The Struggle Against Pension Reform in France : Lessons from a Defeat

(«Proletarian»; Nr. 21; Spring-Summer 2024)

Back Sumary

 

 

Just recently there was a large-scale movement that lasted several months, fighting against the government’s “pension reform” project (in effect an attack): hundreds of thousands or even millions of people demonstrated and tens or even hundreds of thousands of people went on strike several times. Despite its magnitude, however, this movement also ended in failure once again. It is of the utmost importance to understand the causes of this failure so that we can try to remedy them if we do not want them to lead to the same result in future struggles.

 

 

In the richer capitalist countries, a more or less significant system of “social protection” was created over the decades, essentially with the aim of maintaining social peace by partially reducing the insecurity of the conditions of the proletarians. These various social benefits are not some kind of gift from the bourgeois state; they constitute what is called “social wage” or “deferred wage”: this is the fraction of the wage which the boss does not pay to his employee, but which goes into this system and is redistributed in the form of various benefits when necessary. Bosses always believe that they are paying their employees too much and are constantly trying to reduce wages; reducing deferred wage (called “social costs” in boss-speak) is a relatively simple and almost painless (in the short term) way of lowering wages. But it is a fundamentally anti-proletarian attack which must be fought as such – and not as an “anti-democratic” measure which should be fought by democratic and inter-class methods (referendum, recourse to parliamentary institutions) in the name of “social justice”; the latter is only an illusion: under capitalism, and until capitalism is overthrown, all that matters is the balance of power between the opposing classes.

The bourgeois believe that social costs are an obstacle to the successful performance of individual companies and limit their profits, and that the sums spent on them, given that they are for social purposes and not for production (“we spend an insane amount of money on minimum social benefits” – Macron, 12 June 2018), represent a handicap in international competition: by pushing down the average rate of profit of the economy, they weaken the ability to invest in other sectors. In times of crisis or economic difficulties, the bourgeois try to reduce these social costs and redirect them towards their target. And spending on pensions is an important part of these costs. That is why, almost everywhere, from China to Brazil, from Sweden to France, etc., various measures have been taken or are being prepared to attack pensions and reduce the burden of pensions on the economy, in particular by raising the retirement age: for example, in Sweden, where the new political leaders are working to gradually reduce the social protection system that has made the country a model example of a “welfare state”, the age for entitlement to a basic pension will gradually rise to 67 from 2026.

According to the report of the Comité d’Orientation des Retraites (COR; Council on Retirement Policy), September 2022, France was behind Italy in 2017 as the OECD country with the highest share of GDP devoted to pension spending (private and public): 13.9% and 16.7% respectively; while in Germany it was 11%, in Spain 11.2%, in the US 12.4%, in the UK 10.8%, etc. Such a rate is intolerable for the French bourgeoisie!

 

A BIT OF HISTORY

 

In 1983, the left-wing government of the Socialist Party and the French Communist Party approved a pension at 60 for 37.5 years of paid contributions, whereas since 1945 the retirement age has been set at 65. This was a long-standing workers’ demand, which was part of the “common government programme” in 1974; Mitterrand, in his “110 Propositions” as a socialist candidate for the 1981 presidential election, even provided for women to retire at 55, but this promise was quickly abandoned.

Since the turn to “austerity” in the same year, 1983, the administration’s target will be the overall pension at age 60, and pensions will not be indexed to inflation to reduce the burden on employers. Subsequently, we will see further attacks on pensions by governments of the left or right, in line with the “reforms” planned by the Socialist Rocard government in 1991; these have often led to large-scale combative movements; we must pause here in order to put the current movement in the right perspective.

