[French workers cherish their welfare state. That’s why
they’re striking. Macron’s proposed retirement reforms are latest
attempt to erode the safety net. The people are fighting back. First
anniversary of Yellow Vest uprising marks an historic moment]
[[link removed]]

FRENCH GENERAL STRIKE; ONE YEAR OF THE YELLOW VESTS IN FRANCE  
[[link removed]]

 

Cole Stangler; Richard Greeman
December 4, 2019
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ French workers cherish their welfare state. That’s why they’re
striking. Macron’s proposed retirement reforms are latest attempt to
erode the safety net. The people are fighting back. First anniversary
of Yellow Vest uprising marks an historic moment _

At present it is unclear how long the strike will last, REUTERS //
BBC

 

French Workers Cherish Their Welfare State. That’S Why They’Re
Striking  - Cole Stangler (The Guardian)
One Year of the Yellow Vests in France - Richard Greeman (The Bullet)

 

FRENCH WORKERS CHERISH THEIR WELFARE STATE. THAT’S WHY THEY’RE
STRIKING

By Cole Stangler

December 4, 2019
The Guardian
[[link removed]]

‘The people on the streets in France will carry far more wisdom than
the national assembly or the Elysée palace.’ French hospital
workers prepare to strike on 5 December against Macron’s planned
retirement reforms. 
Photograph: Eric Gaillard/Reuters  //  The Guardian
It’s shaping up to be one of France’s biggest strikes
[[link removed]] in
recent memory. Responding to calls from unions to protest against the
government’s proposed retirement reforms, an impressive swath of the
workforce plans to walk off the job tomorrow – everyone from railway
workers and truckers to judges, nurses, teachers and students.

While it has yet to introduce legislation, Emmanuel Macron’s
government has floated a proposal
[[link removed]] that
would mark the deepest overhaul of France’s pension system since its
creation in the aftermath of the second world war. This would
effectively hike the earliest age at which one can collect so-called
full retirement benefits from 62 to 64, overhaul the formula for
calculating benefits and merge the country’s 42 existing pension
schemes into a single regime – all in all, resulting in likely
benefit cuts for millions. Authorities have defended their ambitions
with the language of French republicanism, vowing to forge a
“universal system” in which everyone is treated equally. But what
they neglect to mention is that the new standard would be worse than
today’s.

Yes, Macron’s reforms would probably save money – under the
current system, authorities face a total pension deficit slated to
reach between €8bn and €17bn by 2025
[[link removed]]. But they would
also take a bludgeon to one of the best retirement systems in the
world. In France, just 7% of older people are at risk of poverty
[[link removed]].
This is the lowest rate in the European Union, much less than the 19%
in the UK and Germany. It’s also likely to be part of the reason why
France has slightly greater life expectancy than either country. A
system like this ought to be cherished and expanded, not cut.

Predictably, the French government has sought to paint opposition to
retirement reform as “corporatist” – an unhelpful backlash from
pockets of workers aiming to preserve their own advantages, along with
the usual bunch of hardline trade unionists. And indeed, the call to
strike initially came from militant railway workers with relatively
good benefits. But it has since spread elsewhere: to state
schoolteachers, hospital staffers, postal workers and employees of the
state electricity provider. Student unions and groups of _gilets
jaunes _(yellow vests) looking to re-energise their year-long protest
movement have also joined the cause. Those planning to protest appear
increasingly like a cross-section of French society, brought together
by a shared goal. A poll published on Wednesday found
[[link removed]] that
nearly six in 10 people support the strike.

Sympathy for the strike has been fuelled by frustrations over
Macron’s broader economic record. Retirement reform is only his
latest effort to chip away at the welfare state. Since taking office
in 2017, the president has also slashed unemployment benefits
[[link removed]] and
made it easier for companies to fire workers, while keeping a tight
lid on the cost of public services.

 

French president Emmanuel Macron. ‘If there is a unifying thread
behind Macronism – a vision that links these various reforms – it
is the notion that France must be made more attractive for
business.’
Photograph: POOL/Reuters  //  The Guardian
At the same time, he has replaced the country’s wealth tax – which
once applied to all those with €1.3m in assets – with a tax on
property holdings valued above that level. As the gilets jaunes
expressed in such dramatic fashion, ordinary French people are
increasingly forced to make sacrifices while the super-rich get
government handouts.

