Workers stage general strike against pension cuts in France

Two major struggles are currently underway in France.

To solve its financial problems on the workers’ backs, the Sarkozy government wants to increase the retirement age and make it harder to get a full pension.

To distract attention from its attacks on workers’ gains and point the blame at some scapegoats, it is also carrying out large-scale expulsions of Romas (formerly called “Gypsies”), even though they have the right to stay in France as citizens of another European Union country. It is also deporting immigrants without papers and is revoking French citizenship from immigrants, and even people whose parents were immigrants, who have been convicted of attacking a French official.

The unions responded on Sept. 7 with the biggest general strike that France has seen since 2003, when the unions and the left defeated an earlier pension “reform” proposal.

Between 2.5 million and 3 million people marched in 220 demonstrations all throughout France. According to the CGT, a major French labor confederation, 270,000 people marched in Paris; 200,000 in Marseilles; 110,000 in Toulouse; and 35,000 in Lyons. Even more significant, a larger than normal number of workers actually filed the paperwork needed to officially strike and then walked out.

The French Constitution grants workers the right to strike, even in companies without unions. Most of the time small and medium-size companies don’t have unions to file the necessary strike notices. However, on Sept. 7 many workers at these smaller companies went out.

According to public opinion polls, about 70 percent of the people in France oppose their government’s pension proposal. They see a decent pension as a right for older workers and a way to open jobs and careers for younger workers.

According to l’Humanité, the daily newspaper of the French Communist Party (PCF), what led to this massive turnout was “the feeling of injustice, already strongly felt after the bill was introduced in June, which gained strength after the revelation of the close ties between the government and big money,” which had reached scandalous proportions.

On Sept. 4, the labor unions and various human rights groups, such as the League for Human Rights, held 137 rallies involving hundreds of thousands of people all over France to protest Sarkozy’s attacks on the Romas and foreigners. In Paris, the march was led by a group of Romas whose encampment at Choisy-le-Roi was destroyed on Aug. 12. (www.cgt.fr).

Both the LHR and the Young Communists (JC), a large youth group affiliated with the PCF, drew a close connection between the attacks on the Romas and immigrants and the attack on pensions.

The JC said, “Sarkozy reawakened Vichy,” in a speech he made laying out his program against immigrants and Romas in Grenoble. Vichy is shorthand for the fascist French government that collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and that also rounded up Romas.

Their call to the Sept. 4 and 7 demonstrations states: “Let’s thwart the trap of false divisions: all together for the retirees! But why is the right stirring up all this old rotten muck? They want to get us lost in the smoke of false divisions. It is the crisis of capitalism unleashed by the bankers and bosses which has just made our life harder. But Sarko has absolutely no desire to see the people rise up against the true thugs and begin to actively finish with capitalism.” (www.jeunes-communistes.org)