WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, UCL AL #356 - Spotlight: Austerity and layoffs, organizing against the capitalist offensive (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 With or without complacency from the left-wing parties, we already know

that François Bayrou will continue the same liberal policy in favor of
capitalists and shareholders: "at the same time" austerity and business
closures. It is up to the population to mobilize against unemployment,
the destruction of public services and social protections. Let's take
advantage of the parliamentary instability to find the path of strikes
again under penalty of new major defeats. ---- Bayrou cultivates the
image of a moderate managing public finances "as a good father". A
Macronist from the very beginning, he is counting on this image to make
it easier to swallow the austerity potion that the bourgeoisie is
demanding to complete the destruction of public services and allow
private capital to finally fully invest in these potential markets that
are education, health, pensions, etc. After creating the debt by
collapsing revenues through lower taxes and employer social security
contributions, massive gifts to capitalists without compensation or
control[1], politicians serving the richest are bringing us the bill!

The return of massive social plans must not make us forget the
unemployment of tens of thousands of civil service contract workers and
employees in the non-profit sector, as well as the forced unemployment
of precarious workers in the private sector: temporary workers,
fixed-term contracts, etc. But the collective capacity to resist will be
played out in the large commercial and industrial groups. The CGT, by
organizing the day of mobilization on December 12, made these enormous
figures widely known: 300 collective redundancy plans over a year and
more than 200,000 jobs destroyed. The variable geometry unity achieved
locally around the companies concerned on December 12 is a source of hope.

Our bourgeois have talent
The dominant imperialisms, Chinese and American, are relaunching a cycle
of confrontation and the European bourgeoisies sometimes seem helpless.
However, the richest fraction of our bourgeoisies still gallops to the
top of the indecent rankings of economic magazines where the richest
French people are the richest in Europe. But there they are, they have
concentrated on a few very high-yield niches, deliberately abandoning
the branches with more modest returns. Luxury, tourism, banking and
insurance, certain agricultural segments, maritime transport, oil and
gas. In the automobile and transport sectors, the massive relocation of
model assembly plants is making shareholders happy to the detriment of
the proletarians of the entire metallurgical sector. Thus, the famous
promises to reindustrialize France, whose ecological relevance should be
assessed, are coming up against the disappearance of the links essential
to the existence of an industrial sector. Our European bourgeois refuse
to invest here but they are the leading foreign investors in the USA! It
is not capital that is lacking... but they are choosing maximum
profitability for shareholders by combining the relocation of production
tools and tax optimization.

Putting politics back into layoffs
Since the 1970s, we have known from experience how much the struggles
against company closures and massive layoff plans are riddled with
contradictions: should we accept reducing benefits (it always ends badly
with unemployment calculated on reduced wages...)? Should we look for
the biggest redundancy bonus? Serious training plans? Early retirement?
Continuation of activity on a reduced scale? Each situation is different
and there is no easy recipe, especially since it is very rare that the
balance of power allows everything to be won at once. Even the
coordination of companies in struggle is difficult sometimes due to
political tensions between union teams, but also the particular tempo of
each employer plan. Nevertheless, these convergences, always
spectacular, such as for example a National March on Paris, have the
merit of giving an anti-capitalist political meaning to the
mobilizations which otherwise hardly go beyond the immediately demanding
plan. Do not disperse
Beyond the struggles against closures and the improvement of social
plans, we must put forward strong political demands such as the control
of public aid by employees and their reimbursement in the event of
layoffs, the blocking of dividends to shareholders who make
redundancies, unemployment insurance that meets needs, a right of veto
for employees on collective layoffs, the reduction of working hours
without reduction in wages or "flexibility" with equivalent hiring.  The
same high level of demand is needed for the restoration and expansion of
public services and the status of civil servants. For the return to
popular management of social protection based on employee and employer
contributions. In short, demands that can unite all employees to nibble
away at a little of the employers' power and prepare for the
expropriating general strike by arming workers with a program of
rupture. Because isolated combativeness in a company affected by the
plans always ends in the same way: even with real compensation wrested,
it is the dispersion of fighters and the loss of organized forces. This
is why, through bold slogans, we must succeed in setting the entire
class in motion, including sectors that are still relatively unaffected
by the attacks of capital.

Jean-Yves (UCL Limousin)

Coordination of the boxes in struggle!

At the initiative of the NPA-l'Anticapitaliste, left-wing political
organizations are trying to unite for common initiatives. Political egos
are holding back its implementation, but a joint press release has just
been released. It summarizes the approach and calls for its expansion at
the next joint meeting on January 9. The UCL is a signatory.[2]

Meetings, support concerts, Marches for employment... As long as they
are not indirect means to promote political parties, the UCL is
available to join joint initiatives. However, its intervention remains
primarily the construction of coordinations of grassroots unionists such
as have existed in recent decades on various occasions.

Validate

[1]https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?La-dette-publique-n-existe-pas

[2]"To resist the wave of layoffs", UCL press release of December 19, 2024.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Austerite-et-licenciements-s-organiser-contre-l-offensive-capitaliste
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