Striking workers with the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), one of France's largest unions, are clashing with French government forces after the union members blockaded oil refineries and depots in response to President François Hollande forcing unpopular labor reforms through parliament earlier this month.
Hollande's proposed legislation would make it easier to fire employees, increase employees' work hours, and move jobs offshore, in defiance of France's long history of labor protections.
The blockades shut down a quarter of the France's gas stations and forced the country to dip into reserve petrol supplies.
France's President François Hollande was forced to deny that the country was facing a nationwide uprising akin to the worker and student uprising of May 1968, as riot police clashed with protesters around the country late Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning.
The government dispatched the riot police to shut down picket lines….France is exploding as the "socialist" government attempts to repress workers.
Striking Workers Shut Down France's Oil Depots, Move to Blockade Nuclear Plant
Nika Knight
5 comments:
"Survival of the fittest...." should not be surprising...
Hollande, the sell out to the ruling elite, is desperately drying to screw over labor at the behest of his future paymasters. ----- so much for for the Socialist thing.
All power to the French working class for standing up to this atrocity.
Maybe the French will do what the Greeks did not do.
Gotta be able to compete to be fittest...get the costs down...
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/27/fran-m27.html
What the links says basically is that by adopting wage competitiveness, countries are engaging in a race to the bottom that suits the ownership class just fine since they pocket the difference, which shows up in growing capita/labor share.
Doh. This was obvious from the beginning and we were calling it several years ago.
Now the Chinese are robotizing, so the bottom is nowhere in sight yet.
The good side of this is that we may be seeing capitalist forces and relations of production maturing to the degree that new forces and relations of production will replace capitalism with a new system, and with robots replacing workers that system could be socialism.
This will be the result of "evolution or revolution," title of my master's thesis on this back submitted back in 1972. Remember the countercultural revolution?
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