5 November strike: 250 actions, one question: who owns our hours?

According to franceinfo, the public news broadcaster, more than 250 actions are planned for 5 November across France, based on a map drawn up by the CGT union confederation. The unions are calling on employees and civil servants to strike over their pay, and on young people and pensioners to join them on the streets. The government, for its part, is "expected to deliver concrete answers." Which ones? The report doesn't say, and we won't invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the vocabulary. Wages, we are told: a wise, almost technical subject. But a wage is the price of our hours. Discussing its level means discussing what a day of work is worth, and therefore what share of that day comes back to us. The reasoning is simple: the worker is paid enough to reproduce their labour power, but works longer than the time needed to produce that value. The remainder, which nobody pays them, is called surplus value, and it is the source of profit. No cruel boss is needed: the mechanism is enough. When productivity climbs and payslips go nowhere, you can see this mechanism with your own eyes.

The unions are fighting here over the price of labour, and that is legitimate. Marx considered this struggle necessary but insufficient: it treats the symptoms without touching the wage system itself. Yet it has a virtue that ministerial communiqués forget: a strike builds solidarity and trust. You discover that you are many, and that the workshop next door has the same end-of-month worries.

The mobilisation brings together private-sector employees, civil servants, young people and pensioners. This mix is no accident. Rosa Luxemburg observed that the great waves of strikes often begin with a local conflict, over a wage, a working day or a pension fund, before widening into a political movement. We predict nothing: a day of action is not a mass strike. But a scattering of separate demands is often where the big question begins.

Then there is the government and its "concrete answers." The state is not a neutral referee: its budgets, laws and police are shaped by property relations, and its room for manoeuvre is bounded by the need to let capital keep accumulating. So one can bet on measured gestures, "conferences," one-off bonuses, in short anything but a pay rise that would touch the sharing of value. That is only a bet, but recent history counsels caution.

The Republic has written into the preamble of its Constitution (the founding text's introduction) that everyone has the right to obtain work, and that the right to strike is exercised within the framework of the law. It also promises dignified living conditions. Today, 250 processions are reminding it of its own words. We'll see tonight whether it knows how to read, and above all whether it knows how to pay.