a certain sense?

On Tuesday March 28^th, according to the organisers, 3 million demonstrators take to the streets; that’s more even than during the December 1995 strike against the Juppé plan and the March 2003 demonstration against pension reforms. ’High spirits’, are kept severely dampened by the official stewards appointed by the unions and above all by the police. It is obvious that the workers are exasperated by a social situation in which increasing insecurity takes on more and more the aspect of poverty, pure and simple.

On the day after the demo, the parliamentary deputies of the prime minister’s party, the UMP, distance themselves from him. Villepin nevertheless presses on and calls for the law to be immediately put on the statute books. The inter-union confederation doesn’t know which way to turn. Who will change the great man’s mind! Enter Chirac, that unequivocal supporter of Law and Order!

The social struggle continues. It is not only the young workers being betrayed by means of various attacks but the whole of the working class. And the working class will only be able to defend itself effectively when it is organised as a class; both in trade unions which are worthy of the name, organised across trade categories and encompassing the different generations of workers, and, in order to maintain a clear sense of class identity and consciousness of the class’s ultimate goals, within the International Communist Party!