FLORANGE, FRANCE, September 26 — Workers waving trade union flags jeered French president François Hollande when he came to the Florange steelworks today. Workers also demonstrated their bitterness in front of the ArcelorMittal Steel Corporation offices.
In February 2012, the corporation was threatening to shut down the Florange steelworks. The union leaders endorsed Hollande for president and led the workers to welcome him with open arms when he came to the site during his presidential election campaign. He promised a law to force corporations to sell a factory instead of shutting it down.Gravestone that the bosses quickly removed from the Florange site after it was erected in April 2013. It reads: “Betrayal. Here lie the promises of change that F. Hollande made to the workers and their families in Florange on Feb. 24, 2012.”
Today, the steelworks has been shuttered and the law has been watered down to an obligation to “look for” a buyer.
For months, Hollande has been promising to bring unemployment down. When the latest figures showed the number of unemployed falling by 50,000 in August, the Socialist Party exulted that “the president has made the strategic choices that our country requires.”
In reality, the fall resulted from 77,500 workers being struck off the lists because, the phone system to which they are required to regularly call was broke. This resulted in the loss of unemployment benefits. Since opinion polls show support for the Socialist Party plummeting in the run-up to the March, 2014 municipal elections, the Socialists will stoop to any trick to try to persuade workers that the French economy is improving.
Official figures show 5,397,200 jobless workers, 19.1% of the workforce, including part-time workers who want full-time jobs.
Rulers’ Racism Rampant
When the government isn’t trying to deceive the working class with misleading data, it’s trying to divide it with racism. Interior minister Manuel Valls — France’s “top cop” — said on September 24 that “it’s illusionary to think that we’re going to solve the problem of the Roma population through integration alone.” He added that “the Roma are destined to go back to Romania or Bulgaria.”
This sort of racism can be expected from Valls. In June 2009, as mayor of Evry, he complained about seeing too many “non-white” faces at the municipal flea market.
An additional 840,000 households — mostly previously-exempt low-paid workers — will pay income tax this year. The Socialist government labels this “sharing the burden” of the austerity measures taken to guarantee that France pays its sovereign debt to finance capitalists.
This is the capitalist hell of unemployment and racism that the “lesser-evil” Socialist government presides over. It exposes the futility of participating in the bosses’ electoral circus and depending on their promises to solve workers’ problems.
Toasting Pesticides with French Wine
But workers here would be ill-advised to try to drown their troubles in wine. A report just published by the consumer protection group Que Choisir indicates that all French wines contain pesticides — from 300 to 3,000 times as much as is legally allowed in drinking water.
France does not limit the amount of pesticides that wine can contain. This makes the capitalist grape-growers happy while poisoning the working class (seven of the 33 different pesticides detected cause cancer). Scientific studies also show that vineyard workers have up to 11 times as much pesticide in their bodies as other people, and die more frequently of cancer.
Meanwhile, French bosses offered to lead an attack on Syria which workers in France roundly rejected. In France, like everywhere else in the world, the only solution to the ills of capitalism is communist revolution.