Strike of 5 November: poverty is not just a figure, it is a rent bill

According to France 24, this Thursday 5 November, a cross-union strike day, put purchasing power and precarity in the spotlight. The broadcaster recalls that, according to INSEE (France's national statistics office), 9.8% of French people were living below the poverty line in 2024. The demonstrators are calling for greater social justice and propose, among other things, taxing the ultra-rich. The Secours populaire (a French charity), for its part, claims that 26% of French people consider themselves to be in a situation of precarity. What the report does not say: the detail of the demands, nor the number of strikers. We will not make it up.

From here on, it is our reading.

France 24's headline speaks of "more than 9.8 million" people; the report, for its part, cites a percentage of 9.8%. The two do not match, and the difference deserves to be put on the table: a percentage and a million-based figure do not say the same thing. Let us retain the INSEE rate, the only one cited in the text.

The gap between INSEE's 9.8% and the Secours populaire's 26% is telling. One measures a statistical income threshold, the other a sense of precarity. Between the two, there are a great many people: those who have a salary, sometimes a permanent contract, and who count every end of the month. The poverty line tells you who falls; it tells you poorly who is teetering on the edge.

This is where the strike meets the kitchen. Capitalism needs a kind of work that produces people rather than commodities: feeding, caring, minding children, looking after the elderly. This work is often unpaid or badly paid, and it is mostly women who shoulder it. When purchasing power falls, it is not only the shopping trolley that shrinks. Someone has to compensate: cook more, give up a treatment, stay at home with a child for lack of childcare, make three trips to the shops to find the lowest price. This invisible labour is the variable that absorbs inflation and budget cuts. These costs do not vanish; they are passed on to households.

The taxation of the richest, proposed by the demonstrators, fits this logic: who pays for society to stay upright? Today, it is first and foremost households, and the women within them.

A word on the strike itself. Unions fight over the price of labour, wages and conditions. That is necessary, but, as Marx pointed out, it addresses the effects more than the system of wage labour itself. A single day of striking settles nothing on its own; it does, however, create solidarity and confidence, and makes visible what we would rather not count.

A day of action will not change INSEE's statistics. But it poses a simple question, one that the most modest family budget knows only too well: who pays the bill, and who, at last, will get to the till?