 

- In the autumn of 1995, the newly elected government under Chirac’s presidency announced a project (known as the “Juppé Plan”) to abolish the “special pension schemes” that had hitherto been granted to certain strategic categories of workers (railways, energy, etc.), to increase the number of years of service for retirement for public sector workers (as was done for the private sector in 1993, without provoking any reaction from the unions, through the Balladur reform, which led to an average 6% reduction in pensions), in parallel with a social security reform and a “reform” of the SNCF consisting in the abolition of tens of thousands of jobs for railwaymen; this Juppé Plan was then supported by the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT) leadership and the Socialist Party. This provoked a strong response: mass demonstrations (culminating in the December demonstrations with more than 2 million participants across the country) and above all a hard strike on the railways and Parisian transports (RATP): 3 weeks of strikes with occupations of the main stations and a complete blockade of rail transport across the whole country, with massive delegations of striking railwaymen trying to involve other companies such as the Post Office, etc. The movement also affected education, energy sectors, etc. The government eventually withdrew its plan to abolish the special pension schemes and the reform of the SNCF, and the unions demanded an end to the movement, although the social security part of the plan remained intact. The striking railwaymen, who opposed the end of the movement and wanted to achieve a complete withdrawal of the “Juppé Plan”, resisted for only a few days.

 

- In the spring of 2003, the “Intersyndicale” (a “cartel” made up of the largest trade union federations), bringing together most of the unions, was formed to channel opposition to the new reform (the Fillon plan), the centrepiece of which was to increase the number of contributory years, in the form of isolated days of action (there were to be five in total), but which were attended by several hundred thousand people; during these struggles, the CFDT reached an agreement with the government and withdrew from the movement, while the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) managed to stop the strikes at the SNCF. The engine of the movement was then the public education sector, where strikes lasted several weeks, sometimes up to 3 months!!!, with many strikers calling in vain for the unions to call a general strike.

 

- In 2010, the Sarkozy-Fillon government launched its plan to definitively bury pensions at 60. The “Intersyndicale”, which brings together all the trade unions, resumed the tactic of repeated days of action: starting in March, there will be 14 of them; starting in September, well over a million people will gather several times (even according to police data); young people (especially high school students…) joined the movement en masse at that time, while the renewable strikes have spread to certain sectors (rail transport, refineries, rubbish workers, truck drivers…). However, after the vote on the law that, among other things, raised the retirement age to 62, the “Intersyndicale”, after having organised the last day of the action-funeral on Saturday (i.e. without strikes), let the strikes run out and thus put an end to the movement.

 

- In the winter of 2019–2020, a powerful movement responded to the Macron government’s pension reform plan; its driving force was the “renewable strike” in the SNCF and in Paris transport, which lasted 49 days but gradually faded and became marginal because of its isolation; unlike in 1995, there were no occupations of railway stations and pickets  were never effective, meaning that rail transport was never completely blocked; by contrast, there were real pickets at Parisian buses, but they were systematicallyy dispersed by police interventions.

The “Intersyndicale” (of which the CFDT, which more or less agreed with the government’s reform, was not a part), which allowed the strike to exhaust itself, continued to call repeated days of action (9 in total) with a significant number of participants, but which steadily declined after the first day, when almost a million protesters gathered. The driving force of the struggle this time too was the public education sector. In the end, it was the outbreak of the pandemic that put an end to the moribund movement (as well as the reform). An interesting characteristic of this movement was the presence of numerous “interprofessional” structures (which had already appeared timidly in 2010), whose tendency was to organise the struggle from below. These structures reflected the widely felt need to go beyond the limits of trade unions’ actions; we can mention the coordination between the strikers of the SNCF and the Parisian transport company RATP and the existence of “AG interpro” (General Inter-professional Assemblies) in several cities. In Toulouse, a “common AG” was set up to organise actions also on the outskirts of the city and to centralise local or sectoral AGs. However, these various structures, largely led notably by far-left groups, limited their activities to seconding the “Intersyndicale” (in Toulouse, we were told that the AG’s task was not to mobilise workers, as that is up to the unions to do so!). The “national coordination” – stillborn – only thought of putting pressure on the “Intersyndicale” to adopt more combative tactics…

 

