We are trying to get to Nice soon and, well, the transportation unions are on strike. What to do? Get annoyed? Act like this is a huge inconvenience? Or???
Labor and the trades are powerful in Europe. It is an important part of history as it clearly defines the interface between the idle, observing, judging, entitled rich and those who use their hands. The distinction is very important.
In the 10th century guilds were formed by trades people, students, and professors. These guilds helped organize people into self-managing, self-protecting groups. They created well organized systems of education and provided support for members.
In the guild system young people learning a trade would take a seven year apprenticeship to travel around Europe. They would go from one place to another to learn their crafts at the feet of acknowledged craft master guild members. In this way people would learn a trade and would return to their village or city to take up this work to provide the local community well crafted materials of daily living.
Coming forward nearly 800 years, Louis XVI lost his head, in part, because he was a weak king and "the people" had seen that a certain measure of wealth and survivability (ie: longer lived, less harsh lives) might be within their reach. Revolutionaries did away with the monarchy and swept away the Sainte Eglise. Former business owners and managers to the king created a new power center for France. Labor at first supported the Bourgeois class overthrow of the Monarchy thinking they too, the workers, would benefit.
Labor, in Paris at least, soon learned that the Bourgeois class now led by an Emperor (of all things) were not interested in sharing power nor in giving much to trades-people and laborers. After spectacular collapse of the Second Empire, and after the Prussians had surrounded the city to dictate harsh terms of surrender to Adolph Thiers, and after the Army blundered a canon reclamation exercise on Montmartre in 1871 a new political power vacuum was created. Labor quickly organized a Parisian government.
The new government passed laws that perhaps surprisingly lowered wages, improved the plight of the poor, ended child labor, ended night work at bakeries, separated church and state, returned tools that had been pawned during the Siege to their original owners, restricted business owners from fining employees, and allowed employees to claim business abandoned by their owners.
Organized labor was not concerned simply with economics. The trade
unions worked for rights of self determination and rights to be respected
as individuals. Their struggle was and still is against the idle, judging, entitled,
restraining forces, including monarchies, royalists, the bourgeois, the
rich, and the Sainte Eglise that represents and works for those restraining forces.
The 60 day old political experiment called the Paris Commune ended in a hail of monarchist bullets. The bloodbath is, even now, strongly remembered. Flowers are even today placed along the wall in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise where 150 of Paris' citizens were lined up and executed.
The church of Sacre Coeur that was built atop Montmartre to celebrate the monarchist "victory" over the Paris Commune remains a contentious symbol of power. Many Parisians would even today to this symbol be pulled down and forever destroyed.
During the second world war, rail workers formed the basis of the Résistance-Fer, the French Resistance against the invading Nazis. Employees of the SNCF railroad company organized themselves, sabotaged portions of the rail system, and fought against German occupiers. As the Allies were landing in Normandy, the Nazis rounded up SNCF employees executing 150 people and deporting over 500, many of whom died.
A year ago les gilets jaunes largely located in the countryside organized to protest actions of the current banker led government. This is an interesting development because during the Paris Commune paysans remained aligned with the monarchists. But today paysans reacting to the movement of production overseas (to China in particular) and they are reacting to the laws and policies of the banker government that wishes to accelerate the upward flow of money. President Macron has said he supports the failed Reagan economic policies of "trickle down economics."
It is against this long history that the current strikes take place. President Macron has made it clear he wishes to reduce the number of different retirement systems from 40 down to something "more reasonable." However, the labor unions knew that the government's lead negotiator had not declared (as he is required to by law) his connections to industries that would benefit from the proposed changes.
This sniffs of corruption at the highest levels. This sniffs of government working with corporate leaders against the trade unions. Only yesterday the negotiator has left his post to be replaced by a different minister who said immediately that the government will continue with the prior plan to change the retirement system
President Macron has none of the warmth of character that someone like Jacques Chirac had. Macron is a spread-sheet number-cruncher banker by trade. His attitude appears to be that by enabling the rich, work and money will "trickle down" to the working classes. He doesn't seem to consider that the rich will simply keep the money and to send work off-shore, just as they do in the US.
Just the other morning one of the ministers was interviewed on France2 and he said the current situation is not the fault of the government. My chin hit the floor when I heard that. While on the one hand the strikes have severely restricted our ability to move around and enjoy this city and this country, I have a hard time blaming the workers or trade unions.
As for our winter travel plans, we've heard that car rental agencies are "sold out." We've heard that air-traffic controllers are sympathetic to the trade unions and flights in-country may or may not be flying. We've watched as the train we booked to Nice is only one of two trains a day that are leaving for the south of France, so we might be going afterall.
The situation is not clear.
