Peugeot Strikers Invade Socialists’ Council, Charge Betrayal

PARIS, April 13 — Fifty Peugeot strikers invaded a meeting here of 300 top Socialist Party leaders at their national council, charging the Socialist government with betrayal in not fighting the company’s plan to lay off 8,000 workers in 2014 and close the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant. Over-running the security guards, the angry workers disrupted the meeting, loudly chanting, “No factory closures, outlaw layoffs!” and “We are workers, not vandals, the bosses are vandals!”
The Socialist Prime Minister, who had just finished a speech defending the government’s austerity policies, fled the hall when he saw the workers coming.
The strike began at the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant on January 16, with the workers setting up shop inside and outside the factory. The assembly workshop has been renamed “Strike Square.”
The three-month strike has paralyzed production which used to turn out 500 cars a day. The company has kept the plant open with the hope of producing 250 cars daily with scabs, but “Today, practically no car leaves the factory,” said a 61-yar-old worker, Harfaoul, pointing to the immobile assembly line. The workers have chased after anyone who wants to help the company function, throwing bolts and emptying fire extinguishers against office windows.
The CGT union leadership is misleading the workers in appealing to the austerity-scripted government to set up a mediation process as a solution, saying, “You mustn’t leave us alone against the bosses,” with the threat that betrayed workers will vote for the openly fascist National Front.
This is the result of being trapped in the electoral process, presented with the “choice” of the Socialists, who are following an austerity policy, or the le Pen-led National Front, but with the same result. The latter is talking alliance with the right-wing Sarkozy UMP party — which lost last year’s election to the Socialists — and hoping to develop a populist appeal among workers sold out by the Socialists.
Rank-and-file workers’ direct strike action, as at Peugeot, needs communist leadership with the goal of overthrowing the job-destroying profit system rather than being diverted into depending on still another bosses’ party as the solution to the mass unemployment built into capitalism.