The law is a stick-up !

Weekend Update: After and Before the March 7 Mobilisation

“Tax the investors not the grandmothers.” (It rhymes in French.) Laurence in Nice on Tuesday for the mobilisation. (Photo Cyril Bottollier-Lemallaz, ActuNice)

“We’re not slowing down. This is the emblematic reform of Macronism.” Gilles le Gendre, former leader of Macron’s party in the National Assembly

"We gave the President of the Republic and the government three weeks to react, and all we got were a few cookies in response. It's very worrying that the executive branch is not responding to a social movement of this magnitude." François Hommeril, president of the CFE-CGC unions

“Cette loi est un véritable hold-up!” Laurance, Nice, Tuesday 7 March. (‘This law is a real hold-up!’)

A demographic of participation in Tuesday’s demonstrations in France, courtesy Visactu and la Depeche.

Some two million people participated in Tuesday’s national mobilisation, and not just in the capital: 30,000 in Nice, 245,000 in Marseille, Grenoble 25,000+, Paris 80 or 90,000 – all bigger turnouts than demonstrations at the end of January and more widely distributed across the country. (Numbers are a compromise between organiser’s and police figures.) Smaller cities were well represented, too : 12,000 in Tarbes, 7,000 in Auch, 25,000 in Perpignan, 16,000 in Pau, 23,000 in Bayonne, and so on, as readers can see from the map above.

If numbers leave you cold, consider the following : more demonstrations are planned, while striking workers continue to block fuel getting in or out of oil and gas refineries. The country inches closer to the standstill brought on by the miner’s strike in 1963: at some point, Macron, like De Gaulle before him, will have to respond, although it goes against his nature. (He prefers to float high above the Elysée where only McKinsey & Co. have a direct line.) So far, the president’s men have made no bones about their willingness to use Executive Order 49,3, which allows him to override the National Assembly, if that august body refuses to approve Macron’s plan. (It becomes law if the Assembly doesn’t have the backbone to vote him down after he invokes the measure.) A move like that is essentially an act of war when the issue is the nation’s retirement funds.  

Readers of the English or American press labor under an illusion, not exactly shocking given sources of information like the New York Times. The liberal Guardian in the UK made it clear in their header: More than 1.2 million march in France over plan to raise pension age to 64. That sets the reader up for a narrative in which lazy, socialist Gauls can’t cut the slack. The retirement age is the one of the changes debated but it’s only the tip of the iceberg, which is the conversion of people’s retirement into a kind of market index, not entirely unlike Bush II’s attempt to make Social Security savings available to Wall Street.

Even the Guardian admits that based on current projections, the French pension system will return to the black side of the ledger by 2030. Those are the current projections. It’s all projections. People are living into their nineties now, while many are working longer. We’ll be past the Baby Boomer Bump soon enough. Does that mean that the system is bound to go bankrupt or that with more people paying in for longer periods, scare tactics are being employed ? France has a high tax rate – slightly more threatening than Eisenhower’s – but real money finds innumerable clandestine routes over borders to Switzerland and the tax havens. What contributions do businesses and the wealthy make to France’s pensions ? An unexplored angle. Macron simply hasn’t made the case for the necessity of his plan. He hasn’t really tried.

Which way next ? Strikers at the refineries have promised to keep up the blockade for at least the next ten days. If they pull it off, France faces the prospect of running out of fuel. It’s too soon to tell. As one of the staffer’s in a small Alliance Française in a town deep in Slovakia said to me the other day, ‘We’ve been here before.” He mimed pulling a paving stone out of the street as he said it.

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Prologues Past & Present-Future

Pas de Calais, March 1963

Exactly 60 years ago on March 1, 1963, three of France’s unions, the CGT, Force Ouvrière and the CFTC ( Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens) sent the country’s 200,000 miners out on strike. Their principal demand was an 11% raise in salaries, the figure being calculated to keep pace with inflation. Miners, then working 48 hours per week, also demanded a reduction in job time.

95% of pit workers joined the strike, as did 60% of those who worked above ground. Good news for the labor leaders, who had long hesitated to launch a movement they’d been discussing for months. The winter of 1962 had been particularly brutal. Benoît Frachon, secretary general of CGT from 1945 to ’67, convinced the miners that the goal was to win the the country’s hearts and minds. It looked like a horrible tactical move to deprive France of coal when temperatures hovered below freezing for 40 days straight.

