Third Saturday of marches: the street thins, the bill stays put

According to franceinfo, this third consecutive Saturday of marches in France drew between 320,000 and nearly half a million people, depending on the source. The mobilisation remains substantial but is on the decline. The broadcaster also reports clashes on the fringes of some processions and city centres under heavy police protection. We know no more at this stage: the dispatch does not detail the precise demands, the exact role of the unions, or the toll of the clashes.

From there, here is our reading, and it commits only us. On paper, the range is good for a smile: 320,000 or almost 500,000, depending on whether you count with the indulgence of a prefect or the generosity of an organiser. But one thing reads clearly in both figures: three Saturdays running, hundreds of thousands of people have given up their day of rest to say that life costs too much. That says a great deal about the state of the purse.

The decline, for its part, is no mystery. On a Saturday, you march on your free time, that is to say on the only time not already sold. You leave some energy there, sometimes a day of shopping or childminding, but you lose no wages, and so you frighten no one. The boss watches the procession pass from his window; he only worries when the workshop stops. It is the old lesson of the labour movement: the street expresses, the strike weighs.

Now the price of living is first and foremost a matter of wages. The unions fight over the price of labour, its hours and its conditions, and that is a necessary struggle. It is not enough on its own, because it corrects effects without touching the mechanism: as long as productivity gains flow to profits and never to payslips, we chase inflation, always a step behind. March today, catch up tomorrow, and the rent in between.

The unions thus face a dilemma that the dispatch does not resolve. Turning Saturday's indignation into a work stoppage means risking days of pay at a moment when every euro counts. Staying in the Sunday-style procession means accepting to be nothing more than a barometer. Rosa Luxemburg observed that great strike movements rarely arise from a great slogan: they start from a local dispute over wages, hours or a pension fund, then spread at a speed nobody had scheduled. Organisations do not decree that passage; they accompany it or they miss it.

Then there is the backdrop: city centres locked down, clashes put centre stage. We know the manoeuvre, which consists of talking about shop windows rather than end-of-month money. Yet the Republic has enshrined the right to strike in its Preamble. It would do well to remember that before protecting its shopfronts better than its employees.