The months of May and June 2003 saw the biggest wave of strikes and demonstrations in France since the historic general strike of May 1968. On several occasions millions of workers struck and demonstrated against the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Their demand was for the withdrawal of the Fillon Plan, a project for pension reform that would effectively put an end to the right to retire at 60 with a decent pension. At the same time teachers and other workers in education were fighting a project of decentralization, a first step towards breaking up the state education system.

Pensions Struggle

February 1 saw the first massive national demonstration against the Fillon Plan. The basic elements of the plan are that workers will have to work and make pension contributions for longer in order to be able to retire with a full pension. Workers were faced either with retiring late or trying to live off inadequate pensions. And that is where the real sting in the tail comes in. The only way to be sure of a decent pension would be to pay into a pension fund, the development of which is a basic aim of the MEDEF [France’s employers’ federation - ed.]. The result would be that those who could afford to would do so, and those who couldn’t would spend their old age in abject poverty. This two-speed society is fundamental to the neo-liberal project. What is being applied to pensions today will be applied to health tomorrow and education the day after. There will be a low quality minimum guarantee in the public sector, and if you want quality, it will be private health insurance, pension funds and school fees.

One of the most striking aspects of the May-June movement was the extent to which large numbers of people understood this. One of the catch phrases of the movement was “choice of society.” People understood what kind of society was being prepared for them and they didn’t want it.

Raffarin’s technique was to engage the union leaderships in months of futile discussions while the law was being prepared. They fell into the trap. A second big day of action was called for April 3, this time on a working day. Hundreds of thousands struck and demonstrated. In retrospect it is now quite clear that the strategy of the union leaderships was to punctuate their discussions with the government with these days of action and at the end present their members with the concessions they had been able to extract. There was no real will or strategy to force the government to back down.

Two things happened to complicate this schema. In the first place Raffarin wasn’t in the business of making concessions, and he would only have dropped his plan if he had been confronted with a full-scale general strike. Secondly the teachers strike erupted. One of the reasons was that teachers would be among those most affected by the pension reform. But even more important was their opposition to the decentralization project. Behind the innocuous-sounding term of “decentralization” was the proposal to take 110,000 non-teaching staff out of the state education system and transfer them to local authorities, who would have no obligation to allocate them to schools, opening the door to privatization of everything from cleaning to careers advice.

Teachers Strike

The eruption of the teachers strike complicated the situation. In the first place, it was completely outside of the control of the big union federations and indeed to a large extent of the main teaching union, the FSU. Secondly, the fact that one sector had come out on all-out strike acted as a focus for the most militant layers everywhere, those who would soon be pushing for a general strike.

The decentralization plan went through Parliament in March before anyone really realized what was happening. But teachers had already been mobilizing for several months. By May the movement had really taken off. It was organized by general assemblies of striking teachers and other education workers and supported by the unions, especially the FSU. It took the form of a permanent strike by a large minority punctuated by regular (once or twice a week) days of action where a big majority came out. The government was probably not expecting a reaction on this scale, but it stood its ground.

Militancy among teachers had been building up for several years. The fundamental reason is that they are at the sharp end of the social effects of unemployment, job insecurity and low pay. It is no accident that the strike was most massive in the poor neighbourhoods in and around the big cities. Once a solid base of support for the Socialist Party, teachers were seriously disillusioned by the Jospin government from 1997-2002.

A key feature of this strike was that the shock troops were young teachers between 20 and 30, in the majority women. They employed tactics such as occupations of public buildings, blocking roads, and similar actions, which was something of a break from the more traditional methods of teacher’s trade unionism. All over the country neighbourhood meetings were organized by striking teachers and parents organizations that supported them. The debates that took place on pension reform and decentralization and the coherence between the government’s different projects helped to convince the majority of public opinion (which held at over 60 percent until the end of the movement, and indeed since) to oppose the government’s measures and support the movement.

