PARIS, October 12 — French airline workers proved last week that they won’t take the capitalist rulers’ cuts “flying down.” In defiance of union misleaders, several hundred workers raided the Air France-KLM headquarters, broke up the Central Works Council meeting and forced the company’s top executives to flee and clamber over a chain-link fence. Two senior execs had their suit jackets and shirts ripped off their backs.
The company provoked workers’ rage by announcing it would eliminate nearly three thousand workers, including pilots, ground crew and flight attendants, and require pilots who kept their jobs to fly 100 hours a year extra with no pay. Whenever capitalist competition cuts into profits, the bosses aim to make workers pay the price.
Air France is also notoriously racist. In 2014, the company marketed their long-haul flights to Asia with an ad campaign featuring white women in yellow-face makeup. More recently, it was revealed that companies chartering planes from Air France could choose the skin color of its cabin crew personnel from a group of 1,166 workers classified as African, Caribbean, Asian, Eurasian, Indian or Western (Le Canard Enchaine, 10/7/15).
Meanwhile, most union leaders condemned the workers’ attacks on the bosses as “acts of aggression.” Pro-boss union delegates were thanked by an airline director for helping him flee the hall. These class traitors try to pacify the rank-and-file by calling one- and two-day “strikes.” About half of the dozen rival unions at Air France have called a “day of action,’ a weasel-word expression that allows “moderate” unions to ask off-duty workers to demonstrate, while more “radical” unions try to organize a walkout. The phony strike failedn—not a single flight had to be cancelled!
Air France is not alone in trying to solve the bosses’ economic problems on the workers’ backs. Lufthansa, the German airline, has had several strikes over the past two years over plans to cut jobs and base crews in countries with lower wage and working conditions. SAS and Norwegian have seen work stoppages this year over staffing and pay, while baggage handlers in Spain have struck Ryanair for months. In both France and Spain, air traffic controllers have struck over job security and wages.
Once again, the French Socialist government revealed its pro-capitalist colors by aggressively pursuing those who attacked the bosses; five workers were hauled in for questioning on October 12. After the French presidential elections next April, Air France plans to axe another five thousand jobs. The current cuts are intended to soften up workers before that knockout punch.
Airline workers need to take the throttle away from their pro-boss union leaders and wage an all-out fight against the cutbacks, and against the capitalist system that demands them.