France's step beyond

Submitted by AWL on 3 June, 2020 - 4:40
CGT flag

Three of France’s trade-union confederations — CGT, FSU, and Solidaires — have (26 May) got together with Greenpeace, ATTAC (the Tobin Tax campaign), and others to produce an “exit plan from the crisis”: see here.

It includes:

• “requisitioning of factories and businesses to produce masks and medical supplies”
• “re-establishing individual and collective liberties to move around, to meet, and to protest”
• restoration of trade-union rep access to workers, sometimes suspended on grounds of virus emergency
• “reducing drastically” the numbers in prison
• “a standard work week of 32 hours, without loss of pay”
• “a moratorium on rents”
• “for poorer countries… cancelling debt payments for the year 2020”
• restoration and strengthening of the wealth tax
• expansion of public services, public transport, and rail.

It doesn’t propose public ownership beyond that, or workers’ control, and it is vague about how to progress, but it’s a step beyond official ideas so far in the British labour movement.

Left political life has begun to re-emerge in France, with a protest for the rights of “illegal” migrants (“sans-papiers”) in Paris on 30 May estimated at 5,500 by the police, who used tear gas against it.

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