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    The French quagmire Jad Bouharoun 1 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on April 27, 2019, 11:52 am

    http://isj.org.uk/the-french-quagmire/


    The French quagmire
    Issue: 162
    Posted on 18th April 2019
    Jad Bouharoun

    Lazy clichés run through the liberal media’s depiction of the so-called ­“ungovernability of France, popular resistance to the advance of neoliberalism that seems so inexorable elsewhere” and the country’s “rigid labour market and work rules that supposedly stand in the way of economic progress”.1 Far from being restricted to the Anglo-Saxon press, this tune of “unreformable, archaic France” regularly tops the charts in France itself, from Jacques Chirac to Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron, not to mention the mouthpieces of MEDEF, the powerful bosses’ syndicate, and virtually all of the mainstream media. Needless to say, since the sudden irruption of the Gilets Jaunes (or Yellow Vest) movement on a scene already disturbed by the high-profile strikes and demonstrations of the past few years, such talk has intensified further, leaving one wondering how on Earth a capitalist country so impervious to the laws of modern political economy has managed to see its gross domestic product quintuple since the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, there is no French miracle, and, as Chris Howell reminds us, any serious assessment of the French scene should conclude that “all aspects of the French economy have experienced far-ranging liberalisation, through privatisation, supply-side macroeconomic policy and deregulation of financial and labour markets. The result has been growing inequality, dualism and insecurity”.2

    French capital and labour in the neoliberal era

    How and to what extent the French economy has liberalised is perhaps what distinguishes France from the textbook “neoliberalisation” scenarios of the violent, systematic union-busting professed and successfully applied by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Unlike in Britain and the United States, French voters elected a left-wing president, François Mitterrand, in the early 1980s. Mitterrand and his Communist Party allies sought to save capitalism from itself, by responding to the crisis with an overall wage hike, stimulating consumption and manufacturing. When the capitalist class, through investment strikes, capital flight and attacks on the national currency, expressed its reluctance to be saved, Mitterrand announced the “tournant de la rigueur”—turn to austerity—in March 1983, meaning the beginning of neoliberal, pro-market reforms.

    Thus the French version of what Tariq Ali likes to call the “extreme neoliberal centre” was born, not in a Thatcherite crucible of open confrontation with the working class, but through a tranquil betrayal by a left eager to accommodate to capital. Politically, the neoliberal consensus between left and right was gradually built in the 1980s and 1990s through successive so-called cohabitations between president and prime minister of opposing political affiliations, when the vagaries of the electoral calendar would return right-wing parliamentary majorities under a left-wing president and vice-versa. Privatisation, for instance, has progressed with little apparent regard to the political identity of presidents and prime ministers (see table 1).

    Table 1: Rounds of privatisation under right-wing and left-wing governments, 1986-2005

    Source: Poingt, 2018.

    Period


    President


    Prime minister


    Value of privatised state assets
    (€ billions)

    1986-8


    François Mitterand (left)


    Jacques Chirac (right)


    13

    1993-5


    François Mitterand (left)


    Édouard Balladur (right)


    26

    1995-7


    Jacques Chirac (right)


    Alain Juppé (right)

    1997-2002


    Jacques Chirac (right)


    Lionel Jospin (left)


    30

    2002-5


    Jacques Chirac (right)


    Jean-Pierre Raffarin then Dominique de Villepin (right)


    13

    Privatisation as pursued by successive governments must be seen as a move away from the “dirigiste” policies of state ownership that had presided over the destinies of French capital during the long boom—a 30-year period in which France was, incidentally, ruled by right of centre governments. Contrary to what is implied in David Harvey’s fashionable formula of “accumulation by dispossession”, privatisation does not necessarily open up new sectors for capitalist accumulation. In the case of France, companies that were privatised or part-privatised included building materials manufacturer Saint-Gobain, oil giant Elf Aquitaine, Renault, France Télécom and Air France, already dedicated to competitive capitalist accumulation under state ownership.

    To put privatisation in the context of the long trajectory of capital and its imperative of wage suppression, we may take up Ben Fine’s suggestion that “privatisation has been an important way in which the relation between labour and capital has been reorganised”.3 The fates of Orange (previously France Télécom) and La Poste are particularly instructive in this regard. In both cases, the change in status from public service to state-owned business enterprise and finally to joint-stock company has allowed the introduction of ruthless policies of wage suppression.4 This has resulted in catastrophic increases in cases of nervous exhaustion, depression and other mental health issues among workers, driving many of them to suicide.5 Sectors as diverse as Renault and public healthcare also saw spikes in suicides in recent years, reflecting a secular increase in mental health risks at work against the backdrop of sped-up working rhythms, as bosses in both the private and public sectors ask workers to “do more with less”.6