If there is a unifying thread behind Macronism – a vision that links
these various reforms – it is the notion that France must be made
more attractive for business. This has always been an obsession of the
nation’s top employers’ lobby, the Movement of the Enterprises of
France. But it’s only grown since the 1980s, when France’s
neighbours began pursuing pro-business reforms at a much brisker pace.
Regretful that they never had a Reagan or Thatcher of their own, much
of France’s commercial elite now share a sense that their country is
economically backwards: that there’s too much red tape, too many
pro-worker rules, that state spending unfairly crowds out the private
sector. The pension system is emblematic of these frustrations: where
retirees see a source of hard-won benefits, bosses and reformers see
a costly dinosaur
[[link removed]] fed
by payroll taxes.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for those who are whining. After
all, France still has the world’s sixth largest economy, and the
rich have no problem making money here. There are more than 40
billionaires
[[link removed]];
last year, France’s companies paid out
[[link removed]] more
dividends to shareholders than anywhere else in continental Europe.

But more importantly, France can boast one of the most successful
welfare states in the world. That’s a major reason why the country
has a lower poverty rate
[[link removed]] than its
often-idealised American, British and German counterparts. The safety
net also helped soften the blow of the last economic crisis, a lesson
that authorities would do well to remember as the global economy slows
down.

Protesters in France will probably be derided as unrealistic, as
stubborn defenders of an old-fashioned model in need of change.
What’s actually far more outdated in 2019 is Macron’s insistence
on chipping away at an effective and popular social welfare programme.
One need only look at the state of the countries that French business
elites look up to with such fondness. On paper, the UK and US might be
more economically competitive than France
[[link removed]], but at what cost? Can
anyone truly say that neoliberal reforms have made them better
countries to live in?

In this case, like so many others, the people on the streets in France
will carry far more wisdom than the national assembly or the Elysée
palace. The country’s welfare state is a world-class achievement
that ought to be protected, not hollowed out for savings.

_[Cole Stangler is a journalist based in Paris, writing about labor
and politics. A former staff writer at International Business Times
and In These Times, Cole has also published work in The Nation, VICE,
Dissent, and The Village Voice.]_

 

The strike is set to be the biggest in France since 1995. 
Photo: AFP  //  The Local-France

ONE YEAR OF THE YELLOW VESTS IN FRANCE

By Richard Greeman

November 20, 2019
The Bullet
[[link removed]]
 

Converge With Planned Labour Strikes

This past weekend the Yellow Vests
[[link removed]] (Gilets Jaunes)
celebrated their first birthday, with convivial barbeques on traffic
circles (roundabouts) all over France followed by direct actions like
liberating tollbooths. Although number of protestors has declined to
about 10 per cent of the estimated 400,000 who rose up a year ago on
November 17, 2018 – thanks to a year of violent police repression,
media distortion, and sheer fatigue – a surprisingly large number of
women and men throughout _la France profonde_ (“middle France”)
came out of ‘retirement’ and donned their yellow vests for “ACT
53” of the weekly Yellow Vest drama – double the previous weeks’
numbers. Recent polls indicate that 10 per cent of French people
consider themselves “Yellow Vests,” and two-thirds still support
them (although a majority wish they would go home!)

The first anniversary of the Yellow Vest uprising marks an historic
moment: perhaps the first time in history that a self-organized,
unstructured, leaderless, social movement has survived for so long.
This weekend there was much eager discussion out on the traffic
circles of the upcoming unlimited general strike called by
the Confédération Générale du Travail
[[link removed](France)] (CGT)
and other unions for December 5. Two weeks ago the Yellow Vests’
nationwide “Assembly of Assemblies” called for “convergence”
with the upcoming strike, and the leader of the CGT, who had
previously snubbed the Yellow Vests, reacted by inviting them to join.

So, after a year of lonely, increasingly dangerous, physical
resistance to the neoliberal counter-reforms of the arrogant,
unpopular “President of the rich,” suddenly new perspectives are
opening for the Yellow Vests in their unequal struggle with the
powerful, unified, increasingly authoritarian, capitalist state. (We
will turn to this enticing possibility in a moment.)

