France: Bosses’ Austerity Hits Workers; Union Hacks Roll Over

PARIS, November 23 — The working class here is reeling as one austerity plan after another destroys social gains won through generations of bitter class struggle. But the trade union misleadership, having lost last year’s battle to save retirement pensions, is marching workers straight into another Waterloo (British defeat of the French).

On November 18, five union confederations issued a call for workers nation-wide to rally on December 13 to protest the government’s austerity plans. In the build-up to that demonstration, they’re urging workers to “question the government and elected officials” — a give-away of their election treadmill aims.

With presidential elections five months away, the union misleaders are walking a thin line. They want to organize just enough action to mobilize workers to vote for Socialist Party candidate François Hollande. But they also want to avoid any disruption of French society that might cost the Socialists the elections.

Sellouts Control Workers’ Anger

This is a mirror image of last year’s losing kid-glove approach, in which 24-hour strikes were held at six-week intervals so that workers’ anger remained controllable.

On September 7, the National Assembly adopted a 12-billion-euro austerity plan (US$16 billion), followed by a November 16 vote on a new 7-billion-euro austerity plan (US$9.3 billion), now being debated in the French Senate.

The new plan includes higher taxes for 86% of the population, cutting health and welfare benefits further and forcing people to work one year longer before retiring and until 67 for a full pension. Even subsidies to associations providing services to elementary school children are being axed.

These austerity plans are racist in that they fall most heavily on immigrant workers — most of whom are of North African or sub-Saharan African origin — and are disproportionately among the poorest workers in France

All these measures are being taken to satisfy the finance capitalists, who worry that the government will be unable to pay back the money they’ve lent it. And a third austerity plan may be in the works.

On November 8, the day following the announcement of the second austerity plan, Natixis, the corporate and investment banking arm of the BPCE group (the country’s second-biggest banking corporation) complained that the plan is based on “overly-optimistic” estimates of economic growth and reduction of government spending.

This drive to make the working class pay for the rulers’ economic crisis mirrors world capitalism’s inevitable “solution” to its problems: make the workers take the losses — “inevitable” because all these recurrent crises grow directly from all bosses’ drive for maximum profits to “stay ahead of the competition.”

The inter-imperialist rivalry for control of resources and cheap labor has had a particularly devastating effect on the billions of workers worldwide who are forced to exist on starvation wages of a dollar or two a day. Only communist revolution can end the profit-system’s horrors.

As the tailspin of the world capitalist economy continues, the old recipes of the union misleaders are being revealed for the poison that they are. Now’s the time for new communist leadership to orient workers’ struggle away from reformist electioneering and pro-boss trade unionism and towards anti-capitalist revolution.