France on Strike Again: The Chance of a Transnational Movement?

On Saturday, April 9^th, that is on March the 40th according to the new calendar of the protest, more than 150.000 people demonstrated in Paris and more than 200 demonstrations took place all over France, showing that the mobilization against the project «loi travail» it still vibrant. The Parisian mobilization has been very powerful and has involved not only activists but many sectors of wage labor, students and high school students as well as the entertainment workers. After more than one month of ongoing demonstrations, something totally new happened: very provocative police forces in Paris, in Place de la Nation, charged the demonstrators while they were arriving at the end of the march. The same evening, the Place de la Republique was stuffed up with lots and lots of people, clearly showing that «Nuit Debout» is effectively establishing a connection between students, employees, private sector workers, common citizens, LGBT and feminist activists, migrants and pensioners.

In France the movement against the «loi travail» is growing rapidly and it is involving the precarious workers of today and those of tomorrow. The government is trying to further precarize the labour market to attract foreign investments and please the employers. The fight back is engaging workers in different conditions – precarious, students and migrants – opening up a space for political organization that goes beyond the refusal of a single law. The strike – its possibilities, its conditions and its political meaning – is at the center of the discussion. From the perspective of the Transnational Social Strike process, what is happening in France can be seen as a step in the right direction. With this intervention, we want to stress what is relevant in the French mobilization and its transnational significance. The French «loi travail», in fact, resembles other instruments of precarization pushed under the agenda of European austerity and its normalization, and it fits in a cross-border reorganization of labour that requires a new level of workers’ organization. It is time for us to bring the challenge a step further.

http://www.transnational-strike.info/2016/04/11/france-on-strike-again-the-chance-of-a-transnational-movement/