This Revolution will not be Televised

None of the above events transpired through the French mainstream
media, which as usual concentrated on two subjects: violence and
Paris. In the capital this Saturday, as happens every Saturday,
brigades of robo-cops outnumbered demonstrators and prevented them
from actually marching along routes that had been (for once!)
previously agreed upon, while a few bands of
black-clad _casseurs_ (vandals who somehow never seem to get
arrested or even shot at) managed to smash bank windows and set a
couple of cars on fire. The usual. Despite the fact, universally
recognized by sociologists, historians, and analysts, that the Yellow
Vests are unique among revolutionary movements because based in the
provinces rather than centered in Paris, you would never guess this
from French television.

Indeed, the highpoint of Channel 3’s evening coverage of the
nationwide Yellow Vest anniversary, was a woman reporter filmed
standing in front of the Arc of Triumph, with a perfectly empty Champs
Elysées in the background, going on at length about the great
achievement of the “forces of order” (as they are invariable
termed) in keeping this rich Parisian neighborhood safe by emptying
it. The next day’s top story quoted a thuggish gangster named
Costner, Macron’s Minister of Interior (police), calling the Paris
vandals “thugs and gangsters.” Nothing new.

On Sunday, Channel 5 aired a serious, well-produced, hour-long
retrospective on the Yellow Vests. The words “convergence” and
“Assembly of Assemblies” (of which there have been four) were
never spoken. Clips of Yellow Vests acting violent were shown, but no
images of another taboo subject: the government’s systematic
excessive violence against demonstrators, sharply condemned by the
Human Rights Commissions of both the UN and the European Union. No
wonder “Turn off your TV and come out to talk with us” was among
the Yellow Vests’ first slogans.

New Perspectives

Two weekends ago, the self-organized Yellow Vest movement held its
fourth nation-wide Assembly of Assemblies here in Montpellier. This
Assembly brought together 500 Yellow Vests delegated by over 200 local
groups from all over France. [1] Pulled together at the last minute
in an abandoned, futuristic Agriculture museum known as “the
Saucer” as a squat, it was a convivial event, with food supplied by
local soup-kitchens, endless small-group discussions and endless good
will, despite a certain amount of controversy around the issue of
“convergence” with the unions, of which many Yellow Vests are
suspicious, as they are of political parties.

Montpellier was chosen at the Third Assembly of Assemblies to host the
Fourth, and the local organizers, a somewhat secretive group, designed
the format so as to exclude plenary sessions and official appeals, for
example for Convergence with the unions, which many of us in
Montpellier, as elsewhere, had been working toward for months. It soon
became clear, as the results of the small-group discussions were
synthesized, that the huge majority of delegates, although openly
critical of the unions’ bureaucratic leaders, were eager to support
and ally themselves with the organized workers and to converge with
the nationwide, unlimited labour strikes that are scheduled to begin
on December 5. At the last minute, the efforts of the organizers to
limit debate were overwhelmed, and a near-unanimous Assembly voted the
following appeal:

After a year of tireless mobilization, the situation has reached a
turning point. The time has come for convergence with the world of
work and its web of thousands of union members who, like us, don’t
accept it. All the constituant sections of the people of France must
join together: peasants, retired people, the youth, artists, people
with disabilities, artisans, artists, the unemployed, temps, workers
in both the public and private sectors…

Beginning on December 5, hundreds of thousands of workers will be on
strike and meeting in general assemblies to ratify its continuation
until the satisfaction of our demands. The ADA of Montpellier calls on
the Yellow Vests to be at the heart of the movement, with their own
demands and aspirations, at their jobs or on their traffic circles
with their Yellow Vests clearly visible!

The defeat of the government’s reform of retirements would open the
way to other victories for our camp. Everyone into the street
beginning December 5, on strike, on traffic circles or in blocking
actions.

Interviewed on BFM/TV, Philippe Martinez, the leader of the CGT labour
federation, immediately declared that the Yellow Vest appeal to join
the December 5 strike movement “A very good thing.” He added,
“We have been trying for a year to find convergences, and little by
little we’re getting there. We have the same preoccupations, the
cost of living, the environment, unemployment.”

