The Striking Strikers Strike Back
Gonna be a long, tense month in France...
(Note: A trip to the US this week interrupted regular newsletter publication, which should resume next week).
I’m sitting in a Washington DC airport waiting for my return flight to Paris and crossing my fingers that it won’t be canceled due to the air traffic controllers’ strike. And after I land, I will have to hold my breath that the RER A and B lines are functioning despite the public transportation strike to carry me across the Paris battlefields to my west of the city.
I have watched this week of upheaval in France from across the Atlantic, but I can confirm that it has been an international story as puzzled observers once again try to understand the French. Macron has proposed raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 and the reform is proving to be wildly unpopular, as one would expect.
But the fact that French workers would protest so vehemently seems surprising to the non-French, particularly from the shores of America where employees long ago were beaten into submission and are now relatively docile as things like retirement, job security, and the social safety blanket are gradually taken away from them.
The Who Moved My Cheese? culture has won the day in the U.S. But the French are not about to sit around while somebody fucks with their fromage.
The latest wave of protests feels like almost a direct response to a recent statement by Macron. After an initial burst of anger, the protests appeared to be losing a bit of steam. And then the nation entered a hallowed two-week vacation period when everyone tends to be pretty chill. One must have priorities, and even strikers take a holiday from striking.
Apparently, Macron is not familiar with a few helpful American phrases, like “let sleeping dogs lie” or “don’t poke the hornets next.” Maybe there is a French version? In any case, Macron, who has never been accused of being an artful politician, decided to throw a dog into the beehive by declaring in a TV interview that he “doesn’t feel public anger” over the retirement reforms.
Which, of course, disgruntled workers took as a challenge. And thus, we have witnessed a massive escalation this week in the form of coordinated marches, widespread strikes across many sectors including schools and public services, port blockades, garbage strikes, and well, you get the picture. Per The New York Times:
Unions and authorities provided wildly different estimates of the number of marchers on Tuesday — a record 1.28 million, according to the Interior Ministry, versus a record 3.5 million for the unions, a gap large even for France, where discrepancies between their estimates are common.
“The idea is to bring France to a standstill,” said Fabrice Michaud of the railway workers’ branch of the CGT trade union, told The Guardian.
Although Macron’s party lost its majority in the National Assembly last year, it appears the reform bill has a good chance of passing later this month. Macron continues to argue that the retirement age needs to be raised to keep the system solvent. Critics counter that Macron’s reform unfairly targets workers rather than raising taxes on the rich and corporations.
The French Exception
The backlash is about economics, but it’s also much more than that. And a couple of terrific stories this week explored the nuances of why the French consider the concept of retirement so sacred, beyond the financial security.
The first story, by Catherine Porter of The New York Times, zoomed in on retirees in a small Normandy town. France’s retirement system is generous and promises a decent quality of life post-work, a time many French look forward to rather than dread:
France’s attachment to retirement is complex, touching on its history, identity and pride in social and labor rights that have been hard won. They will not be easily forfeited, no matter how many times the government argues that changing the pension system is imperative to save it, given the demographic realities confronting the country.
When it was introduced by the National Resistance Council after World War II, the retirement system — along with national health care — was part of a series of celebrated social measures intended to help bind the fractured country together.
“We are capable of being as productive as Americans. But don’t forget, life is not just about working,” said Hervé Bossetti, 58, a money manager at his fifth protest snaking through Paris last month, dressed in a striped prisoner’s uniform, carrying a ball and chain, and wearing a sign that said, “Prisoner of work.”
He added, “In France, we believe that there is a time for work and then a time for personal development.”
A story by Rick Noack in The Washington Post echoed some of those themes, while also noting that when they are working, the French are typically harder workers than most (despite the stereotypes suggesting otherwise):
Measured by output per hour, French workers were more productive than their German counterparts — who are often perceived to be obsessed with efficiency — and only slightly less productive than Americans in 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
France also has some of the highest levels of burnout and on-the-job accidents among European workers, which researchers have attributed to a sometimes toxic and hierarchical work culture that limits employees’ growth and engagement. After accounting for differences in purchasing power, Americans earn about 17 percent more than French workers, OECD data shows.
A previous reform that cut the work week to 35 hours also seems to have caused French employers to increase productivity demands on workers. As work has become tougher and more unpleasant, the prospect of retirement has kept many going. With little attention to workplace misery and a move to put retirement further out of reach, the explosion of anger makes perfect sense:
Annie Sicre, 62, a former translator who participated in a Paris march on Tuesday, said a higher retirement age makes little sense when some French companies have developed a reputation for pushing out employees in their late 50s.
“Throughout my career, I witnessed work become more intense — and by the time I turned 55, 58, I started to struggle,” she said. After stretches of stress-related sick leave, she spent the final two years of her work life on unemployment benefits, before retiring in January.
What’s ahead of her now, she said, “is another part of life — and everyone has the right to enjoy it. This country isn’t poor.”
The notion that there is more to life than work is almost heretical in many modern economies. In France, they are manning the barricades to fight for that belief.
Compromise doesn’t appear to be part of the French political culture, which tends to favor trench warfare. That means only one side will win this fight, and so we can expect the strikes and protests to continue through the end of the month and increase in intensity. And in this case, even the passage of the reform might not signal the end of the anger and the resistance.
All kinds of reasons to dislike Anglo-American neo-liberal economic policies. The French have more than most.