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Take away the right to withdraw labour and you rob working people of one of only two available responses to employers with little to learn from Victorian coalowners. But is the right always used responsibly and with concern for the other working people who are invariably the chief casualties of the effects? Tricky issues arise, This is my latest column for The Connexion, a monthly newspaper for English speakers in France ...
Imagine a France without pesky trade unions intent on causing maximum disruption to public services and industry.
Travel by trains, aircraft, buses and boats would no longer depend on the whim of strike-happy staff. Schools would never close because teachers were displeased by government policy or some aspect of their terms and conditions.
There would be none of those other mouvements sociaux, a curious phrase when applied to entirely unsociable interruptions to movement of any kind.
But don’t let the imagination stop there.
In this strike-free, born-again version of France, there would also be wholesale trampling of workers’ rights, casual abuses by employers and poverty-level wages for downtrodden citizens.
Some sort of happy medium, between anarchic militancy and the subjugation of ordinary people, is what civilised societies strive to attain. But the aim is elusive and France is bedevilled by repeated social unrest, strikes spilling over into street protest, some of it violent.
Every single-interest group feels entitled to go beyond its own sphere of activity to ensure all-round inconvenience. So many people have grievances that the country could easily be reduced to a permanent state of standstill as each strike or blockade succeeds the last.
There is even a website cestlagreve.fr - as in “it’s the strike” - dedicated to month-by-month listings of all the industrial action planned by French unions and information on any settlement of disputes. Handy dropdown lists allow readers to check the diary for each region and sector.
For some reason, October is seen as a good time to strike. The site reminds us that on October 8, five days after the latest one-day national stoppage by GPs and specialists opposed to health reforms, three unions - CGT, FSU et Solidaires – are calling on all members to stage a general strike, again lasting 24 hours.
A glance at the September diary shows a hearty appetite for post-rentrée agitation, with stoppages begun or continued on each of the first 14 days of the month in transport, education, hospitals and factories.
And since farmers also unite as organised labour, we should include their mass demonstrations, accompanied by the usual disruptive tactics and low-level hooliganism. Not that French strikers would accept that they behave like hooligans when doing things that would see them thrown in jail in many countries. They are simply exercising their republican right to riot. After redundancy-threatened MyFerryLink workers, who actually had reason to be angry, mutinied on board ship, closed the motorway with burning tyres and blocked the Channel Tunnel, an English journalist mentioned the lack of accountability to their leader, Eric Vercoutre.
“Happily,” Vercoutre replied, unable to avoid laughter, “we just happen to be more of a democracy.”
The problem with the “French model”, as politicians of both left and right call it, is that while it gives employees protection on a scale British workers can only envy, it stifles economic advance and investment and makes bosses unwilling to hire.
And to return to that cestlagreve website, it seems a fair bet it will have no need for details of how the grievances of October 8 strikers are met. The shopping list is long and fanciful, from higher wages and pensions, shorter hours and improved conditions to ecologically sound investment to stimulate the economy and an expansion of public services.
I am sure officials compiled it with straight faces but cannot help thinking back to pre-Thatcher years in Britain when the satirical magazine Private Eye highlighted yet another train strike – yes, they still happen long after Thatcher - with a front cover depicting railwaymen as walking out in support of a claim for eternal life.
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