France today, us tomorrow – Oct 23

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Independent coverage of French strikes
John Lichfield, Independent
President Sarkozy vows to crush petrol blockades crippling country
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PARIS – France teetered on the edge of a complex and multi-layered crisis yesterday as petrol shortages worsened and violence by disaffected suburban youths spread and intensified.

Around 3.5 million people, according to unions – about the same or marginally fewer than last week – joined marches around the country to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to raise the retirement age to 62. One-day strikes in the public sector disrupted rail and air services but were patchily observed by workers in other sectors.

The sense of crisis threatening the country came not from these “official” protests but from spreading blockages of schools and universities by students and by continuing strikes at oil refineries and the picketing of fuel distribution depots by hardline union branches.
(20 October 2010)
The original headline is ridiculous (“France burns as strike descends into violence”), but the article is good. -BA

French lessons: pension protests
Editorial, Guardian
As the welfare state is rolled back all over Europe, a cause is being fought in France which we would do well to watch
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… Today mass protest follows decades of high unemployment – particularly for the young. In the last two years it has risen by 17% for the under-25s. The social ladder in France is broken. Little wonder that among the millions of demonstrators who have turned out against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s pension reforms – at one point one in 20 of all the people in France – tens of thousands are sixth-formers. Behind the pensions revolt is a deep fear of unemployment which will only be worsened by workers delaying retirement.

Before we in Britain scoff too quickly at the French for racing to the barricades to preserve a pension system which, to our eyes, looks generous, it is worth being clear about what is being fought over and what is not. There is a broad consensus, and has been for at least seven years, that the French pension system is bust.

… The issue is not whether this system should be reformed but how. Who is to share the pension burden? Do low-paid manual workers, women, and the disabled take an extra hit as they would under Sarkozy’s formula, or should employers and big business pay more?

… The age that matters is not 62, when retirees can start drawing their pensions, but 67, when the benefit reaches its maximum. Why should poorer workers, who have shorter life expectancies, lose a higher proportion of their retirement years? Whether you are a refinery worker from Grandpuit or a dinner lady in a Marseille primary school, this is an issue worth coming out on to the streets for. Nor should this debate be wholly alien to anyone who has been following events in Britain this week. It, too, is about fairness and social justice.

… The French are not just being French. France has a lower level of inequality than most OECD countries, and is one out of only five which saw inequality decrease over the two decades to the mid-2000s. As the basic provisions of the welfare state are being rolled back all over Europe, in the name of protecting triple-A credit ratings, a cause is being fought in France which we in Britain would do well to watch carefully. The same fight could be coming here soon.
(23 October 2010)
What is going on in France is a precursor of conflicts in the rest of the world. As the economic situation gets tight, who will shoulder the burdens: the rich or working people? There is an inevitable conflict.

To make a successful Transition, working hours need to decrease, so that people have time to build community — so that Transition is not just a hobby for retired people and students, but is within the reach of working people.
-BA

Sarkozy should retire, says France
Mark Weisbrot, Guardian
By taking to the streets to defend their pension rights from regressive cuts, the French are fighting for all our benefits

… the French have decided to take to the streets in the millions – including large-scale strikes and work stoppages – to defend hard-won retirement gains. (It must be emphasised, since the media sometimes forgets to make the distinction, that only a tiny percentage of France’s demonstrators have engaged in any kind of property damage and even fewer in violence, with all but these few protesting peacefully.) French populist rage is being directed in a positive direction – unlike in the United States where it is most prominently being mobilised to elect political candidates who will do their best to increase the suffering of working- and middle-class citizens.

I have to admit, though, that it was perplexing to watch the French elect Nicolas Sarkozy president in 2007, a man who campaigned on the idea that France had to make its economy more “efficient”, like America’s.

… [Sarkozy ]had also promised not to raise the retirement age for the public pension system. This has contributed to the mass outrage at his current proposal to raise it from 60 to 62, for those taking the reduced benefits, and from 65 to 67, for full benefits. (Under the US social security system, most people opt for the reduced benefit that is available beginning at age 62; full benefits are available, for those born after 1959, at 67.)