The teachers strike served as a catalyst for the rest of the movement. When the main unions called the next day of action on May 13 it was absolutely massive, with several million on strike and two million marching in demonstrations. On May 14 and 15 rail (SNCF) and Paris public transport workers (RATP) stayed out. These were sectors that everyone looked to because of the leading role they had played in the 1995 strike movement that forced the government of Alain Juppé to back down. If they had stayed out they would have been joined by other sectors. But the leadership of the main union, the CGT, pulled out all the stops to force the rail, bus and subway workers back to work, explaining that the next steps in its strategy were a big mass demonstration on Sunday May 25 and a new one day strike on June 3, letting it be understood that if the government didn’t back down, that would be the time for an all-out general strike. Meanwhile on May 15 the other main confederation, the CFDT, broke ranks, did a deal with the government and accepted the Fillon Plan in return for marginal amendments to it. But a large minority of the CFDT violently denounced their leadership and stayed in the movement.

“Interpro”

May 25 was massive and a call from the unions could still have led to a general strike, which more and more workers were demanding. Some other sectors were joining the teachers in their ongoing strike. This was particularly the case with local government workers and some state employees. After every day of action militant minorities in the SNCF and RATP stayed out, hoping to draw in other sectors. A new feature of the movement began to develop: the appearance of what were known as “interpro” (short for “interprofessional”) assemblies. Centred on the sectors that were permanently on strike, and often initiated by teachers, they also involved the other sectors, those who only came out for the big days of action. They involved both rank-and-file strike assemblies and representatives of unions. In many areas these “interpro” structures acted independently of the national union leaderships and actively pushed to extend the strike, and they sometimes succeeded. This was particularly the case in areas like Marseilles, Clermont-Ferrand (home of the Michelin tyre factories), St.Nazaire (shipbuilding) and Nantes. In these areas there were incipient regional general strikes.

Nevertheless the leaderships stubbornly refused to put their authority behind a strike call. Further massive one-day strikes took place on June 3 and 10. But the movement was in an impasse. CGT leader Bernard Thibault was booed at a mass rally in Marseilles on June 12 when he formally ruled out a call for a general strike. There was one final day of action on June 19, which was much less massive than previous ones. Nevertheless a final series of defiant demonstrations involved about 350,000, the hard core of the movement. Nothing had been gained except the cancellation on June 10 of 20,000 of the threatened job transfers in education. And the government hastily withdrew a plan for university reform when students began to mobilize.

So from the point of view of its immediate results the movement was clearly less successful than the last big strike movement in November-December 1995. Nevertheless for a number of reasons May-June 2003 was a more significant movement than 1995.

In the first place it involved larger numbers and broader sections of workers. 1995 was essentially a strike by the public sector with sympathy from the private sector but only symbolic participation. This time significant sectors of private industry came out. But not on all-out strike. In France public sector workers have strong job security and little risk of being sacked for striking. That is not the case in the private sector. Workers were not willing to take the risk of coming out on strike without solid union backing. This was true not only of the private sector but of sectors like the Post Office, where many workers are no longer public employees but work on contracts where they have no security of employment. Nevertheless many of these workers did come out on the national days of action or when local unions called them out, and they felt solidarity with those who were on strike. That and the wide support of parents and many others workers employed in small non-union workplaces is why it is appropriate to talk about “the movement of May-June” rather than just “the strike” or “strikes.” The movement was much broader than the number of workers who were on strike at any one moment.

The second noteworthy aspect of the movement was its extremely political nature. This was the case on two levels. In the first place, when Raffarin tried to discredit the movement by calling it political, the reaction of many workers was: yes, of course its political, here is a government trying to put through a political measure and we’re opposing it, that’s political. But it was also the case on a deeper level, in terms of the widespread understanding that what was involved was a “choice of society.” In this respect, the fact that two reforms were going through at once helped to make the big picture clearer, especially when privatization of electricity and gas and a reform of the health insurance system had already been announced.

