Binet calls on workers to join the young: can unity pay the bills?

According to Mediapart, Sophie Binet, general secretary of the CGT, the French trade union confederation, is calling on the world of work to join en masse the youth protests and those against the cost of living, on the eve of a cross-sector day of mobilisation. Still according to Mediapart, she welcomes the way social questions have forced their way into the presidential debate. She sees in it, as the interview's headline puts it, "the alchemy between young people and workers" as well as that of "victory". The rest of the interview does not appear in our dispatch: we therefore do not know the precise demands, the mobilisation figures expected or the slogans on working time. What follows is our reading.

First, the phrase. Alchemy is the art of turning lead into gold; trade unionists know it is also every boss's dream. Here, the lead would be diffuse anger, the gold a balance of power. Yet the link between students and employees is a perennial of the social calendar: it is often proclaimed, more rarely observed.

Why might it take hold this time? Because the "cost of living" is the point where two stages of life meet. The young person pays rent and the weekly shop on an entry-level salary; the employee of forty pays the same prices with a wage that has forgotten to keep up. Our working notes recall that exploitation does not need a cruel boss: it is enough that productivity gains never reach the payslip. There lies the common ground, and it has no age.

Trade unions, Marx observed, fight over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. A necessary struggle, but one that treats the effects more than the system of wage labour. That is the limit, and the strength, of a cross-sector day of action: it demands the means to make ends meet, and does not always dare ask who owns the hours. Yet the question of working time, of retirement and of free time is precisely the one that speaks to both generations: one dreams of not working itself into exhaustion, the other of having, one day, a job worth the effort.

Rosa Luxemburg, studying the Russian mass strikes, noted that they almost always arise from a very partial conflict: a wage in a small factory, a cut in hours, a pension fund. The line between the economic and the political, she said in substance, is almost impossible to draw. Madame Binet is pleased that the social question has invited itself into the presidential campaign; Luxemburg would no doubt reply that the social does not wait to be invited.

What will come of tomorrow? No one knows. But the Republic, which engraves "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" on its public buildings, would have little grounds for surprise if fraternity took to the streets with placards about the price of the shopping trolley.