5 November strike: workers and sixth-formers in the same street as Matignon (the prime minister's office) unveils a social conference

According to Mediapart, the interprofessional day of action on 5 November drew dense marches across France. The site also reports that workers joined up with the sixth-formers and students who have been mobilised since September. One protester sums it up: "This is a strike we've been waiting for a long time." The prime minister has announced a "social conference" from Monday to "provide answers to questions of purchasing power and wages." What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

What this conference will contain, the wire report does not say. We don't know who will be invited, on what timetable, or with what remit. So let's take the timing for what it is: very fast. When a government convenes a round table three days after a successful march, it is rarely for the pleasure of conversation. The social conference is the oldest reflex of the tired Fifth Republic: move the conflict from the street to the meeting room, where it is easier to keep it going.

On substance, the unions are fighting here over the price of labour: wages, conditions, time. This struggle is necessary, the Marxists would say, but not sufficient, because it deals with effects rather than the wage relation itself. Still, a successful strike is also a school: you gain confidence there, you discover that you are many. The government speaks of "purchasing power," a consumer's word. We would rather speak of the share of the working day that returns to the person who works. When productivity gains never reach the payslip, it is exploitation that becomes visible, without any boss needing to be nasty.

The link with the sixth-formers and students deserves attention. Rosa Luxemburg, watching the mass strikes in Russia, noted that movements almost always start from a partial conflict, a wage, a cut in hours, a pension fund, and very quickly pass into politics, with no clear border between the two. We will not compare Paris in 2026 with Saint Petersburg in 1905: that would be absurd. But the idea keeps its value. The young people marching beside the workers do not yet have payslips; yet they know what awaits them: hours, many of them, for a wage that others will judge "reasonable."

What can the conference concede? A bonus, a "coup de pouce" (a small boost), a "clause de revoyure" (a review clause): the repertoire is familiar, and it has the advantage of costing nothing over the long term. What is less easy are the questions of substance: how many hours, until what age, and who decides. The Republic promises the right to rest and leisure in its 1946 preamble, which puts it in an awkward position when it talks only about wages. On Monday we will see whether the government comes to negotiate the share of life that work takes, or only to buy some calm. The marches, for their part, will at least have posed the question.