The French strikes
Bornstein, Stephen & Tixier, Pierre-Eric
From late November 1995 until a few days before Christmas, the workers of France's public sector occupied center stage. They brought buses and subways in French cities to a halt, cut rail...
...as France—like other European societies— becomes leaner and meaner, large numbers of public employees and their families have begun to lose a grip on many of the certainties 18 • DISSENT Politics Abroad around which their lives used to pivot...
...Finally, the strikes of 1995 featured a very narrow set of issues—pensions, health care, job security—when compared to the broad-gauged attacks on the foundations of capitalist society that emerged in 1968...
...France seems today just as prone to crisis, as vulnerable to instability, and, possibly, as open to fundamental transformation as it was shown to be by the "events" of May-June 1968...
...It is a lesson that may prove relevant well beyond the boundaries of France...
...Nonetheless, the end of the summit brought the end of the strikes...
...as public services are curtailed or privatized...
...huge demonstrations of strikers, students and their supporters week after week, not just in Paris but all across the country...
...The private sector remained entirely untouched...
...For many observers, both in France and abroad, this was May '68 all over again...
...Even if there is no substantial resumption of unrest this spring, however, the strikes have already revealed something very instructive about contemporary France...
...the thruways and roads in the country's main cities throttled by unprecedented gridlock...
...Observers of French industrial relations agree that the grievances that provoked the 1995 strikes have not been eliminated and that French workplaces, in both public and private sectors, remain ripe for further outbreaks of protest and disruption...
...Not another May, then...
...As various pundits put it, "The mountain had labored and brought forth a mouse...
...And yet, the ultimate results of the strikes were surprisingly meager...
...the smallest, weakest, most fragmented, and most politicized trade unions in the developed world...
...They brought buses and subways in French cities to a halt, cut rail traffic to a trickle, slowed the flow of cars, of the mails and of electricity, organized monster demonstrations twice or more every week, and finally forced Prime Minister Alain Juppé to call a "Social Summit" to deal with their grievances...
...Within a day or two, France had pretty much returned to normal...
...Even within the public sector, the strikes remained largely confined to a few branches with very little impact on other key areas that had played such a central role in 1968—nationalized industries, the airlines and airports, the civil service, the health system, the social services network, and the like...
...a hypertrophied and paternalistic state...
...Elites in France, and elsewhere in Europe, may have been ignoring, at their own peril, the advice of Jacques Delors, who, during his final term as president of the European Commission repeatedly warned that, for the forces of market integration and rationalization to work effectively, their impact has to be tempered by a "social dimension" that takes human consequences into consideration...
...an underdeveloped system of collective bargaining and social conflict regulation—all still pertain today, and they go a long way toward explaining how the 1995 strikes emerged, expanded, and persisted...
...The strikes emerged from the efforts of railway workers and other public servants to defend their jobs, their career expectations, their health care, and their retirement plans from rationalization and privatization schemes developed as part of the response of French policy makers to the twin challenges of globalization and European unification...
...We think there may prove to be...
...The Chirac-Juppe team that looked so solidly installed at the dual helms of the French ship of state may be in for more rough seas ahead...
...The 1995 strikes affected much less French economic activity than did the great 1968 "events...
...Many of the features that contributed to the eruption of the 1968 crisis—highly centralized patterns of authority in political, economic, and social institutions...
...France is still an imperfectly developed and imperfectly integrated capitalist society at the heart of late capitalist Europe...
...That such massive, lengthy, and popular strikes could have developed around these sorts ofjob-security, public-service, and welfare-state issues suggests that some of the central structures of the European mixed economy may well prove more resistant than previously expected to the winds of neoliberalism blowing from Bonn, Washington, and London...
...When compared not only to the lengthy list of concessions, commitments, and promises that union leaders brought out of the "Grenelle Summit" in 1968, but even to the limited demands of the 1995 strikers, the results of the December 21 Matignon meeting were not impressive—a delay in the implementation of the plan for restructuring the railways, a promise not to go ahead with plans to raise the retirement age in parts of the public sector that had special arrangements, a pledge that the government would implement expansionary macroeconomic measures, and a vague promise of discussions on job-sharing and work-week reduction in order to create employment...
...Or is there more here than meets the eye...
...municipal buses and subways, commuter trains, and the country's fabled TGV rail system shut down...
...The recent strikes thus reveal that French "exceptionalism" has persisted...
...A final message can be read from the demands on which the strikers focused and from the surprising support that their movement elicited from the French public...
...This is a lesson that both the conservative forces currently in control of the French state and their socialist opponents would do well to take to heart...
...1=1 SPRING • 1996 • 19...
...Such nostalgic exaggerations should be avoided...
...And union leaders have made clear their determination to continue their aggressive approach toward the government and its retrenchment plans...
...What is noteworthy is the way their fears and their disorientation resonated not only in the media but among the broad French public that, day after grueling day for almost a month, put up with the dislocations produced by the transport strikes and continued to tell pollsters that they sympathized with the strikers and their demands...
...For starters, there already are signs that the sudden folding of the strikes does not necessarily mark the end of the story...
...With unemployment figures on the rise, real incomes flat, and economic insecurity deepening, it appears likely that industrial and social unrest will persist, although new protests might not be on the same scale or of the same intensity as those of last winter...
...As the French state has contracted, first under Mitterrand and now under Chirac...
...In addition, the students and teachers, whose role had been so pivotal in 1968, played a much more limited, secondary and narrowly focused role this time...
...Despite fourteen years of non-socialist Socialist rule under the late Francois Mitterrand, France has not become a normalized, pacified, stabilized clone of Helmut Kohl's Modell Deutschland...
...But impressive, nonetheless: millions of workers on strike for almost SPRING • 1996 • 17 Politics Abroad a month...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
