..i don't understand what is gained by creating one thread on strikes around pensions in france. struggles are connected. if you want a different thread title lets just change it. no need to lampoon this one where important content lives.
France strikes against Macron's neoliberal war on pensions
quote:
The immediate cause of the strikes is Macron’s flagship attack on pensions, transforming the way they are calculated and effectively abolishing the final salary based pensions which are common in the public sector. This follows on from the raising of the pension age by President Sarkozy despite a huge fightback in 2010, and the increase in levels of worker contributions necessary for a full pension under President Hollande in 2013.
Students, who have already been mobilising since a 22-year-old set himself on fire in Lyon last month in protest against student poverty, will be joining the fray. Diverse spokespeople from the Yellow Vest movement, which has been blockading, rallying and sometimes rioting for a year now, have called for all-out support for the strikes, and the national Yellow Vest delegate meeting in Montpellier in November issued a call to action. Nurses, who have been striking en masse against understaffing and low pay for weeks, will be present, too. This week, a firefighters’ protest is occupying Republic Square in the centre of Paris day and night, while popular recent mobilisations against violence against women, and for action on climate change have helped build a combative atmosphere in the country. The major centre-left magazine Le Nouvel Observateur headlined last week: “Half Way through Macron’s Presidency: The Fear of Insurrection”.
Neoliberal governments have for decades been working at rolling back welfare state provision and installing full-spectrum Thatcherism, and workers have seen a number of defeats, though they have been able to protect provisions in several cases too. Sadly, important victories for workers over pensions in 1995 (after trains and metros were blocked for a month), and against a Youth Employment Contract in 2006 are fading from memories. 2016 saw a major defeat on labour contract laws, and a new victory is now sorely needed to restore some confidence.
War of position
There is a war of position going on in every sector of the economy. In education, short staffing, a harsh lack of capital investment and a sharp increase in temporary contracts have been pushed through. But in 2009, months of lecturer strikes buried the government’s plan for neoliberal personnel management in universities, and resistance has ensured that for the moment collegiate leadership and fixed national wage scales and promotion decisions, in both universities and schools, is the norm. Meanwhile, tuition fees for universities have stayed around three hundred euros: governments have not dared to raise them much.
Support for local government services from national funds has been cut sharply, using the excuse of lowering local taxation, though social housing is still being built at a far higher rate than in comparable countries. In Health, staff cuts and ward closures have been hitting hard, and the percentage of health costs which are not paid by public funds has been rising gradually.
What is Macron doing to pensions?
The new pension bill has been carefully written, with plenty of blanks “which we will fill in later after negotiations”, and the government is refusing to say which generation will be the first affected. The reform masquerades as a rationalisation of the present patchwork system, but few are fooled, though the government argument that pension costs must be reduced does find an echo at times. In fact, there is plenty of money available, as can be seen by the huge tax cuts for the richest which Macron has pushed through, the largest for decades.
