It didn’t take long before it was confirmed: the ‘suspension’ of the retirement pension reform is a trick. Those born in 1964 and 1965 will ‘gain’ three months of pension payments and have to contribute one trimester less1 and then the reform is back on.
And even then, workers with a long career are excluded from the above suspension because they’re considered to have benefited from the Borne reform2. “You can’t have your cake and eat it” said one contemptuous top civil servant. The rich have a three-star menu every day, complete with aperitif and digestif and yet early retirement for someone who started work at 17 or 18 years old is a privilege!
The leaders of the Socialist party (PS) and some trade unions have to be pretty dishonest if they can present such sleight of hand as “a great victory for workers”.
The maneuver was specifically designed to allow Lecornu to present a budget that is the attack on the working class demanded by the financial markets.
Retirees will see a freeze on pensions and the suppression of the 10% tax rebate on their income. The sick will have to pay double the deductible and a lot of medication will no longer be covered. Civil servants, i.e. local government workers, teachers, hospital workers, will see their wages frozen while job cuts will be made in services that are useful to the public. Tax brackets will probably also be frozen, as will benefits and there’ll be any number of attacks in the fine print of the bosses’ budgets.
For the last week, members of parliament have been making a fuss about supposedly editing the text. The PS is being all “there’ll be no holding us back if you don’t add a pinch of taxes on the wealthy” and threatening a motion of no confidence. But they’re also negotiating behind the scenes with a government that doesn’t want to upset the right.
And it’s not just posturing – every party that’s fighting to govern, including Unsubmissive France (LFI) and National Rally (RN) who voted ‘no confidence’, share the same respect for capitalist interests. They keep saying that France’s competitiveness has to be improved, which boils down to handing the state budget over to the French bourgeoisie.
In the current period of crisis and trade wars that threaten to turn into outright war, the only way capitalists know how to increase competitiveness is to attack workers’ living conditions, cut jobs, intensify the work of those who still have a job and lower wages.
While parliamentarians are debating, extremely wealthy companies like Michelin, Stellantis, ExxonMobil are closing down plants with all the consequences that entails for sub-contractors, service providers and temps. Before the summer, the CGT3 counted 381 redundancy plans in France. Tens of thousands of jobs have been cut in the chemistry and car industries, retail, mass distribution and construction. This comes on top of the 65,000 small businesses that went bankrupt in the last year.
All in all, hundreds of thousands of workers are losing their livelihood. Their income is dropping in value but prices, starting with those of food, continue to soar. The long line of people forced to count every penny to make ends meet just keeps getting longer.
Meanwhile, corporate profits are breaking records. Share prices on the stock market are soaring. The number of billionaires is skyrocketing. It’s crystal clear: in order to ensure the wealth of a handful of families that keep getting richer, the people who produce all the wealth, the ones who make the whole of society function day after day, are increasingly exploited, underpaid and driven to unemployment.
This isn’t inevitable or an eternal law. It’s the result of the class war that the bourgeoisie is waging with a sharp awareness of where its interests lie.
If workers are to defend the conditions of their own existence – the right to a job with wages that allow them to live decently – they will have no choice but to fight back against the capitalist class without waiting for a supreme savior to come along. Together, they have the strength for that because they are essential to keeping the wheels of the economy turning.
But to do so, they must rediscover the awareness of forming one class, united beyond the companies where they work, their status, their origins and even borders. A powerful class that can run society instead of the capitalist class which is pushing society towards a cliff edge.
Nathalie Arthaud
1 The system in France requires you to have made contributions for a certain number of trimesters in order to benefit from a full retirement pension.
2 In 2023, a highly controversial law was passed in France that raised the retirement age from 62 to 64 with a requirement that the retiree has worked at least 43 years.
3 Conféderation Générale du Travail (CGT). One of France’s major unions and possibly the most left-wing. As with most unions, the leader is usually ready to negotiate with the bosses and/or the government but the base remains relatively combative.