Minimum wage: the government gives a little ground, and the street had a hand in it

According to Le Monde, the labour minister, Jean-Pierre Farandou, said he was open to bringing forward to 1 December the automatic revaluation of the smic, the French minimum wage, normally due on 1 January. He also raised the prospect of a possible "coup de pouce" (a little extra push, a top-up beyond the formula). The paper notes that the gesture comes in the face of social protests over purchasing power, and that it is unclear whether it will be enough to calm the unrest. We know no more than that: not the amount, not the final timetable, not the final decision.

What follows is our reading. Start with the vocabulary. An "automatic" revaluation is not a gift: it is the application of a rule, one that tracks inflation. Moving the date forward by a month therefore simply means paying out sooner what was already owed. The real subject is the "coup de pouce", that small supplement beyond the rule, which governments dispense much as one tosses a biscuit to a dog that barks a little too loudly. That the idea surfaces just as the street grows restless is, of course, no coincidence: it seems purchasing power is discovered the moment the processions form.

This is where the old trade-union lesson remains useful. Unions fight over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. That struggle is necessary, Marx said, but not sufficient, because it corrects effects without touching the wage system itself. The smic is a perfect illustration: a floor, not a glass ceiling that gets smashed. It fixes the minimum value of a person's labour power, that is, what is needed to reproduce oneself so as to return to work the next day.

Who pays, then? The question is rarely put in these terms. We are told that companies could not keep up. But part of the working day produces that wage, and the rest produces profit: this is the mechanism Marx describes in the chapter of Capital on the working day, where the length of surplus labour is not fixed in advance but contested. Had the productivity gains of recent years kept pace with payslips, we would not need to negotiate a "coup de pouce" by way of demonstrations. Every hour worked brings in more than it pays; the smic only decides the size of the crumb.

Then there is the question of the balance of forces. A concession won through mobilisation can soothe, or it can prove that mobilisation pays. The government is no doubt betting on the first outcome. Workers may well prefer the second. Liberty, equality, fraternity are carved above the entrances of town halls; one would like them to appear a little more often at the foot of payslips too.

In the meantime, a month's advance on an existing rule is not the revolution. It is the beginning of a conversation, and that is precisely why people take to the streets to get one.