March 29, 2006
explication du texte
Today's New York Times writes:
....That clause makes all the difference: if workers strike in the United States, they risk losing their jobs, but strikers in France do not fear for their jobs, regardless of whether they are union members. [1]
From the beginning, French unions have mobilized people to put pressure on the government instead of simply pressing employers. They have found a willing populace, thanks perhaps to the romantic legacy of the French Revolution. [2]
Because French union organizers do not need the support of a majority of workers at an enterprise to form a union, a small minority of a company's workers can call a strike. When they do, many people take the day off regardless of whether they are union members. All they lose is a day's pay. [3]
But most important, French unions have continued to play a leading role far beyond wage negotiations, fighting to shape a sort of workers' paradise [4] and amassing entitlements for the broader population along the way. It is primarily because of the strength of the unions that all workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks of vacation, affordable health care and a 35-hour week. [5]
This is an astonishing bit of journalism; one could spend a day meditating on the whiplash shifts between "fact" and "opinion," or more pointedly, the material and immaterial. Sentence [1] provides the all-important material explanation of why French workers feel able to strike; immediately, the article nervously suggests that they are a sort of docile bunch ("willing populace") who pursue their goals out of a kind of nostalgic abstraction — certainly not out of (just to pull something out of the blue) their own interests in how daily life is lived.
The next paragraph returns to some facts of labor, mystifying them at the same time. While noting factually that employees can join a strike without being part of the union and not fear for thier jobs, the article can't bring itself to note that this is true exactly because previous generations have "put pressure on the government." It then suggests [3] that the loss of pay in return for not working is somehow a strikingly insufficient punishment ("all they lose") — as if there were naturally some ethical dimension to showing up for one's wage job, some divine right that exists in the relation between employer and employed beyond wage negotiations.
With stunning indifference to its own rhetoric, the article in the very next sentence claims that, should the workers believe in some right beyond, whoops!, "wage negotiations," [4] they must be Communists ("workers' paradise": not the sublest code, sir). This villlainous spectre, when forced to appear in material form in the final sentence [5], turns out to be something like the basic protections that every worker in the world would hope for, and lacks only because their capacity to struggle for them has been systematically broken.
The article just barely stops short of saying that French workers, because of their myopic attachment to "entitlements" (health care is an entitlement, apparently. Can one take seriously a single word of anyone who talks like that?) are worse off and less productive than they are in a country without such roadblocks. Perhaps this hesitancy stems from the Times' recollection that this isn't actually the case.
Here at sugarhigh!, we should be clear: we find modern labor unions to be a revolutionary force only insofar as they mediate revolutions in capitalist production; their historical task is to make sure that increasing pressure on workers — to live less and produce more — is cushioned so that there won't be any substantial overturnings of the great apple-cart. We recall well the slow entry and swift exit of the CGT during France's last great unrest (all of which is why we believe, optimistically, that when Josh Corey writes of a union for poets, he means something far more like collectivity).
That said, it would be an error to suppose that the current labor action in France can be understood purely as a defense of the status quo, a maintenance of "entitlements" already in place. This is what the papers here and in France have endeavored to suggest, repeatedly, over the last week — including the Times, when it isn't paradoxically concocting its nostalgic anxiety about communism. Here are three reasons why not:
• The current issue does not concern some abstracted feeling that one is secure in one's job, a vague sensation that makes the cherries taste sweeter. Everyone (including the Times) admits that it is exactly and specifically the protection from unfair termination that allows workers to have any say in their own labor conditions — both now and in the future. The CPE (the law against which the current strikes are set) is part of an explicit removal of this protection, and thus a crippling blow to the possibility of any postive changes for laborers.
• The current unrest is part of a larger historical moment, which includes last autumn's riots in France no more more than the current debate about immigration and "guest-workers" in the United States — a moment in which the terms of the relationships between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised are being restructured. Each seemingly individual and local skirmish takes its place within an increasingly global confrontation; the rendering of any given struggle as irrelevant or insubstantial serves particular ends.
• It's a bit of nonsense, isn't it? By the same logic, the American resistance to the Townshend Act in the late 1760s was "a defense of the status quo," as was the Boston Tea Party. New taxes had been levied, and the colonists wished them to be unlevied — to return to the status quo, eh? This entire rhetoric is transparently absurd.
We are not suggesting these events are the beginnings of a revolution; likely, they will turn out to have been a systemic adjustment of labor relations as late capitalism seeks out a sleeker body to march across continents. But we remember well that no overturning comes from a single moment of athletic heroism. If the histories of the 1760s in the American colonies, the 1780s in France, the 1940s in India, or the 1980s in the Soviet bloc teach us anything, it is that — even as onlookers inevitably remark on their pointlessness — there must be quite a bit of calisthenics in the public square before any great weights are lifted, or thrown down.
Posted by jane at March 29, 2006 06:26 AM | TrackBack