The Yellow Vest Assembly of Assemblies also voted unanimous appeals
for international solidarity with all the spontaneous, horizontal
social movements and uprisings around the globe, including Algeria
Chile, Irak, Catalonia, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Equator, Sudan, Colombia,
Haïti, and Guinée-Conakry, as well as the Syrian Kurds, while
recognizing France’s heavy responsibility as an imperialist power
and arms producer. The Yellow Vests were clearly proud and encouraged
that peoples across the world were following, as it were, in their
footsteps.

Cracks in the System

Since the Yellow Vests first rose up a year ago – in the wake of the
abject failure of organized labour to mount a credible resistance to
Macron’s steamrolling into law a series of neoliberal attacks on
public services, wages, and social services – the social crisis in
France has only deepened. The signs of cracks in the system are
everywhere, as working people organize themselves to resist. Already
there are struggles in hospital emergency rooms where patients wait
hours on stretchers in corridors and where dedicated doctors and
nurses are protesting lack of beds and lack of personnel; in schools,
where classes are overcrowded, teacher aids cut back, and
incomprehensible new programs are imposed from above, forcing students
to choose their futures at age 15; on the railroads, where for the
first time in a generation, railway workers spontaneously walked off
the job after a safety emergency without asking permission from either
management or the union; and most recently among firefighters, whose
demonstration was gassed by the police in Paris and who have now
formed an interprofessional alliance with the striking emergency room
personnel.

The straw which broke the camel’s back was Macron’s recent
unveiling of his proposed “reform” of France’s retirement system
which, like much that is positive in France, dates back to 1945 when
the French owning class was in disgrace for collaborating with the
Nazis and the Communist- and Socialist-led Resistance was still
powerful.

Macron’s pension “reform” would do away with early retirement
for workers in dangerous or arduous jobs (for example railways) and
replace today’s system, where retirement income is about 75 per cent
of your last year, to one based on “points.” Points are calculated
on the total number of weeks you worked in your life. This penalizes,
for example, workers who have been unemployed and women who have taken
time off for children. Each point would be worth a sum in Euros to be
decided by the government in power when you retire! Based on current
estimates, people would commonly lose around 30 per cent of expected
benefits under the proposed system.

In their arrogance, Macron and the financial groups he represents are
finally crossing a line which even Trump and the Republicans are
afraid to cross: cutting retirement – the last straw in their
systematic shredding of France’s (admirable) historical social
contract. They can expect trouble.

Popular anger and resentment have been building up in France since
early 2018, when Macron started pushing through his reactionary
decrees and the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 student-worker uprising
and general strike was on everyone’s mind. When the unions failed to
rise to the occasion, ordinary people were so angry and disgusted that
the pot boiled over and in November, the Yellow Vest movement burst on
the scene out of nowhere.

Far from having “achieved nothing” by refusing to negotiate, the
Yellow Vests got more out of Macron than all the unions: 1.7 billion
Euros in concessions last December including year-end bonuses, tax
breaks for the poor and rescinding of the gas tax that set the
movement in motion. When these concessions failed to stop the
movement, Macron unleashed a PR “great debate” where he did most
of the talking and doubled down on police repression, but the Yellow
Vests, whose theme song is “We are here!
[[link removed]]” are still here.

Today, French workers in almost every sector are already in motion in
advance of the planned general strike, and the issue of retirements
– along with health, education, public services – unites the whole
population against the government and the narrow financial interests
it represents. The declared goals of the Yellow Vests – Macron’s
resignation, fiscal justice, economic equality, and participatory
democracy – are frankly utopian, and when the general strike gets
going, they are unlikely to be willing to stop half way when Martinez
and the union bureaucrats decide to settle and end the strike as they
did in 1936, 1945, 1968 and 1995. New perspectives? •

ENDNOTES

* Personal disclosure: I was present as a delegate from
Montpellier’s Convergence34 group.

_[Richard Greeman has been active since 1957 in civil rights,
anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental and labour struggles in the U.S.,
Latin America, France (where he has been a longtime resident) and
Russia (where he helped found the Praxis Research and Education Center
in 1997). He maintains a blog at richardgreeman.org
[[link removed]].]_

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]