What trade unionists call a “convergence of struggles” does not always come from where you might expect. Many people have been looking in the rear-view mirror of history as if the tumultuous events of May 1968 – whose anniversary we will soon be marking – could reproduce themselves 50 years later. But the events and industrial action of today are not a repeat of past protests but the potential culmination of a lengthy sequence of events.
There is, in fact, little chance that the current protests in some French universities will take on the same form as the movement of May 1968, that the current strikes will take the same form or scale as those in 1995 or that the spirit that led to a no vote in the 2005 referendum on a European Union constitution will emerge in President Emmanuel Macron's France.
But something unforeseen is happening. A spark is uniting sectors that have until now been separate, even antagonistic towards each other. Staff at a public enterprise, rail firm SNCF, at a firm that underwent privatisation in 1999, Air France, and at one of the largest private employers in France, supermarket chain Carrefour, all have similar motivations behind their different claims. Their conflicts are brought together by a common impatience, even a form of refusal. They are opposed to the effects of a policy that has been branded as self-evident for 40 years and dressed up as economics.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
- Civil service 'parasites'
Speaking to a summer conference of social democrats on August 28th, 1980, the then prime minister Raymond Barre let drop a word which has remained etched in people's memories. It was an expression that created a scandal at the time and attracted the anger of Barre's president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was worried about its impact on the eve of the 1981 presidential election. For Barre had described the country's civil servants as “privileged”.
Three months later Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House and joined the liberal crusade already begun by Margaret Thatcher, who had become prime minister in Britain in May 1979. At a time when the theme of certain politicians was that “the state is not the solution to our problems, it IS the problem”, Barre's comment was no longer the object of controversy but, quite the contrary, had become the word of the Gospel. The Gospel, that is, of Milton Friedman, the high priest of liberalism.
In the language of the Right, which had become emboldened and more and more dominant at the ballot box, the civil servant was no longer a servant of the public but a form of parasite. A number of sectors which were answerable to the state, such as banks, various industries, services and even money, were “given to the private sector” which was reputedly more efficient and cost the taxpayer less.
This ideology was applied in practice in France after 1986 under the government of conservative prime minister Jacques Chirac – the president was socialist François Mitterrand – when the then minister for the economy and finance Édouard Balladur started a series of privatisations. It continued later at different speeds, whether it was the conservatives or the socialists in government. The constant refrain that “France is impossible to reform” was followed by a sustained and irresistible drive towards “liberal reforms”.
Having arrived in power with a manifesto that promised to leave behind the “old parties of the Right and the Left”, the young Emmanuel Macron promptly repackaged this 40-year-old liberal refrain. His plans for “reform” followed one another so quickly that even the most watchful observers lost their bearings.
The current reform of the public railway company the SNCF – to be carried out mostly by official decree – is part of this frenetic reform activity and, like the others, has been rolled out in the name of adapting to the modern world, of the fight against budget deficits and the promise of a better world in which there will be fewer people out of work and jobs will be more abundant because of the greater flexibility in employment rules.
It is that approach which is being opposed and which is causing anger today, because it has become so overused. It has been repeated ad infinitum for four decades as if it were the Holy Grail of reason and efficiency, yet it has created dizzying levels of inequalities between the richest and the masses and led to ever-greater financial insecurity as well as weakening the collective security which allows citizens to live and raise their children in a minimum of peace and calm.
- Workers in 'cushy' jobs joined by 'the early risers'
You would have to be blind just to see this April's social movements simply as the final spasm of a handful of railway workers clinging on to their special status. They are certainly in the vanguard and their strength has warned the Élysée. On Tuesday April 1st the percentage of workers taking part in strike action reached 77% among conductors, an unprecedented figure. Just 12% of high-speed TGV trains ran, only 13% of inter-city trains and a mere 6% of TER regional trains, all of them unprecedented figures as well.
Yet what is really unprecedented about the current actions is how they are all “converging”. Alongside the SNCF rail company, which has been nationalised since 1938, two other major companies have been shaken by major industrial action in recent days; Air France, the privatisation of which began in 1999, and Carrefour, where 50% of workers have gone on strike and 300 stores have been affected. Carrefour's staff are not public servants but they cannot put up with the fact that their bonuses have gone down from 610 euros to 57 euros while shareholders have carved up 356 million euros in dividends between them.
