The majority of the demonstrators were young women, including nurses, nurses' aides, and student nurses. "Tous ensemble, tous ensemble" (All together, all together), the slogan of the 1995 railroad workers' strikes, is the chant most often heard on the demonstrations. "Inside--too much work! Outside--unemployment! Hire the unemployed! Hire the unemployed!" is also popular.

With a growing number of local hospitals on strike, the movement now organizes mass national demonstrations every Thursday. On January 28, a one-day national strike brought more than 10,000 hospital workers onto the streets of Paris, while tens of thousands more demonstrated elsewhere in the country.

For the first time in France, such a movement unites all layers of hospital workers, from nurses' aides and maintenance personnel, to doctors and even directors of clinics in France's large state-run hospital system.

The strike is coordinated by an "inter-syndical," a committee bringing together all the unions present in the hospitals. But the driving force of the strike has been the mass-based general assemblies open to all hospital workers that take place at least once a week in each hospital, where the basic decisions on strike activity are made.

The hospital workers are fighting to defend the "Sécurité sociale," France's public health-care system popularly known as the "Sécu." They are demanding an end to budget restrictions and the closing of local hospitals and clinics. They call for massive hiring of new hospital workers.

"We are not here for ourselves but for the sick," said 24-year-old nurse Sevrine Cartigny during a demonstration in Paris December 21. "We want to work in good conditions and above all we want the hospitals to hire new workers."

Florence Radigue is a member of the Confederation of Labor (CGT) at the Salpétrière Hospital that, with 5,000 workers, is Europe's largest. "In general, about 500 workers from Salpétrière go to the central Paris-wide demonstrations," she said. "On January 28, the day of the national strike, we were 800. Many more were obliged to work during the demonstration."

Hundreds of Salpétrière strikers were in the middle of their February 11 general assembly meeting when it was discovered that the police had entered the hospital.

The strikers forced the hospital's director to come to the assembly, where he explained that he had not called for the police and agreed to ask them to leave. The strikers then decided to lock all the hospital entrances except one. They marched through the hospital grounds, and then blocked the main avenue in front of the hospital until the police forced them to move onto the sidewalk.

The protest movement started in November following the closing of the emergency ward in the Rothschild Hospital in Paris. Emergency patients were shunted off to the nearby St. Antoine Hospital. With patients in hospital beds lined up in the halls waiting for hours to see a doctor, workers in the emergency ward called for a demonstration and strike that rapidly spread to other hospitals experiencing the same conditions. The strikers maintain urgent medical care, but force the postponement of routine medical procedures.

The closing of hospital wards is a result of draconian budget restrictions adopted by the government of Socialist Party premier Lionel Jospin, called the "Plural Left." In March 1999 the budget provisions for the Social Security system planned to reduce expenditures by 62 billion francs over a five- year period. This includes a 30 billion franc reduction in spending by public hospitals.

Jospin has not attempted the same frontal assault on the social wage as did earlier governments, but has instead launched an indirect attack of ever tightening budget restrictions while preserving the "principle" of guaranteed medical care.

In fact, a new law extending medical care to the indigent, including homeless persons who were not previously covered, has just been adopted.

The current wave of strikes and demonstrations indicates that workers' resistance continues and is beginning to cause problems for the "left" government. In a warning letter to the government, French Communist Party general secretary Robert Hue wrote, "All means should be mobilized to get us out of a dead end that is dangerous for the credibility of the Plural Left," which the CP is a part of.

But the only measure he was able to come up with was for the government "to take an emergency initiative to organize a roundtable discussion bringing together hospital workers, unions, the health ministry, and the hospital management" to see if they could agree on a compromise.

He did not propose allocating additional funds, hiring the large number of new workers the hospitals need, or stopping the closures of hospitals and clinics. The gap between the aspirations of widening layers of workers on the one hand and the concrete actions of the governing "left" coalition is slowly widening.  
 
 
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