The livelihood crisis makes us all vulnerable and angry
‘Class struggle’ might sound old-styled. But there is hardly a better expression to sum up what has been recently going on in a range of European countries.
France, again, emerges as the vanguard. It was clear from the very beginning of Emmanuel Macron’s second term that he would not have a strong mandate for imposing austerity-like reforms. Nevertheless, the Macronist government tries to push forward a pension reform, which would force the French citizens to work longer. There is a 70-percent opposition to the idea in the society, and the scale of popular mobilization on 19 January surprised even the trade unions, who united against the reform.
As Wojciech Albert Łobodziński writes from Lille, France, more than 2,000,000 protesters took part in more than 200 gatherings all over the country. Experienced unionists walked along with young people who feel that the government does not have any offer for them, nor any vision of the future they would like to live.
The popular anger is even greater, if the French consider who, personally, stands behind the reform. Nobody in Elisabeth Borne’s government needs to worry about his/her future, and most of them possess a wealth that is quite unimaginable from a point of view of an average French worker. The PM Borne declared to possess assets worth 1,67 million euro. And she is far from being the richest of the ministers.
The rich have the political power in Great Britain too - nobody working in the Downing Street 10 has been so well-being as Rishi Sunak, and even the royal family cannot compare to him in terms of wealth. So, when a fabulously rich Prime Minister starts speaking about ‘protecting working people from disruptive protest’, doubts immediately appear: isn’t he rather protecting people like him from the angry workers? Especially that the working people tend to support the newest wave of the strikes, and not to be angry with the unions.
One can also ask legitimate questions: what democracy is this, if it is the police only that suggest key changes in the laws on popular gatherings, and activists are to fear prison if their protest is ‘too disruptive’? And they fear it already, like an activist of Just Stop Oil told us.
In terms of protecting workers’ rights such as the right to form unions, to engage in collective bargaining and to go on strike, hardly any state of the world passes an exam. As Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat points out in her comment, according to the International Trade Union Confederation only 9 states of the world (or, more precisely, of Europe) were truly committed to these rights. Everywhere else different violations were noted - from sacking the unionists to brutally dispersing the strikes with the use of physical force. Even universally recognised democracies like France were not free of the anti-worker attitudes, and certain regions of the world like the Middle East or Asia-Pacific region remain absolutely horrific places to live and work.
Workers’ rights were not a key topic of debate before the Czech presidential elections, even though a polarization between metropolitan citizens and those from the periphery is pretty clear here, too. In a Cross-Border Talk with Veronika Susova-Salminen, Czech historian and co-creator of our project, we explain how the Czechs came to a point when they choose either a retired general or an agriculture oligarch for president. Even though we publish this newsletter after the elections, and the winner is known already, Veronika’s remarks about the deep division of Czech society remain valid.