the CGT31 ranks behind the NUPES, the NPA suit
This June 7, at the initiative of the CGT, includes a union meeting at the Labor Exchange with the FSU as well as with the NPA and the NUPES for the increase in wages and pensions. Divided into two parts, the meeting first gave the floor to union activists from EDF, Pôle Emploi, Capgemini, Health, the Territorial Public Service and National Education with the aim of making known their struggles.
As the CGT explained at the start of the meeting, since November 2021 the region has seen more than sixty mobilizations in the workplace. Indeed since the end of 2021 we have seen the appearance on a national scale of defensive strikes for wages in the context of galloping inflation. A phenomenon that has mainly affected private sectors with low wages and few used to strike such as Decathlon, Leroy Merlin or even aeronautical subcontracting in Toulouse such as Mecachrome, the Ateliers de la Haute Garonne, Daher, Satys, Thales etc. Despite the short duration of these conflicts, their often majority follow-up, their youthful composition as well as their novelty seems to draw a “workers’ awakening” which could be the symptom of a deeper process that it could broaden and widen.
On the occasion of this meeting, the platform was mainly composed of activists from the public sector who unfortunately did not represent the new faces of this “working class awakening” of which the Toulouse region provided several examples. And this in a sector as strategic as that of aeronautics. Indeed, bringing together the various representatives of these new conflicts in aeronautical subcontracting would have been a step forward towards the coordination and strengthening of a sector consciously divided between hundreds of companies by employers and which comes up against this obstacle in its struggle for wages.
Among the representatives of these new conflicts, two delegates from the CGT Mecachrome were present in the room, but had not been scheduled for the podium. A situation which illustrates the very relative importance finally granted during this demanding deadline for the salaries of recent combats, from which it is possible to draw a line for action. This meeting was intended rather, as the delegates of the CGT Mécachrome rightly expressed it, “a badly disguised call to vote for the union of the left”.
NUPES, hope for employees?
For the second part, the forum brought together Sylvain Cantaloube for the NPA, Frédéric Borras (himself a former NPA activist who left to join the Left Front in 2012) for the NUPES and Cédric Caubère, secretary of the Departmental Union of the CGT31 , which concluded with a call to vote and make the NUPES vote. For what purpose?
As Cédric Caubère explained, it is a question of “making the electoral campaign rhyme with an increase in wages” to mobilize massively at the ballot box and “build a balance of power”. The NPA continued in the same line: “We call to vote without reservation for a large majority of the Nupes candidates” with the aim of building “a point of support against Macron”.
If for the CGT this call marks a change in discourse and a political rapprochement between the union leadership and the coalition led by Mélenchon, at least within the framework of the legislative elections, for the NPA this call for the NUPES vote marks a capitulation, a abandonment of its independence from the social-liberal left and from the left of the management of the affairs of capitalism by positioning Poutou’s party as a radical caution of the construction of a new left of government.
Indeed, after having evoked the betrayals of the institutional left like that of Mitterrand during the meeting, the NPA praised the coalition of Mélenchon with EELV and the PS while explaining that “when Macron promises us blood and tears it is obvious that a party of NUPES deputies is a huge help for us”. The NPA activist also painted the NUPES candidates as “people like us, who come from below”. A pole which Frédéric Borras seized on to give guarantees against this revival of the plural left. And this at a time when the clarification to the right of the political coalition is confirmed before its arrival in power and even when the parachuting of professional politicians from the NUPES has already pushed worker figures like Xavier Mathieu and Cédric Brun to withdraw and open reviews in working-class neighborhoods.
If the NPA had already carried common lists on the basis of the LFI program in Occitania in the last regional elections and called into question its independence with regard to the so-called social-liberal left during the failed negotiations with the UP, the participation active in the NUPES campaign commits him de facto to the electoral strategy of a coalition integrating pro-business parties such as EELV or the PS and which aims as its main political objective to coexist with Macron.
Alliance with reformism, the PS and EELV or intransigent program with employers?