This political character of the movement was denied by the union leaderships, with the exception of the small G10 Solidarity federation. Christophe Le Duigou of the CGT explicitly stated that “we don’t have the political aim of defeating the government” and insisted on the trade union dimension of the struggle. This was a thoroughly disastrous attitude when faced with a government determined to force through its measures.

Defeat and Victory

The result of the movement of May-June was a victory for the government and a defeat for the movement. But there are different degrees of victories and defeats, and there exist several criteria for judging them. First of all an objective one - by the application of measures that are adopted. There is no doubt that the Fillon Plan and the decentralization measures will have detrimental effects if they are applied. However there is also the subjective aspect. How is the defeat experienced? Is it felt as a crushing defeat that discourages future struggles, or does it on the contrary act as a spur to future battles?

In this case the outcome of the movement has not left the militants beaten, demoralized or disinclined to fight again. The feeling is that a battle has been lost, but not the war, which is in fact the case. We can say that the outcome is contradictory. In the short term, the government has won. But in winning it has probably weakened itself. The movement has activated a resistance that was always latent and that showed itself on several occasions from last October onwards. Secondly, the feeling that the government is illegitimate, that it does not have a mandate for what it is doing, has come to the surface. Thirdly the movement has mobilized and politicized a whole new generation of young workers.

Any judgement has to be tentative, to be confirmed or invalidated by future events. Those events will not be long in coming. The situation remains potentially explosive. A generalized climate of discontent and resistance is developing. Ministers have been warned by the civil servants who run the education system to expect an “indescribable” situation when schools go back in September. With the support of the main secondary school teachers union, parent and teacher representatives on school boards have been blocking the application of some of the decentralization measures.

Into this still simmering situation has come the strike of the acting profession. Traditionally not much happens on the political and industrial front in France in July and August. But that is not the case so far this year. A measure adopted by the government on June 27 makes it much harder for actors, musicians and other workers in the profession such as technicians to get unemployment payments when not working. This immediately provoked a strike that is spreading and has already caused the cancellation of many of the theatre and music festivals that take place in many towns over the summer, including two of the biggest and most prestigious ones, in Avignon and Aix-en-Provence. Very significantly, teachers and other participants in the May-June movement have been actively supporting the strike. Between that and the campaign for the release of José Bové, the press began talking about “Chirac’s rotten summer.”

As everyone looks forward to the future confrontations the question is how to win next time. There will be many repercussions from the movement. Shock waves are being felt in the unions. Massive collective walkouts from the CFDT towards other unions are on the agenda. Sharp debates will take place in the CGT over the confederation’s role in the movement. The SUD unions [SUD is a small militant and democratic union federation - ed.] will be strengthened. And the FSU, which already has some members outside education, will probably also benefit from the crisis in the CFDT. There will be a discussion on the role unions should play in future movements. One key element for the future will be to maintain and strengthen the inter-union links at local level, which were such a positive feature in May-June.

Finally, it will be necessary to address the question of building a political alternative to the traditional left. The movement has underlined the urgency of such an alternative. Both the Socialist and Communist parties formally opposed the government’s measures, the Socialist Party albeit quite hesitantly, aware that it would have done much the same in office. But neither of them played any significant role in the movement, their opposition being essentially limited to a belated and ineffectual campaign of parliamentary amendments. Although revolutionary socialist organizations, especially the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), did play an important role in the movement, none of them can claim on its own to represent an alternative. In the wake of the movement a number of appeals are circulating, seeking to promote debate and joint action on the left and to give the movement a political expression. One of the most interesting is the “Appeal for a new Anti-Capitalist Force” in Marseilles, “capital” of the May-June movement, which involves representatives of the LCR, a series of currents from a Communist Party background and trade union and community activists. Hopefully the logjam that has so far prevented the regroupment of anti-capitalist forces in France will begin to be broken in the coming months. ----