PARIS, April 18 — France is a country in which the Socialist government is playing its classic pro-boss role by helping them run roughshod over the working class. The Socialists are shackled to the capitalist class and its requirements. The finance capitalists want French president François Hollande to use ex-president Sarkozy’s shock-and-awe tactics to reinforce French capitalism against its imperialist rivals.
This includes by-passing Parliament with executive orders to slash pensions, government-financed health care, and welfare, as well as eliminating job protection for government workers and what remains of the 35-hour work-week.
The new french Prime Minister Manuel Valls kowtowed to the bosses, with his austerity plan: By 2017, the Socialists intend to slash 50 billion euros (69 billion USD$) from the government budget, including 21 billion euros from social security (10 billion from health care and 11 billion from welfare).
Retirement pensions, family allowances and housing benefits will all be cut in real terms, with no cost-of-living increase until October 2015, at least. Retirees will lose over 3 billion euros (4.1 billion USD$). Wages for five million government workers — without a pay increase since 2010 — will be slashed in real terms by continuing the wage freeze.
Meanwhile, unemployment, including part-timers who want to work full time, rose to 5,611,700 people — France has one-sixth the population of the U.S. — or 19.8 percent. Joblessness continues to climb, despite François Hollande’s iron-clad promise that he would “reverse the unemployment curve by the end of 2013.” Inevitably, there will be more savage attacks on the working class to meet the capitalists’ target of reducing the government budget deficit by 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
Seven rival trade union confederations have called for a day of protest on May 15. The “elastic” call preserves a façade of unity by allowing each organization to decide whether to strike, hold a work stoppage or just hold a rally. The wimpy demands and action program made it possible for even the most reactionary union confederations to support this “protest.”
While workers see their wages, pensions and health care cut, the Socialists are giving the capitalists 42 billion euros (58 billion USD$) a year in presents — 30 billion euros in lower employer social security contributions under the “responsibility pact” and 12 billion euros in lower corporate taxes.
Imperial Tobacco is laying off nearly one-third of its 1,150 workers in France. “Once again, the fat cats win out; we’re fed up,” said Christelle Notebaert, who works at the Carquefou factory. “We’re just numbers, we get no consideration…” Union steward Michel Laboureur said, “Over five years, they paid out 2.6 billion euros [3.6 billion USD$] to…shareholders. You can believe me, this factory is profitable.”
Imperial Tobacco plans to hire 130 workers in Poland, where it is shifting part of the Seita factory production (a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco.) In 2011, the average gross wage in Poland was barely one-fourth of that in France.
Pascal Lamy, former World Trade Organization chief, revealed the bosses’ plan on unemployment: “It is necessary to introduce more flexibility [i.e., make it easier to lay off workers], and jobs that are not necessarily paid at the minimum wage.” In other words, the French bosses want to introduce German-style “mini-jobs,” which have created a pool of four million precariously underpaid workers for the German bosses to exploit.
The fascist National Front (FN) is saying it would pull France out of the European Union, which they blame for the disastrous austerity policies. “We call for a radical change in economic policy by ending the euro…and true economic patriotism,” the FN proclaimed on Feb. 28, with an eye to winning workers’ votes in the May 24 European Union parliamentary elections.
But the problem is not the bosses’ European Union — it is the bosses themselves. The only solution is for workers to build a revolutionary communist party and eliminate the bosses through communist revolution, and create a society run by and for workers.