- In 2016, the same tactics were used by the trade unions during the movement against the Valls government’s El Khomri law (or “loi travail”, i.e.  labour law), which challenged some provisions of the labour code: 10 days of action, from March to June, with renewable strikes breaking out in May by truck drivers, at the SNCF, ports and refineries. Police repression against demonstrations was particularly severe due to the state of emergency imposed after the Islamist attacks and the numerous clashes linked to the presence of the so-called Anarchist “black blocs”. The headquarters of the CFDT (which did not take part in the movement) was attacked by about a hundred masked men with the slogan “enough of treason”. The law will be passed thanks to Article 49.3 (the article allows the government to pass a law without the National Assembly voting on it).

 

- 2006: a counterexample? Contemporary protesters often refer to the example of 2006, when an already adopted law was effectively repealed under the pressure of street demonstrations. This previous phenomenon should indeed be pointed out, but it is important to remember what happened then. In response to employers’ wishes, the Villepin government set itself the goal of making workers more precarious (Parisot, then President of the employers’ union MEDEF: “Love and life are precarious, why shouldn’t work be precarious too?”). In the summer of 2005, it introduced a “new employment contract” (“contrat nouvelles embauches”, CNE), which in effect aimed at abolishing open-ended contracts, to which the trade unions responded with nothing but futile legal action. In the wake of these developments, Villepin announced in February 2006 a law against young people called the “Equality of Opportunity Act”, the centrepiece of which was the “First Employment Contract” (“contrat première embauche”, CPE), which, among other things, provided for lower pay and precarious conditions for young people under 26. Very important was the mobilisation of students and high school students against this plan, led by the “national student coordination” (more than 80 universities went on strike), accompanied by large demonstrations. The coordination demanded the revocation not only of the CPE, but of the entire law, as well as the CNE, along with other demands directed against precarious conditions, such as the regularisation of illegal immigrants, as well as other demands that were more interest-specific. In the face of this uncontrolled movement, the big trade unions stepped in; they announced days of action accompanied by mass demonstrations and thereby took control of the movement and its direction. This allowed the government, concerned about the risks to social peace – at a time when barely a few months had elapsed since the uprisings in the suburbs and when the police agencies were warning of the risk of new disturbances in working-class neighbourhoods – to declare that the conditions for the application of the CPE had not been met. The trade unions, apparently in concert, then declared an end to the movement, even though the other demands had not been met…

We can see how during all these years, the various movements of struggle that we have just recapitulated, although they were massive, always encountered the same obstacle: the sabotage of the big trade unions organisations linked to their commitment to defend social peace, and the halfway success in 2006 can be explained by the bourgeoisie’s fear of an uncontrollable escalation of social tensions. In 2023, the obstacle was the same and that fear was gone…

 

THE MOVEMENT OF 2023

 

One of the measures put forward by Macron during his election campaign was to revive the pension reform and raise the retirement age to 65; in the end, this plan will leave the age at 64. This plan will be opposed by an “Intersyndicale “ with the participation of the CFDT whose leadership wanted to profile itself as a privileged partner of the new government; during its congress in June 2022, it was ready to accept the increase in the retirement age, but had to back down in the face of strong opposition.

The Intersyndicale” will call a “day of action” on January 19 to protest against this plan. Despite the expectations of the government and the unions, the participation was massive, immediately reaching or surpassing the record numbers of 1995 and 2010 then reached in a matter of weeks or months across the country. Moreover, opposition to the plan and support for the movement was and remained very strong throughout. This forced the “Intersyndicale” to renew its tactic of repeated days of action – there will be ten – while “radicalizing” its discourse, in particular by demanding the withdrawal of the entire plan, something it did not even demand at the beginning. Under pressure from the workers, it even called for a “blockade” of the country on 7 March, without, of course, organising anything to that effect, but leaving some sectors free to launch renewable strikes if they so wished. When the police and the judiciary attacked the strikers (ordering them to return to work and dispersing pickets at the refineries), it contented itself with empty protests and legal action; it did everything possible to ensure that the demonstrations were peaceful (for which it received government congratulations), without in any way opposing the police repression of the demonstrators when that peaceful character began to be questioned. Overall, it managed the mobilisation with a view to the course of parliamentary activity, and duped the proletarians with the vision of a favourable vote by the deputies against the bill, then by the Constitutional Council, and then by the possibility of a referendum; relying on democratic illusions, it deployed all the practices of the parliamentary circus in order to avert any prospect of a real class confrontation with the government.

