PARIS, June 16 — Tens of thousands of railroad workers are striking the government-owned railroads against a proposed law that would split the system into three public companies. It would open the railroads to private company competition in accordance with a 1991 European Union (EU) deregulation directive 91/440.
The workers refuse to bow down to an EU globalization plan laid down for all countries in the EU: turning public-service railroads into for-profit railroads. The workers know that this is a capitalist scheme to push through a race to the bottom, channeling everyone into the worst possible working conditions and wages existing in the most backward countries in the EU.
The Socialist government is introducing legislation to do this in France. Already the French national budget for 2014 includes an austerity plan to eliminate 2,500 jobs.
The system is drowning under a 40-billion euro debt (US $55 billion) incurred when the high-speed rail system was developed in the 1980s. The EU’s destruction of public sector monopolies in passenger and freight transport, scheduled for 2019, will lead to creeping privatization. The government officially plans to stabilize the public railroad company’s debt, but reducing the debt to allow the public company to compete with private railroad companies will depend on even more job cuts and the worsening of working conditions. The bosses want to “save the system” on the workers’ backs, axing their jobs and throwing safety out the window.
As one 30-year veteran locomotive driver said, “I’ll tell you what I see from my cab. Management talks to us about safety, but it’s the high-speed train that is clipping the branches off the trees! We sounded the alarm a dozen times and the hierarchy plays dead. We’re fed up with bailing out a company that is taking on water” (Liberation newspaper, 6/15).
A TV report recounting the “comfort” of train drivers disgusted him. “Come and see… It seems we have bucket seats and a micro-wave oven! But we don’t even have toilets!”
The unions that called the strike are not challenging the EU dictum that the rail network has to be opened up to private company competition. They’re not challenging the fact that the capitalists are using the EU to make these so-called reforms obligatory. They’re just advocating a different reform that would be less unfavorable to the workers, to maintain reunification of the whole rail system. Nor are they organizing for a Europe-wide working-class unity, building ties with rail workers in Germany, Britain and Italy to oppose these pro-capitalist reforms.
The walkout began on June 10. Every 24 hours workers across France hold local general assemblies and vote on continuing the strike. The workers are demanding that the government postpone introducing legislation (scheduled for June 17) in the French National Assembly and that the government rewrite the law to suit them. Workers have blocked tracks in a number of cities and the rank and file appears to be highly mobilized, ahead of the union leadership and intent on broadening the strike. Only the largest and third-largest of the six rail unions are striking, with possibly half of the 250,000 rail workers participating.
The workers are caught between a public-sector rail company that answers to a bosses’ government which does not have to represent the workers’ or riders’ interest and a bosses’ plan to have private companies run the industry with even greater ability to oppress the workers. The union leaders do not challenge the capitalist system that presents these “choices” to the workers but rather look to the crumbs of a reform that would be “less unfavorable” to the workers.
There is no communist leadership to advocate a real alternative, a system run by and for the workers, with no bosses, profits or reliance on a bosses’ government. That is the only answer to the problems these strikers and all workers face. The organization of a communist party must become the future for these workers and the whole working class.