After the 17 October Wrecking, the Government Puts Sunday Workers on Sale

According to Le Monde, the government intends to make it easier for shops to open on Sundays, in response to the violence and looting that marred the 17 October demonstrations. The paper recalls that mayors can already authorise twelve Sundays a year, and that prefects can grant three more by derogation, without consulting social partners (the unions and employers' bodies that negotiate workplace rules). The trade minister cites "3,000 shops" hit by violence and "almost 400" looted. What the report does not say: how many extra Sundays, for which employees, with what compensation. We don't know yet.

On the violence, let's keep it sober: shopkeepers have seen their windows smashed or their stock carried off, staff have found their workplaces trashed, and none of that is cause for cheer. Still, the question deserves asking: how does working one more Sunday repair a shop window? It is the sort of logical link you only find in ministerial press releases. A demonstration turns nasty, and the bill is handed to those who broke nothing and looted nothing: the shop assistants, the checkout staff, the stockroom workers, whose Sunday rest becomes the variable to be adjusted.

That is our reading, obviously, but it rests on little: the working day is an old battlefield. Marx, in the chapter of Capital devoted to the working day, describes how Irish bakers' journeymen organised in the late 1850s to fight night work and Sunday work, and how their movement won in some towns and was beaten in others. Sunday was never a gift: it was wrested away, town by town. And what has been wrested can be taken back, by prefectoral circular.

The method matters as much as the substance. That prefects may authorise openings without consulting social partners says everything about the balance of power: workers' time is decided without them. Unions fight precisely on this ground (wages, hours, conditions), and they can only do so if they are given a seat at the table. Shutting them out means settling the debate before it has taken place.

Finally, there is an irony the Republic ought to savour: support for battered shopkeepers is invoked to stretch the availability of those who work for them. The heritage to protect is the stock; the workforce, meanwhile, is presumed elastic. The productivity gains of the week will not reach the payslips, but the extra Sunday, we are already being told about.

The text will need watching: wage compensation, genuine or fictitious volunteering, the role of trade unions. In the meantime, one thing is certain: Sunday has just joined the list of collateral damage.