Dockers on strike: when those who keep goods moving turn off the tap

According to Le Monde, French and European ports are being disrupted by a dockers' strike. "French ports are going to be 95% shut down" on Friday, Tony Hautbois, general secretary of the CGT dockers' union, told Agence France-Presse. The order: no loading, no unloading. That is all the dispatch tells us for now.

What we don't yet know is the detail of the demands, how long the action will last, or the real scale of the mobilisation on the European side. The 95% figure is the union's, not an independent finding. We will come back to it once the facts are established. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Still, the question that matters can already be asked: who holds the tap? A container does not move on its own. Behind the figures of world trade are crane operators, portal operators, checkers, people working in shifts, at night, with dangerous machinery. When they stop, everyone suddenly notices that "the economy" has hands.

That is the particular strength of a dockers' strike. A union, in the Marxist tradition, first fights over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. Marx argued that this struggle is necessary but not sufficient, because it treats the effects rather than the wage system itself. He added that it forges solidarity and confidence. A port blocked at 95% is a demonstration of collective confidence: it cannot be decreed, it is built in general meetings, on the quays, in union offices.

And this is where the political debate will creep in. Whenever a strategic sector stops, we hear talk of "hostage-taking", requisitions, minimum service. These debates are, in reality, debates about how much leverage we are prepared to tolerate in workers' hands. The state presents itself as a neutral referee, but its tools, from the police to requisition orders, rarely tilt towards those who do not own the warehouses. It remains a terrain of struggle, with limits set by the need for capital to keep circulating.

And what about the household? A strike day is a day's pay less for a family. Someone does the sums in the evening, juggling rent, school canteen and the shopping. This invisible work of managing everyday life, often carried by women, is the real price of every picket line. We forget it too quickly when we comment on the "disruption".

The message of these dockers, whatever the detail of their demands, is simple: without them, nothing arrives. It is for the public authorities and the shipowners to respond on substance rather than on order.