Strike on 5 November: wages first, and the street behind

According to Libération, the unions will be at the forefront on Thursday 5 November, seeking answers to their wage demands. The daily reports that the coordination of the "gilets jaunes" (the yellow-vest movement) and the secondary school and student movements are also calling on people to take to the streets. Its article also sets out what awaits commuters and the public: demonstrations, the police deployment, transport, schools. From the headline of its link, the SNCF (the state rail operator) expects disruption on most lines, while the RATP (the Paris metro and bus operator) anticipates relatively normal traffic. Beyond that, we do not have turnout figures or a detailed list of demands here, and we will not make them up.

What follows is our reading. A strike over wages is the barest form of the quarrel: at what price do we sell our hours? The wage covers what is needed for the worker to be back at their post on Monday morning, and the rest, the time worked beyond that, feeds profit. This is not a story of a nasty boss; it is machinery. When productivity gains never reach the payslip, the machinery becomes visible, and the strike serves to point at it.

What can the unions win? Probably pay rises, clauses, promises of negotiation. That is useful, and it is not nothing: a country where people never strike is a country where wages are set between people who have no need to find somewhere to live. But the socialist tradition has always said that this struggle treats the symptoms without touching the wage system itself. We haggle over the price, never over who owns the hours. The unions know this, and that is no criticism: you cannot ask for everything on a Thursday.

What remains interesting is convergence. Rosa Luxemburg observed, about the mass strikes in Russia, that they almost always begin with a partial conflict, a wage in one factory, a pension fund among railway workers, and very quickly turn into a political demonstration. For her, the border between the economic and the political was "almost impossible" to draw (our translation, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions). Let us not force the parallel: France in 2026 is not Russia in 1905. But seeing employees, "gilets jaunes" and young people march together is proof that the price of labour is never only a matter of pay scales. Some want enough to get to the end of the month, others a future that is not a long queue at the hiring desk.

The announced police deployment is a reminder that the right to demonstrate is itself up for negotiation: the tighter the street is hemmed in, the less balanced the balance of power. The Republic loves freedom of assembly, especially when it does not get in the way of the trains. On Thursday, we will see whether the country wants to talk about wages, or only about punctuality.