WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, UCL AL #357 - Culture - Read Baptiste Giraud: Relearning to Strike (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 We made the bitter observation in 2023: there were a lot of people in

the streets for our pensions but few workers on renewable strike.
Relearning to Strike, written by Baptiste Giraud based on a field survey
dating from the 2000s, offers keys to understanding. ---- The author
observes the activity of the CGT trade union in the city of Paris. The
unionization rate is stunted, job insecurity high, and union repression
massive. He describes the forms that resistance to arbitrary employer
action takes and more specifically the obstacles to strikes.
First, the low unionization rate leads to union intervention by CGT
permanent employees from outside the company. The gap between the CGT's
demands and the expectations of employees, focused on compliance with
labor law, is sometimes glaring. Not very politicized and legitimately
worried about potential employer repression, they are very reluctant to
establish too direct a balance of power. However, this does not mean
that no action is being taken: from petitions to short, judiciously
chosen walkouts.

The second part of the book reports on three long strikes, in a luxury
hotel, a shoe store, and a pizza delivery company. They appear to be a
salutary and spontaneous "fed up" feeling following a new employer
announcement. In reality, the author emphasizes the importance of the
long-term work of the struggle leaders, unionized or not, who prepared
the ground. Unions cannot order the start of a strike, but they create
the conditions necessary for it to start.

The three situations show the different facets of the struggle... for
better or for worse. They lead to bittersweet endings, hastened by union
representatives who fear that weariness will cause the ranks to explode.
What still emerges is a union section strengthened by a wave of
memberships and hardened by the struggle.

The book offers few solutions to the prevailing gloom, but has the merit
of supporting an intuition widely shared in union circles: the weakening
of union implantation, the fragmentation of statuses and working
conditions, precariousness and widespread turnover, are all conditions
that make resorting to strikes difficult.

In mirror, it underlines the importance of union structures outside the
company, local unions or inter-company unions, to pool activist resources.

Nicolas (UCL Caen)

Baptiste Giraud, Réapprendre à faire grève, PUF, September 4, 2024, 368
pages, 20 euros.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Baptiste-Giraud-Reapprendre-a-faire-greve
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