“My mandate is to put my feet in the dish”. Clément Berger, secretary of the CGT Mecachrome Toulouse union, intervened from the room to read a press release from his union section. The press release highlighted the lessons of the recent strike of this aeronautical subcontractor whose employees carried out a strike over twelve days for wage increases. This strike, which was followed by a large majority of the workers, as Clement explained, was organized democratically with General Assemblies so that the strike belonged to the strikers and not just to the union members. The strikers sought to forge links of solidarity with other companies, dismissed themselves from a strike fund controlled by a commission of strikers and sought to enter into contact with the other sites of the group, where the CGT did not is not deployed, to widen the strike. If the strike did not completely obtain its demands because of the division that reigns in this sector, as Clément explains, the story of this strike loaded with lessons (which returned to its preparation, its strengths and its weaknesses) was already in itself a tool of struggle.
“Far from the elected representatives, continued the Mecachrome trade unionist, what must guide our action is that we act to satisfy our immediate needs but also in the long term we must build our class independence, on the basis of our demands. by putting at the head of our movement the most precarious, exploited and oppressed among us. For this our strike has been and is a bearer of hope”. All with the aim of being able to build a “real social movement to bring down capitalism and the ecological catastrophe it will cause”.
A strike (but there would be dozens of others during the period) bringing hope but above all examples, a wealth of elements for the action to be generalized. It is the results of the strikes that have taken place in recent months, particularly in the region, their strengths and their limits that the members of the unions have discussed and made widely known, in order to seek ways for the construction of a vast capable of wresting the increase in wages and their indexation to the rise in prices. For the moment, the current strikes face several obstacles: they are isolated company by company, and often limited by the calendar of the obligatory annual negotiations with the boss. These obstacles are reinforced on the one hand by the absence of any general plan from the union leaderships, and by the illusion that the vote for left-wing deputies (which would allow the formation of a hypothetical government) could change the things. In this sense, while the fighting is on the agenda and the economic situation is worsening, it is regrettable that the only Unitary Meeting for Wages that took place in the city was organized with the aim of calling to the NUPES vote.
The electoral agitation of Mélenchon which proposes to “save days of strike and kilometers of demonstration” or the program of the NUPES which proposes to increase wages by the organization of a “general social conference” by branch lock up the nascent strike dynamic either in the illusion of voting, or in the illusion of social dialogue. In a certain way, the call of CGT structures to vote for NUPES is coherent in the sense that the passivity to reactivate the strikes which emerge, to extend them, to arm them with common slogans, finds its counterpart in the fact to place its destiny in the hands of the “union of the left”.
These are indeed two competing strategies. That of the NUPES (joined by the CGT31 and the NPA which is working on such a union from the regional) considers that it is possible to renegotiate a compromise between labor and capital, renegotiate wages, negotiate on the ecological question, in voting for a left-wing government leaving to rehabilitate its treacherous and liberal organizations like the PS or EELV. In this strategy, workers’ struggles are a supplement of soul that can be mobilized to serve as a mass for the vote but has no specific role to play. While the Toulouse region is a Mélenchonist electoral bastion, and its candidates are almost guaranteed to obtain several constituencies, Clément de Mecachrome denounces this strategy: “the PS, PCF, LFI and EELV did not come to see us”, ” there was just a thread on Twitter calling for our strike fund which they didn’t participate in either”. And to continue, “for the new union of the left, there is little support for a workers’ struggle”. The same could be said of the NPA which, despite claiming to be anti-capitalist and class-struggle, has not put its strength into advancing this conflict, which is full of lessons for the labor movement.
Contrary to this strategy, and in agreement with the statement of the activists of the CGT Mecachrome union, we believe that there is no positive outcome for workers’ demands except in the struggle against the capitalists, in strikes , and that the workers in struggle, not the elected officials, have the situation in their hands. This implies preserving the independence of the workers’ organizations vis-à-vis the bourgeois and left parties which have met before the social dialogue with the government and the employers. All workers’ organizations should make it their duty to support the strikes in progress, to strengthen them, to work for their expansion and their coordination. Against unity from above for electoral purposes, it is this unity of the sectors on strike, currently divided by the calendar of the NAO, that we defend. This will notably involve the development of a common program to massively increase wages and so that they follow the rise in prices, but also the construction of a revolutionary organization which defends and carries this strategy within the labor movement and different social movements.