French college students' and teachers' strike hangs in the balance

Submitted by edwardm on 12 May, 2008 - 1:28 Author: Edward Maltby

In France, and especially in the Parisian region, students and teachers are continuing a huge strike against the Sarkozy government’s planned attacks on education. Xavier Darcos, the education minister, has announced 11,200 job cuts in education to be implemented from this September, and a further 80,000 to be implemented by 2012. The reforms will introduce new working contracts for teachers, making their jobs more precarious and worse-paid; vocational courses are being cut and class sizes significantly increased.

In response to these reforms, which threaten to demolish state education, and open the way for a Blair-style “choice agenda” and massive private-sector expansion into education, French teachers and students, especially in lycées (a rough equivalent of FE colleges), have been leading a large, militant strike campaign since February. Although the major teaching unions have been leading a typical strategy of “exhausting” the movement, calling occasional “days of action” over a long period, and holding back from sustained strikes, teachers and students have been organising discontinuous strike and blockade action. The action is sporadic and patchy, because the union hasn’t organised a network of support for local actions, and the level of mobilisation between institutions is unequal. But the strikes, co-ordinated by workplace meetings of teachers, and neighbourhood meetings of teachers’ and students’ delegates, have been large, regularly bringing out thousands of strikers on twice-weekly demonstrations through the centre of Paris – growing from 10,000 on the 20th of March to 50,000 in mid-April. Since the holidays at the end of April the movement has slackened, as organisation out of term time is very difficult, but the workplace and local meetings are still going on. Nor is it limited to Paris – major actions have been underway in the provinces since mid-April – in Toulouse, Le Mans, Tours and Grenoble. According to a survey published in the mainstream newspaper l’Express, the movement is supported by 65% of the population.

Montrueil, a suburb of Paris which will be hard-hit by the reforms, is a good example of how the strike operates. Students and teachers from the 4 or 5 different lycées in the region hold meetings every other day in the Trades Council building. Teachers and students agree on strike dates, generally the Tuesday and Thursday of every week, based on their assessment of the strength of the movement. Because many students in Montreuil are on course-assessed courses, and financially dependent upon benefits which the government stops if they truant (there is no right to strike), and students on part-apprenticeship vocational courses as well as teachers suffer wage cuts if they don’t turn up, the only way that the strike can avoid the dangers of victimisation and economic pressure is if the students blockade the school. Students do this each morning of a strike day, using planks, bins and where necessary (for example if attacked by police or school security) human chains. Students, hall monitors (surveillants, generally part-time HE students) and teachers then picket the school, handing out leaflets, and often organise for students from that lycée to march off and visit other striking schools to offer support to pickets there. Around mid-day strikers from all the lycées in the suburb converge on the local town hall to march off together to the demonstration in town.

On days other than strike days, the local co-ordination in Montreuil has attempted to organise one action every day – pickets of the police station to protest against abuses by the police; roadblocks in town to leaflet drivers and buses before letting them drive off again; and other highly visible stunts to gain the support of the rest of the population.

Members of the LCR youth organisation, the JCR, are supporting the mobilisation by publishing a regular newsletter on the mobilisation, complete with tactical advice, such as why and how to hold a general assembly, and the reasons for blockading a lycée, as well as broader political articles on women’s liberation, worker solidarity and the need for a new anticapitalist party. They send activists to the gates of lycées every morning to leaflet and discuss politics and tactics with students, and counteract the arguments of the government, and student union leaderships. JCR activists fulfil an important role by passing on the accumulated experience of many years of student movements to lycée students who are participating in a major mobilisation for the first time. This is a very visible and explicit example of revolutionaries acting as “the memory of the class”.

Given the lack of serious support for local mobilisations from either the teaching or the lycée unions, these local co-ordinations are obliged to try to constitute themselves as the leadership of the movement, holding regular regional and national co-ordinations. But because many lycées involved in the mobilisation don’t have regular general assemblies to elect delegates, either because of poor organisation or repression from the administration, the delegate structure is weak, lycées are often represented by whoever turns up, and channels for reporting back from the co-ordination are limited and patchy. Nevertheless, the regional and national co-ordinations are challenging the leadership of the major unions, and attempting to give a formal infrastructure to largely spontaneous strikes and blockades by the grassroots. Unlike in 1998, the lycée student unions are incapable of boycotting or ignoring the co-ordinations, and are obliged to participate in the demonstrations and actions they call. But the balance of forces within the movement will not swing decisively in favour of the grassroots if activists and revolutionaries do not succeed in organising more general assemblies and the election of strike committees at the local level, to give real muscles and nerves to the grassroots rank-and-file network.

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