In Gennevilliers, Geodis Is Blockaded to Defend Those Who Had Won Their Strike

According to Reporterre, around a hundred people, workers, activists and farmers, blocked the Geodis warehouse in Gennevilliers (Hauts-de-Seine) for two hours. The action backed logistics workers who denounce harsh union repression. In 2025, these employees had run a winning strike and secured up to 150 euros more a month. Since then, still according to Reporterre, more than twenty people have been dismissed in a year, and many others have been put on (the rest of the sentence is cut off in the dispatch). We therefore do not know the details of these sanctions, the grounds the employer has given, or its version of events: the dispatch does not say.

What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

The scenario nonetheless has the sharpness of a textbook. A strike wins 150 euros, roughly the price of a studio flat in the provinces, and one discovers that the victory is paid for the following year. If the dismissals were confirmed as reprisals, it would be the old lesson: the right to strike exists, it is even in the preamble of the 1946 Constitution, but it is worth only what the balance of power is the next day. You have the right to strike the way you have the right to sleep under the bridges: nobody stops you, but nobody protects you from what comes after.

The basic concepts are useful here. The union fights over the price of labour: pay, hours, conditions. That is necessary, Marx said, but not sufficient, since one acts on the effects rather than on the wage system itself. And the 150 euros wrung out in 2025 show it: they are a tiny share of the value produced in a warehouse where pallets move day and night. Surplus labour, that part of the working day which goes unpaid, does not vanish because one recovers a small piece of it. It defends itself. And sometimes, it dismisses.

What also strikes me is the make-up of the crowd at the gates. Farmers alongside logistics workers: this does not appear on the usual maps of the "categories" we like to set against each other on television. Rosa Luxemburg observed, about the Russian mass strikes, that everything starts from a local conflict, a wage dispute in a small factory, a pension fund, a right of association, and that the boundary between the economic and the political quickly becomes impossible to find. We are obviously not announcing a mass strike in Gennevilliers: two hours of blockade do not make an uprising. But the idea that a warehouse dispute becomes a matter of solidarity, and therefore of politics, is not exotic at all.

As for union freedom, the Republic proclaims it willingly, especially in speeches. What remains to be seen is what the labour inspectorate, the courts, and Geodis, whose response we do not yet have, will say. In the meantime, around a hundred people have reminded us that a right you cannot exercise without losing your job looks rather like a privilege of those who do not need it.