So this month the people in “cushy” jobs, those in the public sector who have been routinely mocked or criticised since the 1980s, have been joined by the “committed” workers”, the “flexible” workers, the “early risers” in the private sector who have always been held up as an example to point the finger at public sector staff. They are not fighting the same fights and do not really have the same expectations, but they feel the same weariness, the same doubts and the same anger.
It is here that the French president has become personally involved in this. By launching headlong into a programme of entirely liberal reforms, even though his presidential manifesto proposed, contrary to that of the conservative candidate François Fillon, a dimension that was “liberal and at the same time social”, Emmanuel Macron has taken a risk, and one which is materialising this month. He believed that he could differentiate himself from his predecessors but he is repeating the errors made by François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy: that of having said one thing during the campaign and then done another thing in power.
Three messages that no longer hit home
Since his election in May 2018 President Macron has launched a triple message that could yet come back to smack him in the face like a boomerang: a message on “reform”, as if it goes without saying that “reform” is associated with progress; a message on “deficits” as if it is obvious that the EU demand that government spending deficits should be below 3% of GDP will automatically provide a way out of purgatory; and a message about the “privileged” - public sector workers or pensioners - as if increasing the financial insecurity of one group helps other groups.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
- Message on reform: an old refrain
Re-reading Nicolas Sarkozy's speech at Le Harve in northern France on May 29th, 2007, just after his election, one becomes struck by a sudden realisation. Emmanuel Macron's entire approach can already be found there, the terminology, the strategy and the economic policy.
One finds the same claim to represent a “new world”. Back in 2007 President Sarkozy said: “France has chosen change. It's chosen to break with the behaviour, the thinking, the ideas of the past.” Already he had become carried away with the arrogant idea of an “old world” that had been abolished and even that France had moved out of the shadows and into the light, rather as the then culture minister Jack Lang had claimed upon François Mitterrand's election in 1981.
There was the same ambition to overcome divisions. “For me convictions and ability are more important than labels. It's in that spirit that this government has been formed,” said Sarkozy. Does that remind you of anyone?
There was the same disdain for the objections that the government's political decisions might provoke. For Sarkozy all criticism was the “return of conformist thinking”; for Macron it is the “return of the old world”.
There is also same stated determination. “I won't let anyone stand in the way of the project that I took right through the presidential campaign,” declared Sarkozy in 2007. Meanwhile in 2018 President Macron said on television: “I'm doing what I said. That perhaps surprises [some], annoys others, it's perhaps a long time since that's happened.”
Above all there is the same strategy of requiring “all the reforms at the same time”. Just after his election Sarkozy explained his blitzkrieg theory in this way: “To shake off the constraints, to cut through the knots, you have to strike hard, you have to take action on every front at the same time, you have to create a knock-on effect, you need a critical mass.”
Ten years later Emmanuel Macron is also striking hard, striking quickly – by using decrees – and across all fronts: on employment law, pensions, the justice system, primary schools, universities, the unemployed, training, speed restrictions on roads, the railways, privatisations, raising the CSG supplementary tax – which helps fund the social security budget – and so on.
Sarkozy's “critical mass” became so big, so critical that it rebounded on him within a few months. No matter; far from having weighed up the consequences of that, Sarkozy's successor is imitating him by stepping up the number of measures, as if the hustle and bustle assured that he was taking action. And as if the word “reforms”, brandished like a talisman, serves as some kind of master key which has opened doors leading to other doors and so on, for the past five presidencies.
- Message on budget deficits: a hollow issue?
The fight against the budget deficit and public debt is a central part of Macron's message. It is, for example, the justification for the sacrifices demanded of certain sections of the population at the start of his presidency, such as pensioners, in the name of solidarity.
This demand for the budgetary strictness of the so-called “new” world in fact dates back, once again, to Raymond Barre and to the aftermath of the 1970s world oil crisis. The idea that the French are “living above their means” is doubtless a theme that any man or woman born at the end of the 1970s will have heard since they drank their first bottle of milk.