Once again, most of the media thinks the French are being unrealistic, and should just get with the programme like everyone else. The argument is that life expectancy is increasing, so we all have to work longer. But this is a bit like reporting half of a baseball score (or soccer, if you prefer). On the other side is the fact that productivity and GDP also increase over time, and so it is indeed possible for the French to choose to spend more years in retirement and pay for it.
(20 October 2010)

French Fury in the EU Cage: “Work Harder to Earn Less”
Diana Johnstone, CounterPunch
The French are at it again – out on strike, blocking transport, raising hell in the streets, and all that merely because the government wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. They must be crazy.

That, I suppose, is the way the current mass movement in France is seen – or at least shown – in much of the world, and above all in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Perhaps the first thing that needs to be said about the current mass strikes in France is that they are not really about “raising the retirement age from 60 to 62”. This is rather like describing the capitalist free market as a sort of lemonade stand. A propaganda simplification of very complex issues.

It allows the commentators to go crashing through open doors. After all, they observe sagely, people in other countries work until 65 or beyond, so why should the French balk at 62? The population is aging, and if the retirement age isn’t raised, the pension system will go broke paying out pensions to so many ancients.

However, the current protest movement is not about “raising the retirement age from 60 to 62”. It is about much more.

For one thing, this movement is an expression of exasperation with the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, which blatantly favors the super-rich over the majority of working people in this country. He was elected on the slogan, “Work more to earn more”, and the reality turns out to be work harder to earn less. The Labor Minister who introduced the reform, Eric Woerth, got a job for his wife on the office staff of the richest woman in France, Liliane Bettencourt, heir to the Oreal cosmetics giant, at the same time that, as budget minister, he was overlooking her massive tax evasions. While tax benefits for the rich help empty the public coffers, this government is doing what it can to tear down the whole social security system that emerged after World War II on the pretext that “we can’t afford it”.

The retirement issue is far more complex than “the age of retirement”. The legal age of retirement means the age at which one may retire. But the pension depends on the number of years worked, or to be more precise, on the number of cotisations (payments) into the joint pension scheme.
(21 October 2010)

French History Strikes Back
Robert Zaretsky, Foreign Policy
… Despite the timeliness of the protests, as Europe enters a new “age of austerity,” the images evoke a much less recent event. Next year France will mark the 75th anniversary of the raucous birth of the Popular Front government in France. The protests that gave rise to the Popular Front laid the foundations for the social contract now at stake in the current confrontation — and anticipated it in some other, more surprising ways.

In the summer of 1936, France was wracked by a series of unprecedented and largely unplanned protests against the deflationary economic policies of the conservative governments of the interwar period. Beginning in mid-May, workers in factories and stores, ports and refineries, joined the protest movement, eventually bringing the national economy to a standstill. By June, nearly 2 million French workers had either walked out of their work places or simply sat down on the job, locking out their supervisors.

French industrial workers had for a long time been caught between the terrifying prospect of being without work and the appalling reality of the jobs they held.

… From the bowels of such factories flowed the visceral resentment that found its public expression in the great waves of strikes that broke across France that summer. Just weeks before the strikes began, the Popular Front had come to power. An uneasy coalition formed by the Socialists, Radicals (who, despite their name, occupied the center of French politics), and Communists, and led by the Socialist leader Léon Blum, the Popular Front carried the immense hopes and aspirations of both urban and rural workers. In fact, the left’s electoral victory helped bring the strikes into being: The workers’ protests were meant to both celebrate and secure this new beginning.

… The Popular Front crystallized at this moment, largely forced on national leaders by voters and workers who were no less galvanized by the frailty of the Republic than by the paucity of their paychecks.

Blum’s government acted swiftly. The leagues were dissolved, and the government brokered an unprecedented agreement between unions and employers. Not only did workers secure the right to join unions and bargain collectively, but they also won the 40-hour work week and two weeks of paid vacation. Quite suddenly, the borders of France burst beyond the confines of one’s working-class neighborhood in Paris or Lille, extending as far as the mountains and coasts. For the first time in their lives, men and women could truly know their country.

Ultimately, the expectations stirred by this vast social movement in 1936 were too great a burden for any government, especially one based on so volatile and narrow an alliance. Within a year, the Popular Front had imploded, and the hope it had embodied gave way to disenchantment.

… Yet few events have greater emotional resonance with the French left today.
(21 October 2010)