 

THE STRIKES

 

These “days of action” were not days of general strike (the term was never used by the unions anyway): many workers who could, took a day or half a day’s leave; but for others (in education, various administrations, etc.) they represented a real strike; in some sectors, strikes took place for several days in a row, or were even renewable strikes of longer duration. This was particularly the case for Parisian rubbish workers, refineries, employees of the ports, Parisian transport, railwaymen – sectors that traditionally show combativeness.

A few words should be said about the strikes in the energy (EDF) and gas (Engie, formerly GDF) sectors. It is a very “aristocratic” environment: good salaries, good working conditions, various benefits; EDF’s works council is the richest in France: a large enterprise in the enterprise with 5 000 employees (there are about 160 000 employees at EDF), a real and pure hotbed of opportunism. The most difficult jobs are outsourced to subcontractors who do not have the same conditions at all, wage or otherwise. One would not expect much combativeness there; yet the unions report strikes during the days of action that have a higher participation than in 2019 (more than 40% of all workers, including managers, a fact confirmed by management in mid-March); in several cities there have been cases of “wildcat” electricity cuts, actions to which the unions (of course!) do not subscribe. “If we wanted to, we could (…) make a blackout. Obviously, this is not on the agenda. We are professionals, and we know that this would have serious consequences.” (statement by a CGT-Energie union leader to Reporterre, January 2020)…

As in all such struggles for decades, it was mainly public employees (with the exception of refinery workers and, to some extent, truck drivers for some large transport companies) who mobilised; in Paris, for example, the rubbish collectors of private companies did not strike like their colleagues in the municipal companies. Moreover, in sectors of the public sphere, such as the Post Office, where there was nevertheless a certain tradition of struggle, the number of strikers was very low. Employees in the largest industrial enterprises (automobile, aerospace, steel, etc.), as well as those in small enterprises, generally remained on the fringes of the movement, although local strikes took place in various places (e.g., the nearly three-month strike by female workers at the VertBaudet textile enterprise in Lille, whose picket line was broken up by the police). This is partly explained by the fact that it is more difficult to strike in factories and private enterprises, where the “despotism of the bosses” is stronger; but also and above all by the fact that the most pressing issue for proletarians in the private and public sectors is the wage.

Prior to the outbreak of the movement, several strikes related to this issue took place in the autumn and early winter of 2022; among the most important were the work stoppage of several thousand workers at Peugeot (Stellantis), strikes at refineries and oil depots, three-week strikes at 11 of the 18 nuclear power plants (for a 200 euro a month wage increase for all), and a wildcat strike by SNCF controllers during the Christmas holidays. But the unions were, of course, careful not to put forward any blanket platform of demands in which wage increases would play a prominent role; in fact, the only demand was the repeal of the plan and then of the pensions’ law.

 

Another point worth mentioning: the relatively low number of “interprofessional” structures set up compared to 2019. It seems that many of these interprofessional AGs are nothing more than the mouthpiece of some unions (SUDs, teachers’ unions); even where this is not the case, these AGs “naturally” fit the “Intersyndicale” orientation. A so-called “network for a general strike” initiated by a Trotskyist group, which was supposed to bring together interprofessional structures in order to push the “Intersyndicale” to go in this direction (an absurd attempt), was a failure. A somewhat more detailed critique of some of the so-called “extreme left” groups will be made later. For the most part, these have been content to follow the orientation of the “Intersyndicale” and have made do with timid criticism at best; this manifestation of tailism can be explained by their ever greater integration into the trade union bureaucracy. Let’s focus on just two aspects that appeared frequently in their speeches during this movement.

