BY NAT LONDON AND RAFIK BENALI
PARIS - Thousands of workers throughout the country have
organized strikes and demonstrations against layoffs and to
demand the bosses hire more workers. At the same time thousands
of undocumented workers and others have held spirited
demonstrations demanding "papers for everyone."
About 11,000 rail workers have been on strike since November 27. It is the second time in a week that workers have tied up the entire French railway network. Only one third of the trains in France were able to move. Rail workers are demanding that SNCF, the state-run railway, hire 6,000 more workers.
Rail workers participated in European-wide rail actions November 23, striking in six countries - Belgian, France, Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain. Workers are protesting an EU plan to sell off state-owned railroads. The job actions came after hundreds of rail workers in Marseilles took part in a 12-day strike to demand that 30 workers be hired at their station. On November 23 they won a promise of 20 workers to be hired in 1999 and 20 more to be given job training the following year. That same day jobless workers, some of whom closed job offices last December demanding higher benefits, occupied a Marseilles unemployment office.
Meanwhile, at Le Havre naval shipyards thousands of workers and their supporters have been demonstrating against the announced closure of the shipyards. Hundreds of workers at two SEITA cigar and cigarette factories have been protesting the planned closure of the plants. Unionists have also protested the closure of four Levi's plants in France and Belgium, which will put 1,400 workers on the streets.
Demonstrations were held throughout France November 21 for 60,000 undocumented immigrants who were refused papers an are now threatened with deportation. The government has granted papers to 80,000 of the sans papiers, but rejected 60,000 others because they "didn't meet the requirements." Most protesters opposed the government's method of reviewing each immigrant's dossier individually. "We don't want the case by case, we want papers for all immigrants," chanted demonstrators.
"Everyone should have the right to ask for papers to live in France, because it is not a poor country," said Janneke Van den Berg, a student from the Netherlands working in France as an au pair. "We need more demonstrations like this."
Behind the protest actions and recent strikes lies a persistent level of high joblessness and an explosion in the number of temporary jobs. Unemployment is currently 11.6 percent with almost 3 million people unemployed in France. Temporary jobs have increased by 51 percent in the last two years and have quadrupled in the last 15 years. Today, nearly one worker in 10 is on a temporary contract.
Under the pressure of stepped-up working-class resistance, the Socialist Party-led coalition government of Lionel Jospin has proposed a measure to increase the bonus paid to temporary workers at the end of their contracts. They claim this would increase the pressure on bosses to give permanent contracts to 1.7 million temporary workers. This proposal has also been made to tax companies that have more than 10 or 15 percent temporaries on their payrolls.
The government has announced that beginning January 1 companies that lay off workers over 50 will be fined between two months and one year's salary, depending on the age of the worker being fired. At the same time, Jospin has cut in half the government financing of early retirement programs for companies with economic difficulties.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of workers have been able to retire at age 56 or 57 or even as early as 53 in some cases, instead of being fired. This allowed many capitalists to "downsize" their factories while avoiding the need to fire large numbers of workers outright. Unions have demanded that the unemployed be hired to replace each worker on early retirement.