    Privatisation and austerity in public services deal the working class a double blow: not only do they degrade conditions inside the workplace, but they also degrade quality of life for the working class and the poor, who were the first to benefit from those services. To name but a few examples, two thirds of maternity wards in France have disappeared since 1989, as has 7 percent of public hospitals in the 2013-17 period, while a third of post offices have closed since 2005. Public care homes, already cut to the bone over the past 20 years, faced renewed cuts in 2017, leaving even Macronist MPs embarrassed by the “undignified” conditions they witnessed. Finally, an OECD report indicated that France’s public education system did little to remedy social inequalities.7 The population of rural areas and black working class suburbs (the banlieues) are among those disproportionately affected by the calamities of French neoliberalism. As Mathieu Rigouste argues: “The segregation of the new ‘wretched of the city’ in the suburbs turned them into the experimental fields of neoliberalism, consisting of cutting social funding while reducing the State to its security apparatuses”.8

    Naturally, racism and Islamophobia were invoked to cover the failings of French capitalism, and a whole discourse around so-called “sensitive neighbourhoods” and problems of integration emerged to justify both the crimes of the police and the economic marginalisation of the descendants of immigrants. In a way, as many have repeated, the poverty and economic insecurity that gave birth to the Gilets Jaunes movement had been haunting the banlieues since the 1980s.

    Precariousness in employment has also progressed: subcontracting, fixed-term contracts, temporary work agencies and other derogations in both the private and the public sector have allowed employers to bypass the most favourable collective bargaining agreements, while sapping solidarity between unionised workers on open-ended contracts and the rest.9 Over the past 15 years, the proportion of fixed-term contracts has slightly gone up from 10 to 12 percent of all waged workers; however, the average length of a contract has more than halved, from 112 to 46 days.10 A relatively small minority of workers is therefore working under shortening fixed-term contracts: the precarious are more and more precarious. Unsurprisingly, women and younger workers are ­overrepresented in this category.

    So the wider French working class has not been spared from privatisation and austerity, but the ruling class remains far from satisfied with its neoliberal reforms: many opportunities to drive a Thatcherite dagger through the heart of the organised working class were missed down the road—notably in 1995, when the newly elected right-winger, Jacques Chirac, was compelled to back down from a generalised attack on pensions by the largest national strike since 1968. This defeat defined Chirac’s presidency, and he became somewhat of a Brezhnevian symbol of stagnation in the eyes of the bourgeoisie by the end of his “mandate for nothing” in 2007.

    The years leading to the economic crisis of 2008 saw a slight increase in wages in France, while the French bosses’ German, Italian and British rivals, to name a few, have been able to squeeze their workers’ wages.11 Studies suggest that this tendency has actually accelerated since the crisis, with wages increasing faster than productivity in both manufacturing and the overall business sector, in spite of a stubbornly high unemployment rate. Again, this is compared to German wages, which have lagged behind productivity over the same period of time (figure 1).

    Figure 1: Evolution of wages and productivity in France, Germany and Italy, 1998-2014
    Source: Berger and Wolff, 2017. All variables indexed to 1998 levels.

    One explanation for persistently high wages in France may be that in this advanced capitalist economy, bosses need to retain certain skilled workers, limiting their recourse to fixed-term or temporary work contracts. A recent upsurge in manufacturing demand also revealed an unexpected problem: the 2.6 million strong “reserve army of labour” proved incapable of remedying acute shortages of skilled workers.12

    High levels of strike action also contributed an upwards pressure on wages. According to data put together by the Wirtschafts und Sozial-wissenschaftliches Institut (Institute of Economic and Social Research),13 France’s business sector remains the European champion of work stoppages with 132 strike days per 1,000 workers per year between 2005 and 2014, more than five times the British average over the same period. Strikes in the non-business public sector, including education and healthcare, are even more frequent, reaching 329 days per 1,000 workers in 2011.14

    A more detailed review of the 2005-16 period (figure 2) reveals the fluctuations of labour struggle in the business sector. The high averages of 2005-9 are the norm under right-wing governments (Chirac then Sarkozy from 2007) and culminated with the national movement against Sarkozy’s pension reform in 2010; subsequent years under a supposedly left-wing government saw a notable dampening of struggle, but 2016 raised the bar again with the mobilisation against the new labour law, or El Khomri law. Looking at the years 2015 and 2016, it is interesting to notice that strikes in the business sector were concentrated in manufacturing and transport. Unlike 2016, which was dominated by a major national strike movement against the El Khomri law, 2015 saw mainly local or sectoral disputes, largely within the same pool of companies that mobilised nationally a year later. Unsurprisingly, those are the largest companies that concentrate both workers and trade union activists together in one place.15

    Figure 2: Number of strike days per 1,000 workers per year, business sector
    Source: Dares Résultats, 2018. Ctd....

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