LABOUR-FRANCE: Workers March for a Welfare State

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, May 13 2003 (IPS) - Unions took the French government head on Tuesday through scores of protests around the country to demand their dues in a welfare state.

The unions launched a "day of action" Tuesday that brought most public services to a halt. Railways, airport and other transport staff joined a general strike. Teachers, and at places policemen too, joined the strike.

The workers were protesting primarily against plans to reform the state pension system.

The largest demonstrations took place in Paris, where an estimated 250,000 people marched and sang slogans in support of public services. In Marseille, the second largest French city, about 200,000 people demonstrated against the government’s reform plans.

More than a million people demonstrated all over the country, union leaders said. Tuesday’s demonstrations are only the beginning of more protests if the government sticks to its proposals, they said.

"The government’s way of pushing through its reform plans to dismantle the welfare state shows unacceptable authoritarianism, and doesn’t leave us any alternative," Bernard Thibault, general secretary of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) said at a press conference during the demonstrations Tuesday. The CGT is the largest French union, and the leading force behind the opposition to the government.

"We will continue to demonstrate until the government accepts the strength of our action and accepts real negotiations with unions to change its plans," Thibault added.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has dismissed the protests. "The street doesn’t rule France," he said in a television interview. He said his government would go ahead with changes to the pension system despite union opposition.

Raffarin said the costs of the present pension system are unsustainable. It is also bound to crumble under the growing population of the elderly, he said.

Raffarin distanced himself from his predecessor Alain Juppe who withdrew similar plans in December 1995 under pressure from a wave of strikes that paralysed France for more than three weeks.

Juppe could neither save face nor his government. His party crashed to defeat in the 1997 elections. His government was replaced by a leftist coalition that remained in government until 2002.

The government wants to increase retirement age from an average of 60 years to 67 years by 2020. The government also proposes to reduce the number of employees, and allowances to them, in what it calls a "policy of austerity"..

The government announced Monday that it would replace only half the officials who retire next year. It also ordered state expenses frozen next year at the 2003 level.

Government officials say they are taking these measures to keep up French obligations under the Maastricht treaty, which imposes a maximum budget deficit of three per cent, and a maximum national debt ratio to GNI (Gross National Income) of 60 per cent.

The French deficit was well over three per cent last year, and will remain above that limit this year. The ratio of national debt to GNI has also crossed the 60 per cent barrier.

But the French government has at the same time launched a major campaign to reduce social commitments and taxes for private enterprises.

In a controversial measure, the government reduced taxes for the high-income class last year by more than five per cent. It argued that the move was necessary to sustain economic growth, and to tempt the "French elite" to remain in France.

While freezing salaries and jobs, and reducing benefits, the government increased the salaries of ministers by 70 per cent.

"If the government wants to be coherent, it shouldn’t be demanding new sacrifices in the name of a so-called austerity policy from government employees while making concessions to the richest classes of French society," leading French economist Thomas Piketty told IPS.

Piketty is an expert in income distribution and social inequality, and economists around the world have praised his work on the subject.

Other economists consider the reform of the state pension economically unnecessary and socially irresponsible.

Jean-Paul Piriou, professor of economics at Sorbonne University, compared the welfare system costs now with those 50 years ago. "The welfare state does not represent an additional cost for enterprises," Piriou told IPS. "When the government and the enterprises suggest otherwise, they do it against the empirical evidence and are only driven by an ideological approach."

Opinion polls published Monday showed that close to two-thirds of the French people support the unions.