RAGING CLASS BATTLES SCARE FRENCH BOSSES
By G. Dunkel
On March 12 and again on March 17, students and workers
throughout France held large protests demanding the end to
the sub-minimum wage the government has decreed for youth.
The March 12 demonstrations were called by the CGT, one of
the major trade union confederations in France, and student
groups affiliated with the French Communist Party.
The actions on March 17 were supported by all the French
union confederations, as well as all major student and youth
groups and unemployed organizations.
In total over 230,000 participated in the March 17 protests.
Some 50,000 marched in Paris, 20,000 in Lyons, 10,000 in
Marseilles, 15,000 in Bordeaux and 25,000 in Lille. There
were actions in small cities and towns as well--4,000 in
Bayonne, 1,000 in Auch, 1,000 in Vesoul, 2,000 in Le Havre
and 4,000 in St. Nazaire. And all this on a Thursday.
(Figures from French wire services)
Some 250,000 people had marched on March 12.
TWO-TIER ATTACK ON YOUTH
What the French government wants to do is pay people up to
the age of 26--with a post-secondary degree--$800 a month.
However, those with "fewer qualifications," can be paid as
little as $300 a month. The unions saw this as an attack on
the wages of every worker, especially since France now has
an official 12 percent unemployment rate.
The bosses want to replace older, high-wage workers with
younger super-exploited ones. As one home-made sign at one
of the March actions put it, "Dad, I've found a job, it's
yours."
In a number of cities, there were police attacks as the
demonstrations broke up. In Lyons, the second largest city
in France after Paris, 6,000 people--mainly students and
unemployed--came out March 18 to protest police attacks on
the 20,000 people who demonstrated the day before.
This second demonstration was also broken up by tear-gas and
baton charges, according to the March 20/21 Le Monde.
Some of the more militant demonstrators have come from the
predominantly Third World and poor suburbs--where large
numbers of immigrants from West and North Africa and their
children live.
Especially in the suburbs of Paris, there have been a number
of local, anti-racist protests in the past few weeks over
rising police brutality against North Africans.
DEMANDING 'A RIGHT TO A JOB'
On March 17, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur published an
open letter to the demonstrators announcing that his
government would "modify" the decree to answer some of the
"objections the unions have raised."
Most of the unions responded that they wanted the decreed
"annulled," not "dressed up differently." (Le Monde, March
20/21).
While the youth sub-minimum wage was the main focus of all
these demonstrations, the lead banner of the March 17 union
contingent--which united all the French trade unions for the
first time since 1962--explained why they were marching.
The banner read: "For the right to a job, for our living
standard, no to the five-year labor law." The five-year
labor law allows the government to issue decrees setting
national policy on employment, wages and other labor
matters.
In Lyons, the demonstrators compared the sub-minimum wage to
slavery. In Bordeaux, where there were large contingents of
parents and teachers, they made it clear the wage was a
"wage of misery."
The main chant in Lille was "It's not necessary to lower
salaries, it's necessary to change this society."
(L'Humanite, March 18)
The class struggle in France is reaching explosive
proportions. Late in 1993, when the government tried to cut
5,000 Air France workers out of their jobs, the workers
virtually shut down the airport and engaged the police in
battles on the runways. The government cried uncle and the
workers have their jobs for now.
The Balladur regime also gave in to French fishers, who in
February protested a government threat to lower subsidies to
the fisheries.
When the fishers were tear-gassed, they replied with flares
from distress pistols, fought off baton charges with iron
bars and wrecked a plant processing imported fish--all
captured and shown on French television.
In Nantes, a major seaport in the west of France, the
students adopted similar militant tactics. After a thousand
demonstrators went to police headquarters to demand the
release of 14 protesters, they occupied the train station.
At the same time, 1,000 students at Angers, a city between
Paris and Nantes, blocked the main auto route between the
two cities.
-30-
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint
granted
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