Fightback in Germany & Austria, too
French workers to government: 'No justice? No peace!'
By G. Dunkel
Strikes and protests by hundreds of thousands
of French workers on June 10 to stop pension cuts boiled over
into clashes between police and demonstrators outside the
National Assembly and at the Opera House in Paris. The police
attacked the demonstrators with water cannons. This third
nationwide strike in a month stopped much of the public
transportation and jammed traffic.
The European Union governments agreed last year to attack
workers' benefits continent-wide, calling these cutbacks
"reforms." Currently workers are fighting back in France,
Austria and Germany.
Historically, class struggles have been sharpest and most
decisive in France, and so far the current situation is no
exception.
Teachers and school staffs have been striking in France
since early March. They want the government to withdraw its
proposals to decentralize education and to reduce pension
benefits. So far they have forced the government to promise to
put off passing the decentralization plan until September.
The struggle continues.
The government hopes that teachers will lose the sympathy
and support of parents by boycotting the standardized tests
scheduled for 626,899 finishing secondary school students this
year. Without passing these tests, known as the "bac," students
can't go on to a university.
The government has threatened to "requisition" 125,836
teachers, essentially drafting them, to give the bac. The main
education unions have called for a joint strike on June 12, the
day the bac starts. They made it clear they intended neither to
boycott nor picket the bac, though teachers might withhold
grades.
The unions have called on the government to seriously
negotiate rather than hold public-relations meetings that avoid
discussing the real issues. More than one teacher has told the
media, "We have the impression that it's we who are the barrier
to reforms aiming to remake France. If they pass, we will never
be able to go back to what we have."
Other unions have been battling the government's proposal to
redo the retirement system by making people work to a longer
age for a smaller pension. Unions held a national mobilization
June 3 that was more widespread and militant than the one on
May 13.
While the total number of protesters on the streets was
smaller than in May, they were even more combative, blocking
runways in airports and train tracks, and surrounding city
halls. They booed government ministers when they came to small
towns and forced them to hold their rallies in back yards.
Striking railroad workers calmly held a picnic in one train
station, undisturbed by any trains.
In northern France, protesters set up road blocks on traffic
circles. They only let passenger cars pass after handing them a
leaflet. They told trucks to park. When the cops arrived, they
moved on to another traffic circle.
Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT union confederation, told
the newspaper Liberation after the June 3 mobilization, "I want
there to be a multitude of initiatives gathering the maximum
number of employees. It is the only way to convince the
government" to drop its plans to overhaul the pension
system.
While French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's
government is trying to maneuver the unions into a position
where they can be crushed, as the Thatcher government did in
England, the unions are planning to continue and extend their
struggles.
Austria, Germany
One million Austrian workers, who have been relatively
passive for decades, held a one-day general strike June 3 to
oppose that government's proposal to reduce pensions. Austrian
unions had held two smaller general strikes in May.
Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel is still trying to get his
cuts through parliament in early June. They aim to cut pensions
by 10 percent, to raise the retirement age to 65 and to
eliminate early retirement, a common practice in Austria.
It could take a few years for all of Schuessel's cuts to go
into effect, but Austrian workers feel they are just the
beginning.
Schuessel got an unexpected problem on June 6, when a
faction of Austria's far-right party, for narrow political
reasons, announced it would not vote for pension reforms. They
have enough votes to keep it from passing.
Between intense pressure from the unions and the frittering
away of his right-wing coalition, Schuessel's reforms are in a
precarious state.
In Germany, unions have been struggling against the
government's attempt to force retired workers to pay more for
health-care. They held a series of rallies May 24.
The workers know that more drastic cuts, like the ones in
France and Austria, will soon follow if they allow these first
ones to pass.
In addition, a strike of 90,000 metal workers in eastern
Germany began May 30 for equal wages with their western
co-workers. According to the union IG Metall, there has now
been a partial settlement calling for a gradual phase-in of the
35-hour work week from the current 38 hours, with working hours
being reduced by an hour every two years beginning on April 1,
2005.
The agreement covers only 8,000 of the striking
steelworkers, but probably will be used as a pattern for other
settlements.
Reprinted from the June 19, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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