 

Political crisis?

Some groups did not hesitate to talk about a political crisis (even a “pre-revolutionary” situation!) that could threaten the survival of the government or the institutions of the Fifth Republic; they pointed to the difficulties of the government in parliament, which, because it had only a relative majority, was forced to make deals with right-wing deputies (The Republicans party). It happened again this time: the bill was prepared with The Republicans in the Senate.

Some MPs of The Republicans, however, rejected the deal; in order not to risk the fiasco of a negative vote, the government decided to adopt the law without a vote (i.e., under Article 49(3) of the Constitution), to the great indignation of those who, with confidence in parliamentary institutions, had hoped for a vote against the bill and who denounced this procedure as “undemocratic”.

It must be remembered that all bourgeois constitutions are written to accommodate the executive power of the state, not to express the “sovereignty of the people”: given that “the people” is made up of several classes with different and opposing interests, this sovereignty of the people is only a fiction that serves to disguise the sovereignty of the ruling class: in fact, this crisis was, in its essence, a crisis of illusions about bourgeois democracy, illusions shared and spread even by many pseudo-revolutionaries. But these illusions, always refuted and always reappearing, have a hard root, since they are constantly fed by all bourgeois forces and institutions…

 

The myth of the general strike

In 1995, the popular slogan of the demonstrators was “All together!”; in 2006, the student coordination launched a call for a general strike; in 2003, strikers held marches with the slogan “General Strike!” etc. It is natural that proletarians, aware of their strength in numbers and potential capacity to stop the capitalist economy, seek a general strike.

On the basis of this more than legitimate aspiration, the various political groups of the “extreme left” are making the general strike a decisive weapon to enable the workers’ demands to be won. In reality, this is not the case; the success of a general strike, like any other strike, depends above all on the orientation and objectives of those who lead it: are these the real class interests of the proletarians, or are these inter-class and national, i.e. democratic, interests and objectives?

The example of May-June 1968 shows that a collaborationist union leadership is synonymous with sabotaging the struggle. It was then that the biggest general strike of the workers’ movement in France (and in Europe) took place: 8 to 10 million strikers, tens of thousands of occupied enterprises, even the smallest ones, a movement that lasted two months… and yet, its results were minimal, much worse than the strike movement of June 1936, when there were far fewer strikes; the 40-hour working week won in 1936 and abolished in preparation for the war was not reinstated in 1968; the health and social security reforms for which the trade unions called two general strikes in 1967 were not touched; the reduction of the retirement age to 60 was not achieved, etc. The wage increases achieved were absorbed by inflation a few months later. The tremendous force that had formed in the workplaces against the bosses did not translate into negotiations because the so-called “workers’ representatives”, the trade union leaders, were in fact, as good reformists, primarily defenders of the interests of French capitalism, not of the interests of the workers. And when the workers of Renault Billancourt rejected the Grenelle agreements concocted by bosses, unions and government, they could not but hope for new negotiations led by the same people that would at least marginally improve these agreements. A future general strike left in the hands of organisations sabotaging the struggles can only be a stillborn child.

 

IN CONCLUSION

 

New struggles await the workers in France and elsewhere, including those over pensions. This overview makes it possible to understand that what is decisive in the struggles is not the numbers as such, but the fact that the struggle, large or small, is conducted on the class line, that is, for the exclusive defence of proletarian interests, and with classist methods and means and therefore an independent organisation, breaking with the orientation towards a policy of collaboration between the classes of political and trade union organisations which practise class collaboration with the bourgeoisie and its state.

There is no other realistic perspective in the struggle against the capitalists and their entire system of exploitation and oppression than the general resumption of the class struggle.

 

 May, 21st 2024