Above all, the miners remembered the tragic failure of the strikes in ’48 : nothing achieved, six dead, hundreds of miners condemned to jail, thousands of lay-offs, which meant housing, provided by the employer, lost. Miners participating in the strike were only pardoned in 2016.

De Gaulle united the miners by ordering them back to work on the March 4, a holiday in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, where 120,000 workers lived and worked.

At that point, everyone’s eyes turned towards the extremely conservative mining valleys of the Lorraine: legislative elections in November ’62 gave De Gaulle a solid parliamentary majority, with the Gaullist candidate racking up 59% of the miner’s votes in Forbach in the Moselle. Communists and other left wing candidates barely managed to crack 10%.

Surprising everyone, miners in Lorraine refused to obey De Gaulle’s back-to-work order. A national shock. For the first time in his career, the General faced insubordination.

“Where’s the money, Charlot ?”

With things spinning out of hand, the Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, took to the airwaves a few days later. Using his patented smooth delivery, he spoke of ‘a misunderstanding,’ denying the order was an attack on the right to strike, saying that he completely understood miners’ concerns, but insisting that they were obligated, “less legally than morally, not to deny the country their services at the moment when they are most required.” Pompidou’s moral imperative gambit fell flat. He was mocked.

The strike spread quickly, without violent incidents: Saint-Etienne, Merlebach, Forbach, Grenoble, Alès, Aubagne and Lens, the coal capital in the North, saw demonstrations with huge numbers, miners joined by their wives. “No pay raise, no coal,” they chanted. “Let Pompidou work in the mines,” they yelled at the former banker turned politician, and, going a step further, mocked the President by invoking the memory of Chaplin’s little tramp, always short of cash: “Charlot, des sous!” Little Charlie, it’s money we’re talking about. One can only imagine how De Gaulle reacted when he heard that.

“Presidents, Ministers, Wise Men, if you want to talk about our salaries, then do our job.” March, 1963.

Coal production was soon at a standstill. Security forces were the only personnel in the mines. Engineers joined with the miners, making the strike unprecedented in the extremely hierarchical world of the mine. There were collections throughout the country, while humanitarian contributions came from outside France, over a million Francs en toto, which allowed the miners to hang on.    

Gaullist power, unchallenged since the end of the war in Algeria in 1962, teetered, finding itself forced to negotiate. A Commission of Experts (the so-called Sages) was appointed. The Commission offered a salary rise of 8%, far above the government’s previous offer, so that even as the miners continued to exert pressure, resolution of differences seemed possible. 80,000 miners marched in Lens on March 29. The country was a standstill. After 48 hours around the table, an agreement was signed between the three labor organizations and the heads of the French coal industry. 

Parallels with and lessons for the present abound, not least that sustained popular pressure forces power to listen in a way that single demonstrations don’t. Macron, like his predecessor, wants to keep his hands clean and stay out of the melée, a habit wired in to Fifth Republic’s DNA, where the Prime Minister handles the dirty work of governing. In the first instance, the oily banker Pompidou, at present, Elisabeth Borne, who has the air of a beleaguered school teacher with too many folders clasped to her chest. This government does not negotiate. It set aside its proposals for pension reform during COVID but reintroduced them unchanged last year after the pandemic’s retreat. Macron asserts that his 2022 election victory gives him the mandate to impose the hotly-contested changes to the system. Nonsense : he sneaked in to a second term because his opponent was once again the hapless heir of the rightwing La Pen dynasty. No one endorsed his doomsday scenarios or his retirement plan, with its bizarre system of retirement payouts indexed to market performance. Retirement at 62, ballyhooed by the English and American press as a way to portray the French as pampered children, is worth fighting for but isn’t the issue which enrages people and gets them into the street. That would be the long-game, never-flagging quest of Big Finance and business to get their hands on the nation’s savings, contributions made from the labor of many lifetimes.

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Like many “so-called” journalists in France and elsewhere, I’ve collected a small mountain of material on McKinsey, the American public relations firm whose close contacts and contracts with Macron’s administration are outrageous and almost wholly undiscussed outside of small French investigative sites.

My articles on tax evasion are on Counterpunch, Substack, and Medium. The original Invisible Money series on Ground Report seems to have gone with the wind into the cool ether of cyberspace.

I’m indebted to Mediapart, France Sun-Ouest and La Depeche for data and some of the text on the 1963 miner’s strike. Thanks to Cyril Bottollier-Lemallaz at ActuNice for the image at the head.