There has in fact been a series of “good news” on the economic front since Emmanuel Macron's election. Growth has gone up, the unemployment figures have stabilised and the budget deficit has fallen below the 3% of GDP threshold demanded by Brussels. It has been the subject of pride on the part of the new government even if that has quickly been contested by François Hollande's supporters who give the credit for the growing economy to the former president.
But that is not the issue for the French people. They do not mind who takes the credit for this return to the Maastricht economic criteria, which include that 3% deficit threshold. They instead want to know what the point of this wonderful statistic is if it means they are asked to make sacrifices. What is the point of doing better if it makes things worse for you? And when will they at last reap the benefits of this austerity?
Those are the urgent question that people are asking at the start of 2018 as pensioners, rail workers, rubbish collectors, Carrefour staff, students and Air France employees all make their voices heard.
- Message on the people in “cushy jobs” - an argument of diminishing returns
The lengthy strike planned by railway workers is dangerous for the government because it will disrupt the everyday lives of French people. To reduce the strikes' legitimacy in people's minds the government is playing the card of “fairness”. This involves singling out a section of the population and, in the name of equality between all citizens, accusing it of protecting privileges that others do not enjoy.
This campaign against people in “cushy” jobs is nothing new and its roots go back to the “old world”. It is often relentless in nature, pitting one section of the population against another.
The then prime minister Alain Juppé made use of it in 1995 when he sought to apply similar pension reforms to the public sector that his predecessor Édouard Balladur had imposed on the private sector two years earlier, by increasing the number of years a worker had to contribute to their pension scheme before getting a full pension. He came undone in the face of the railway workers. But another conservative politician François Fillon, who became prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, reworked the idea of “privileged” in relation to pensions, first in 2003 and then again in 2010 when he was premier. How could it be fair, the argument ran, that a teacher in the public sector should have an advantage that a worker in the private sector does not have?
This line of argument worked so well that it has been picked up again today. In past weeks the government has targeted the jobless, who have apparently been given too many benefits in relation to workers on minimum wage, pensioners who must agree to make “an effort” because their spending power has grown more than that of workers, and of course railway workers.
But to avoid antagonising the section of population they are targeting the 2018 government is applying a method that is as old as the hills and which was used with success by Balladur: not to remove the benefits of those who are already in post but to take them from newcomers to those jobs.
That is exactly what is being proposed by the transport minister Élisabeth Borne in relation to the current employment status of rail workers. Having underlined the privileges they enjoy and having repeated that they will keep them for themselves, the minister criticised their supposed abuse of the right to strike. Her message was that they have no reason to go on strike other than out of corporatist, collective motives.
The problem for the government is that this discourse against those in “cushy jobs” has become well-worn and wearisome to the public. This form of equality from the bottom that has been imposed on the younger generations has never achieved the social justice it claims to deliver, but instead has brought about growing inequalities and more financial insecurity.
What is even worse is that the constant attacks on the “little profiteers” in the name of “equality” has been accompanied under this government by incredible benefits for the wealthiest in society. So on the one hand we have the moral invocation of a fiercely equal society, in which no one should enjoy the slightest advantage not available to others, and on the other we have a celebration of the exponential growth in wealth of the top rung whose net benefits are beyond measure.
The time will come when such contradictions are much less accepted. If that time has arrived now then the rail workers will no longer be nuisances in people's eyes but people who “are right to defend themselves”, to use a phrase that one hears a lot in street interviews. If so the government would be forced to change its approach, and the era of decrees would have to give way to the era of concessions.
We are not there yet. Emmanuel Macron is facing a determined social movement which has been fed by years of disappointed patience, but he has not yet lost the upper hand. The successive targeting of different sections of the population, carried out in the name of national unity, has indeed created a common front of impatience but it will have to show it can endure.
A social movement, even a deep one rooted in 40 years of history, must find a political outlet to avoid running out of steam. Yet while President Macron is isolated in the face of public exasperation he is not threatened on the political front. The country's institutions protect him, the Right and far-right do not know which leader to follow and the Left is divided as never before.
So what is at stake in the following weeks is not the make-up of the government but rather its style and its power. If it goes well for Macron he will have free rein in continuing to carry out his planned reforms.
But if things go badly for him and well for the strikers then the president will have to pack up his old certitudes, consign them to history and come back down to earth. The voters will then be waiting for him at the European, regional and local elections – and also the next presidential election in 2022.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter