Strike on 5 November: wages versus the austerity budget

According to franceinfo, a new day of mobilisation takes place on Thursday 5 November. Calls to march come with calls to strike, in the public sector as well as the private. The unions intend to denounce the cost of living and the savings measures planned in the draft 2027 budget. Pay rises, defence of public services, "fiscal justice": these are, according to franceinfo, the main thrusts of their demands. The details of the slogans, the processions and the turnout figures are not in this dispatch, so we will not supply them. We will not make them up.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Note first the order of things. On one side, wages running behind prices. On the other, a budget asking the hospital, the school and the town hall counter to tighten their belts. The same accounting move, twice: savings on what employees take home directly, and on what they receive collectively. Public services are socialised wages: they are called "spending" when everyone benefits, never when it is a tax exemption.

"Fiscal justice" is not a sop to conscience. When productivity gains don't show up on the payslip, they show up somewhere else. Marxist analysts call this surplus value: you work longer than it takes to produce the equivalent of your wage, and the rest feeds profit. No wicked boss is needed; the mechanism does the job. That the same workers should then be asked to pay for balancing the public accounts is, to put it mildly, a bit rich.

The unions are fighting here over the price of labour: wages, conditions, services. This is necessary, Marx said, but not sufficient, because one tackles the effects rather than the wage system itself. That said, we would be wrong to sneer at these "merely" economic battles. Rosa Luxemburg, observing the mass strikes in Russia, noted that they almost always begin with a partial conflict: a wage dispute in a small factory, a pension fund among railway workers, a cut in working hours. Then the economic terrain slides towards the political, with no clear border between the two. She saw in this a reality that pedantic schemas cannot account for.

We predict nothing: a day of strikes in France is not Russia in 1905, and nobody claims otherwise. But the lesson applies to the budget. A text presented as technical, with its columns and ceilings, is in fact a quarrel over who owns the hours of our lives: who produces, who pockets, who pays the bill. The Republic has written solidarity into its motto; on Thursday, workers will simply be coming to ask it to read the words out loud.

What remains to be seen is how many turn up, and what the government will do about it. For now, the dispatch does not say.