France

Victory to the Rail Workers!

PARIS, April 10—Strike action by rail workers resumed this week with the second of two-day rolling strikes called by the four main French rail unions. Union leaders denounced the latest round of negotiations with the government as a “masquerade” and announced that they were ready to broaden their action. The cheminots (rail workers) have pledged to defeat President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to submit the state-owned rail company, SNCF, to competition beginning in 2019, a big step toward privatization, in accordance with a European Union (EU) directive. Macron’s attacks would put an end to rail workers’ statut (special status)—hard-won rights offering a level of job protection, decent retirement and pay.

This strike action is not only about defending rail workers. At meetings and protests across the country, angry rail workers rightly state that their battle is also to defend all public workers, whose contracts will be next in the firing line if the rail workers don’t prevail. They insist that theirs is a long-overdue fight to win back some dignity for their class following years of austerity, humiliation and daily abuse from the bosses and the capitalist government.

The Ligue trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), has distributed a March 25 leaflet calling for “Victory to the Rail Workers Strike! No to the Destruction of the Statut!” at strike meetings and demonstrations. The leaflet explains that the rail workers should fight to extend the statut and unionization to all workers in the industry, including those in the many jobs that have been outsourced or placed on temporary-hire status—repair work, cleaning, catering, etc. These jobs are disproportionately held by immigrant workers, who are barred from employment in the public sector. No to the exclusion of foreign workers! Our perspective is for one industry, one union—with a class-struggle leadership!

Aiming to make French capitalism more competitive, the bourgeoisie has accelerated its war on the trade unions. The 2016 El Khomri law (instigated by “socialist” president François Hollande and his then economics minister Macron) and Macron’s “ordonnances” (government decrees) from six months ago target unions’ collective bargaining powers. The ex-banker Macron sees himself as the French Margaret Thatcher. He calculates that by prevailing over the rail unions, he can go on to strangle the trade-union movement for years to come, making job insecurity the rule for the working class as a whole—not just for its most oppressed layers. But for the past 30 years, the rail unions have played a central role in the major class battles against the capitalists’ offensive. Their hard-fought struggles, supported by other sectors, paralyzed the country and brought about the defeat of the Jacques Chirac and Alain Juppé governments in 1986 and 1995.

Air France has also been hit by industrial action. After a years-long pay freeze, workers led by the pilots are demanding a 6 percent pay raise after the bosses granted themselves a major salary increase coming off bloated profit reports. Emboldened by the rail workers, other working people—in hospitals, schools, garbage collection and transport—are carrying out localized strike actions.

In another attack, the government in February pushed through a new law that will significantly bar university access to children of the working class. Increasing numbers of teaching staff are announcing their refusal to collaborate with the new student selection process. Campus occupations by protesting students are being met by increasingly heavy police repression and a resurgence of attacks by fascists. In late March when students at Montpellier University occupied the law faculty, a band of armed masked fascists, in collaboration with the faculty’s dean, raided the amphitheater and assaulted students. In the weeks since, similar attacks and provocations have taken place in other cities. The fascists’ ultimate objective is the destruction of the organizations of the workers movement—from the trade unions to the left—and racial genocide. The task at hand is the mobilization of the working class, which has the social power and the collective organization to drive the fascists back into their holes.

The EU directive introducing competition in passenger rail transport clearly demonstrates the nature of this reactionary bloc, which is designed to increase European imperialists’ competitiveness against their U.S. and Japanese rivals. The ICL has always opposed the EU and its euro currency, a financial instrument used by German and also French imperialism to plunder and subjugate the economically weaker member states. The EU and euro are also weapons against workers in the imperialist countries, wielded to destroy past gains and break the trade unions. Down with the EU and its directives! For a Socialist United States of Europe!

For its part, the French union bureaucracy is pro-EU. Steeped in class collaboration, the union tops accept the need to make French capitalism more competitive, notably against its German rival, with chauvinist campaigns to “Produce in France.” The ICL fights to get rid of the EU by means of the class struggle. This perspective requires a proletarian leadership committed to revolutionary internationalism—i.e., a revolutionary multiethnic workers party.

Striking French rail workers need to build solidarity and collaboration with trade unions in other countries. The French rail bosses sought to use maintenance and engineering workers from the Leyton depot in East London to work at the Landy technicenter in Saint-Denis in France. In response, the British RMT rail union distributed a statement at the depot opposing the scab operation. The defeat of Macron at the hands of the rail strikers would weaken the anti-worker, anti-Greek, anti-Catalan EU. It would also embolden other workers facing similar assaults, including in Britain, where isolated rail strikes persist against privatized companies, run in some cases in partnership with French and German rail companies. In Germany, tens of thousands of public sector workers, including in transport and at airports, struck for a pay raise on April 10 after years of austerity and outsourcing.

As the French strikes continue, the capitalist state’s cops and courts, aided by the bosses’ media mouthpieces, will mobilize in even greater force to try and break the rail unions’ crucial fight. As the LTF wrote in its leaflet:

“While capitalism endures, any serious reform can be obtained only by relentless struggle by the working class, and is highly reversible as soon as the relationship of forces improves for the capitalists. It has been more than 100 years since capitalism entered into a period of decay, in which the productive forces have ceased to grow and have even rotted. The standard of living of the working class continues to deteriorate, while the objective conditions exist to create an egalitarian socialist society of abundance. But for that, there is only one way: to struggle for the overthrow of capitalism through socialist revolution and its international extension. To achieve this, as demonstrated by the Russian Revolution, what is necessary is a revolutionary leadership of the working class, a vanguard Leninist party. That is what we fight for.”