Minimum wage at 1,500 euros net: the street wrests what the spreadsheets refused

According to Libération, which is following the movement live, the Labour minister wants to try "de franchir la barre" (to clear the bar) of a minimum wage of 1,500 euros net. The announcement comes the day after the mobilisation for purchasing power which, still according to the daily, drew the largest number of demonstrators since the movement began. Calls to protest remain in place for Saturday, notably from the gilets jaunes (yellow vests). The timetable, the mechanism and the cost to employers do not appear in what we have before us: we do not yet know, therefore, whether this is a commitment or a formula.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Note the verb first: "essayer" (to try). When the procession is thin, nobody "tries" anything; they invoke competitiveness. When the street swells, a bar deemed unreachable suddenly becomes a high-jump obstacle. The price of labour is therefore not a law of nature, but a balance of forces that reads off the number of placards. This is the almost schoolbook lesson of trade union action: it fights over the price of labour power, its hours, its conditions. And debates over the right to strike or restrictions on public gatherings are nothing other than debates about how much leverage we tolerate in those who have only their wage.

Then there is the limit, one the Marxist tradition has never concealed. Raising the minimum wage means discussing the price, not the system that sets it. A worker paid a little better still produces, within the working day, more value than they receive: the unpaid share, from which profit arises, does not vanish because the minimum wage has gained a few tens of euros. Marx said of the working day that its length is "déterminable mais en soi indéterminée" (determinable but in itself indeterminate); it depends on who weighs most on the scales. The wage is no different: it moves wherever the pressure is applied.

And then there is the method. The productivity gains of recent decades did not land on payslips by themselves; they have to be fetched, with processions. One would like the Republic, which proclaims the dignity of work on every one of its public buildings, to pay for it in something other than speeches. A minimum wage of 1,500 euros net would be a real gain for millions of employees, and it should be said without sulking.

But let us keep a cool head: a minister's promise is not a line on a payslip. The test is what will be written, when, and what the employers' associations obtain in return. On Saturday, the demonstrators who stay in the street will serve as proofreaders. They seem to have understood that, in this story, it is the balance of forces that drafts the text.