France’s big strike day turned out to be a damp squib
The French for “damp squib,” un pétard mouillé, or wet bomb, is defined as a sensational or spectacular event that turns out to have had no effect.
It is probably too early to say that Tuesday’s general strike in France, called by the trade unions and supported in the streets by as many as one-and-a-half million people, was un pétard mouillé. Even if it did not bring the country to a standstill or the economy – as one union leader boasted – to its knees, the nationwide protest against the government’s proposed increase in the age of retirement from 62 to 64 was without doubt a clear demonstration of the strength of popular feeling on the matter.
The French don’t want to work beyond the age of 62. More than that, they would like to revert from 62 to 60 as the general age at which most of them get on with the real purpose of life, which is to do whatever they like, including nothing, from their late-middle years until death, in its wisdom, intervenes.
But the problem now for the unions and the Left is to keep the pot boiling, so that the steam given off obscures as far as possible the central message of the reform Bill, which is that France is slowly running out of the cash needed to meet its existing pensions commitment. The most commonly held sentiment, as expressed yesterday in placards carried at protests up and down the country, is that the wealthy and big business should make up the Treasury’s shortfall, not the hard-pressed citizenry.
Young and old are united in this. One elderly Parisian questioned yesterday by a television reporter said that she was not demonstrating on her own behalf – she was well looked after – but on behalf of the generations behind her and their children and grandchildren. Students and others in their twenties, whose retirement is not due for at least another 35 years, revealed a similarly motivated, if upwards solidarity.
At the same time, all those in-between, in their forties and fifties, who are already counting the days until they can down tools for good, are demanding that there can be no welching on retirement at 62. Though the existing legislation governing pensions only passed into law as recently as 2010, adding two years to the cut-off point of 60 granted by François Mitterrand, as far as they are concerned the deal is set in stone, dating back to the Paris Commune of 1871, if not to the Revolution and the Rights of Man.
Support for the position of the protesters has come in recent revelations concerning the wealth of top executives, who, as in Britain and the US, have frequently seen their earnings soar as the low-paid and unemployed have struggled. According to Le Figaro, super-rich dynasties now control 21.5 per cent of the CAC-40, France’s equivalent of the FTSE 100, against 9.7 per cent in 2012. French billionaires have increased in both wealth and numbers this century, headed by Bernard Arnault, the founder and CEO of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, now the world’s richest man, with a personal fortune of $215 billion.
If President Macron regards this as a crisis, he has not said so to date. He has rather sought to reopen the pensions question, the answer to which involves not the rich but the population at large.
It was the National Resistance Council, no less, that in the wake of the Second World War confirmed 65 as, in general, the age at which people could retire with an earned pension related to the cost of living. Previously, under legislation passed in 1910, retired workers and peasants (i.e. agricultural labourers) were paid between 36 and 360 francs a year, which even then was not much. The post-war reform, applied during a period of extended economic growth, kept 65 as the age at which the state pension kicked in right up until 1983 when Mitterrand, then entering the second year of his presidency, decided to reward voters by adding a full five years to their troisieme age.
Subsequent presidents tried to bring in reforms, but mostly ended up tweaking the existing regulations by adding three months at a time to the number of years that had to be worked before a pension could be paid. It was in 2010 that Nicolas Sarkozy, now a key adviser to Emmanuel Macron, uncharacteristically, achieved a substantive breakthrough when he forced through an increase in the state retirement age from 60 to 62. Macron, the Jupiter President, believed that he could do better. Having been advised that the national pensions fund would start running out of money as early as 2030 and would be bankrupted by 2050, he resolved to take the unions head-on.
But first, the gilet-jaunes intervened, mostly low-paid workers in the provinces, looking for cheaper diesel, then the cheminots – railway workers bent on giving up work at 55 – and, finally, Covid-19. Not until last autumn, with the pandemic moving into the rear mirror, was Macron able to push pension reform up to the top of his agenda. In the meantime, he had lost his majority in the National Assembly, meaning that he could only govern either by presidential decree or with the support of the centre-right Républicains. But, undeterred, he decided to press ahead anyway, resulting in a parliamentary impasse and, on the streets, a people’s revolt.
This week’s big strike was impressive. But how impressive? The unions insisted yesterday that 700,000 protesters took part in the demonstration in Paris alone, and millions more in the provinces. This absurdly inflated claim was matched by the interior ministry and the police, which said just 81,000 marchers had turned out in the capital and, at most, 1.4 million across the country.
An educated guess, based on extensive television coverage, would suggest more like 120,000 in Paris and maybe another 1.5 million elsewhere. But who knows? Lots of trains, planes and ferries were cancelled; oil refineries were blockaded; electricity generation was down; and many schools were forced to shut when not enough teachers turned up to take their classes. But was France at a standstill? Was the economy on its knees? Not really. It would take the strike to continue for days on end, even weeks, for the impact to be sufficiently serious to force the President either to declare a state of emergency or, more likely, to pause the legislation pending fresh elections to the Assembly.
It could go one way or it could go the other – or the people and the unions could gradually fall out of step, with those opposed to any change losing heart and reconciling themselves to another two years at the office or on the factory floor. Strike pay is in short supply in France, and anyone withdrawing their labour for more than a few days a month could end up facing bills they cannot pay.
From the government’s perspective, the clock is also running. The pension reform bill is supposed to pass into law by the end of this month, and already, having failed to make progress in the Assembly, it is moving into overtime in the Senate. Both Macron and the unions have big decisions to make. Will the President resort to emergency provisions – it seems unlikely for a measure of this importance – and will the unions, backed by the Left in parliament, go for broke, pursuing a scorched earth policy to the bitter end? Whoever wins, France will be changed by the outcome.
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