Following the massive strike movement of last Autumn which ended in stalemate, French rail workers are preparing for the next round. I met with Joachim, a union activist and member of the revolutionary group the LCR at Gare Montparnasse in Paris to talk about the situation. He told me about the atmosphere at the station in the wake of November’s battle with management over pensions.

“It’s over for now, and we didn’t win, although we did get some concessions out of the employers. For instance, originally they wanted us to retire at the age of 60, but we fought them down to 57. So, people don’t feel beaten. There’s not this feeling of demoralisation that you had in 2003, when we lost a big strike. But people do recognise that we made mistakes, and are talking about how to do it better next time. As a member of the LCR as well, people recognise that we were the only political party really fighting their corner, as opposed to the union tops or the Socialist Party (the major New Labour-style ‘left’ party in France).

“For one thing, workers are realising that we put too much store by what the union said. We were holding daily meetings at each station during the strike, to vote on what to do next. But we were letting these meetings be directed by union full-timers, regional organisers, often who hadn’t worked on a station for years and years. Members are saying that in future, we mustn’t let that happen again, we have to take what the CGT leaders say with a big pinch of salt. Some people were so disgusted with what the CGT did in the strike that they just tore up their membership cards and left. What I’m saying to people at my station is, ‘if you leave the union, you drop out of activity, you become isolated. Stay in the union, but keep criticising the leaders, keep an eye on full-timers.’

“Another thing is that as rail workers, we found ourselves isolated in the strikes. We were concentrating too much on narrow demands of our own, at a time when the whole public sector was ready to go out on strike. We should have been doing more that just fighting on our own conditions. We should have been broadening our demands out, sending people to talk to workers from across the public sector like the teachers and the gas workers, thinking bigger. As it was, the union leaderships and management could just make deals industry by industry, sometimes even grade by grade, and pick us off piecemeal. Together, we could have won more.

“A common gripe people have at the moment is pay. As a ticket inspector, I have quite a low starting salary, but you get a lot of bonuses, for things like having to sleep away from home, and early starts. Those bonuses take my pay up from 1,300 euros to 1,700. What management are doing is encroaching on those bonuses, one by one. So this month they’re trying to cut back on overnight bonuses for ticket inspectors, but next month they’re ‘reviewing’ a different bonus for a different grade. A lot of people in the public sector are getting squeezed like this at the moment, and you’re also seeing some strikes in parts of the private sector, like cleaning staff at airports, and Renault employees. We really have to seize on this.”