General Strike in France

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday May 15, 2003 20:00 by Karen - ASF

The streets rule not you Mr Raffarin!

On tuesday 13th May France was paralysed by a general strike. Funny enough I was back home for a week and of course we were more than delighted to see it. Last general strike started in november 1995 and lasted until late december. The reason for the one that day was the cuts on pensions. Indeed the lovely right wing government, the "republican mandated" one which apparently saved us from the National front hit workers in france pretty hard. Basicly, we will have now to work until the age of 68 and will have a lower pension. Now, you don't need to be political or anything to be pissed off. For many workers, it was their first strike and demo. Man, that demo reminded me of winter 1995, when I first got involved in social stuff and became what I am now.
The police pretended that there was only 50.000 people there but if you look at a Paris map, the end of the demo was still stuck in Republic Square when the head of the demo arrived at Denfers. At least 5km long!
After that, all workers went to what is called general assemblies: each workplace will meet discuss and then vote to keep on the strike or not. A worker a vote, by rising hand.
Of course then the unions were invited to discuss with the PM. As far as I know, the strike is spreading dispite the will from the unions to stop it but thanks to the general assemblies, this is not the case so far and there are more actions planned for the coming monday.
Paris was not the only place protesting. The papers claimed we were 2 millions in the streets. We all know that we should never trust papers numbers. In any case, this was massive. Most slogans made clear that they wanted a general strike and chanted that if they managed to get rid of a PM in 1995, they were ready to do it again.
This anger was reinforced after the PM said on TV that it was not the street which governed but the government. No mate, you don't fuck with the working class like that.
I invite you to check Paris IMC for nice pictures.
And it probably will be good fun in Evian!