Talk to the Snail

the strike of the month. Everyone’s at it – transport workers, the police, waiters, pharmacists, even porn actors. This was meant to be an exaggeration of what it feels like living in strike-torn France, and attentive readers might have noticed how coincidental it is that in the chapter about Paul West’s battle against dog poo, the street cleaners down brushes, condemning Paul’s shoes to an even thicker coating of caca.

Attempted satire aside, it is true that the French strike a lot. And the reason is obvious – their strikes work spectacularly well.

One of the main reasons is that instead of a stoppage by the Union of Left-handed Carburettor Polishers, a whole industry or the entire country will go on strike at once, so the government and employers almost always back down.

Union members in any industry, in any company, will probably belong to one of five big unions – the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), FO (Force Ouvrière), CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), CFTC (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens) and Sud, a new and powerful breakaway from the CFDT. If, for example, the CGT calls all its members out, it can paralyse trains, buses, factories, hospitals, power stations and TV channels (which is sometimes no bad thing).

Often, the only things weakening the strikes are the unions themselves, as they are fierce rivals. So a Paris transport strike can be undermined if all the CFDT drivers ¹³ stop work but the Sud members turn up out of spite.

The reasons for strikes are sometimes purely symbolic. Train drivers will decide, for example, that the government should do more to improve the lot of the ordinary worker, and will call a one-day strike (thereby depriving the ordinary worker of a day’s pay). Some people say that one of the reasons why Paris lost the 2012 Olympics was that, on the day the Olympic Committee was visiting the city, Paris transport workers came out on a twenty-four-hour strike. The city authorities begged the unions to postpone their day of action, but were told that it would be too complicated to re-schedule. The strike went ahead, the Olympic Committee saw a paralysed transport system, and London got the Games.

There is almost always a city in France without public transport because of a strike. Paris is usually hit as soon as the weather starts getting bad in winter. The reasons vary – sometimes it is because drivers are being attacked on suburban lines and want more protection. At other times it is just because the transport workers want to show how powerful they are.

Whatever the reason, though, commuters are remarkably tolerant. For the first couple of days there is total anarchy, with fights breaking out as people getting off buses stomp on the heads of people getting on – but then things settle down and a sort of resigned solidarity kicks in. People without access to a car start to hitchhike to work, get their bikes out of the cellar, or simply walk. And when interviewed by TV reporters, they will often say that they support the strikers. Any strike for workers’ rights ultimately protects all the workers.

Plus, of course, if there’s a strike by one group of workers, everyone has a good excuse for working less.

Striking a Blow

Big national strikes are usually a cause for celebration. The strikers take to the streets and it’s carnival time. The unions unfurl their banners and get out the recruitment leaflets. Train- and bus-loads of singing, laughing, face-painted strikers migrate to the big cities¹⁴ and the streets echo to the howl of megaphones and the squeaking of union leaders’ scalps as their heads swell along with their new public profile. Cafés along the route of the march make a fortune, and the demonstrators’ eyes water at the paraffin smoke billowing out from the merguez (North African spicy sausage) stands that line the route.

At the end of the demonstration, as the media are always keen to show, people’s eyes can start watering for a different reason. Recently, French protest marches have tended to end in clouds of tear gas and baton charges. This is not because strikers lose their temper – strikes, as I said, are more about carnival than carnage – but because big crowds attract gangs of so-called casseurs. These ‘breakers’, or vandals, are usually kids from the poor outer suburbs of the city, who see the protest march as an opportunity to loot shops, steal mobile phones from posh middle-class protesters and throw things at the police.

At the end of the demonstration (which always finishes at a pre-determined place), the protesters disperse to catch their trains and buses home or go for a self-congratulatory drink, and the casseurs take over. The plain-clothes policemen in the crowd wade in, make some media-friendly arrests by dragging young men across the tarmac by their hair, the riot police do their gladiator thing, and the world media have their ‘Paris under siege’ headline.

But, like everything in French society, these riots are stage-managed. Canny protesters get well out of the way before the riot begins. Local residents park their cars a few streets away. Shopkeepers lower their shutters. Many protest groups now hire their own security to identify and take out the casseurs. And recent student demonstrations have been patrolled by the young people’s parents, babysitting the protest march. Nothing must spoil the carnival.

Wagging the Chien

One of the reasons why the French feel a sense of worker solidarity even during a long transport strike is that they feel such a passionate hatred for their bosses, les patrons.

Since the revolutionaries decapitated the aristocracy, France has had plenty of time to create a new elite. And this elite does everything it can to distance itself from the grubby people on the production line. TF1, France’s biggest commercial TV station, wanted to make a reality TV series in which a company chairman would spend a day doing the most menial job in his company. But they could not find a single