By Mia Butzbaugh
"We're all drivers of the strike here", a metro worker in Paris told me. This was not the rhetoric of union bureaucrats. This was the reality of general assemblies, where French workers met daily to vote on whether to continue their strike the following day.
I visited Paris for a week in mid-December to learn about the strike. I was especially impressed with the general assemblies, which brought an amazing kind of direct rank-and-file democracy to the struggle.
For three weeks in November and December, French public sector workers brought the country to a standstill. Confronted with privatisation, increased taxes and eroding pensions and health care, ordinary union members played the leading role in the popular movement against the government's proposed austerity plan. The rank and file also be came the leaders within their own unions, sometimes bucking their own officials.
Though the unions did not win the repeal of the government's plan in its entirety, they did force at least two important concessions from Prime Minister Alain Juppé. He backed down on his plan to increase the minimum years of service required for retirement and on his intention to privatise the railways.
But these weren't the only wins workers talked about during the final days of the strike. They constantly referred to the gains made within the unions: cross-union cooperation, inter-generational relationships and raised political consciousness. These, they said, will lay the groundwork for future struggles. The unique, democratic general assemblies helped bring about all of these.
General assemblies
In France, several unions typically co-exist in any given shop; all three main unions, and countless smaller ones, can split the unionised work force. For example, at La Gare de Lyon, a Paris train station, 15-20% of the conductors — about 550 people — are union. But they belong to seven different unions.
The general assemblies, established in the mid-1980s, forced rival unions to work together. Delegates from each major union and from the sizeable non-union striking contingent (95% of the total train work force struck) facilitated the meetings.
Assemblies gathered in the workplaces, which strikers occupied 24 hours a day. Occupation is seen as such an indisputable right that gas and electricity workers, for example, drove city trucks — adorned with effigies of the prime minister hanging from the cranes — along the routes of the semi-weekly demonstrations.
Train conductors made quite a ceremony of returning the office key to the boss on the day they voted to end the strike, but then proceeded to have a victory party in the building. They didn't bother to ask permission.
The general assemblies were very informal forums for updates on other areas' votes, clarification of rumours and debate. French strikers can't be replaced and don't have picket lines to stop scabs, but the assemblies renewed the sense of purpose and cohesion between the workers.
Most important, the daily assembly votes kept the strike at the grassroots. The workers took pride in this. When one delegate told an assembly that the unions had been accused of intimidating the rank and file, the strikers protested loudly.
Tous ensemble
The worker-led character of this struggle was clearest from the events in the CFDT, the most conservative union. CFDT president Nicole Notat — who reportedly received a 75% approval rating in a survey of bosses — gave the strike so little support that she was chased from a rally by her own members. Unionists derisively attached her name to the government plan, calling it the Plan Juppé-Notat. Unwavering, CFDT members struck in all sectors for the duration.
Notat's collusion with the government couldn't profoundly threaten the cross-union solidarity during the strike. Whereas members of competing unions had sometimes in the past marched different routes during simultaneous rallies, everyone marched together this time, carrying banners naming all the unions.
Their motto, "tous ensemble" or "all together", reflects French workers' commitment to a broader, democratic unionism that will not die with this struggle. Though the union wins were limited, other stand-offs are sure to follow. But as one train conductor said upon voting to return to work, "Now the bosses know they'll get a fight every step of the way."
[From Labor Notes (7435 Michigan Ave., Detroit, MI 48210, USA, e-mail: labornotes@igc.apc.org).]