November 5 Strike: SNCF Warns of Disruption, RATP Banks on Normal Service

According to franceinfo, the SNCF expects disruption on Thursday, 5 November, the day of the strike, while the RATP is counting on "normal traffic" across Ile-de-France, the Paris region. The national call comes from an intersyndicale, a coalition of several trade unions. Detailed forecasts from both companies will be published on Wednesday, the eve of the mobilisation. That is what we know. The rest, starting with the number of strikers, the scale of the disruption and the precise demands, is not in the dispatch, and we will not make it up.

What follows, then, is our reading, not a finding. Start with the vocabulary. The SNCF "expects disruption", the RATP "is counting on normal traffic": the striker is treated like the weather, a phenomenon one forecasts, endures and manages the consequences of. We rarely talk about why employees give up a day's pay to strike, which is hardly a day out. Losing a day's wages to protest already says something about the state of people's wallets.

It can be put in the language of an old concept: unions fight over the price of labour, its wages, hours and conditions. Marx judged this struggle necessary but insufficient, since it deals with effects without touching the wage system itself. You need not agree with the second point to accept the first: when prices climb and productivity gains do not show up on the payslip, the surplus created by work goes elsewhere. This is not a story of a cruel boss; it is a mechanism.

Why trains and metros? Because that is where organised labour has its power. A manager who stops working makes a little delay on a spreadsheet; a railway worker who stops, and the country notices at seven in the morning. Hence the perennial debate over "essential services", pickets and "hostage-taking": at bottom, a quarrel over how much leverage we tolerate in those who have nothing else. The Republic, which enshrines the right to strike in its 1946 preamble, is fond of the right... so long as it disturbs nobody.

Rosa Luxemburg observed, about the Russian strikes at the start of the twentieth century, that they almost always began with a local economic conflict, a wage, a working day, a pension fund, before turning into political mobilisation. We are not there, and nothing in the dispatch suggests it. But she reminds us of something useful: the line between a "sectional demand" and a "question for society" is a commentator's convenience.

That leaves the gap in announcements between the SNCF and the RATP. It will be interesting to see on Wednesday whether it reflects internal power balances, modes of mobilisation or communication. The figures will tell. In the meantime, one certainty: every strike raises the same question, namely who owns the hours of our lives.