After the 5 November strike, Lecornu serves up a social tea party at Matignon

According to Le Monde, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has summoned unions and employers to Matignon, the prime minister's official residence, on Monday 9 November for a "social conference", the day after the strike of 5 November. The daily writes that Matignon hopes in this way to open a dialogue that is "more clearly marked out" than the one-on-one talks with youth movements, and notes that the room for manoeuvre is limited when it comes to advances on purchasing power and wages. The agenda, the participants and any possible decisions are not yet known from the dispatch. What follows is our reading.

We know the recipe: when the street rumbles, you serve dialogue, with a white tablecloth and a carefully marked-out agenda. The word is well chosen, moreover. Balisé, like a hiking trail: you may walk, but no cutting across the fields. And in the field, precisely, there are two big questions the format risks leaving in the cloakroom: wages and working time, that is to say, who owns the hours of our lives.

Le Monde says it without hedging: little room for purchasing power. Translated: everyone is invited to discuss what has already been decided will not be let go. The unions, for their part, are fighting over the price of labour, its hours, its conditions. It is a necessary struggle, Marx reminded us, but one that treats the symptoms without touching the wage system. Still, that is already a great deal, and it is exactly what the conference threatens to dilute: a balance of power turned into a conversation.

The employers, meanwhile, are there in their capacity as partners. Yet the underlying relationship is well known: the wage covers what is needed for the worker to come back the next day, while the work supplied beyond that feeds profit. When productivity gains never reach the payslip, this is not the wickedness of one boss, it is the mechanism at work. It is hard to raise that over coffee without offending one of the guests.

There is also an irony in the timing. Rosa Luxemburg observed that great mass strikes often begin with a local and partial conflict, over wages, hours or pension funds, before taking on a political dimension, with no clear line between the two. Nothing says the 5 November strike has reached that point, and we have no mobilisation figures in the dispatch. But the government does seem to treat the strike as a problem of social climate to be managed, not as a message about economics and politics entangled.

The Republic loves to recall its motto: liberty, equality, fraternity. We would happily add: and a little free time. On Monday, we will see whether Matignon puts anything on the table other than chairs. If the conference talks neither of wages nor of hours, it will have served only to buy time, other people's time, as usual. (our translation)