Workers' Liberty

As British teachers are mobilising for a historic strike, their French counterparts are engaged in a bitter struggle of their own, in the face of a ferocious government attack and a scandalously timid union leadership.

The Sarkozy government recently produced the Pochard Report, which represents an acceleration of the neo-liberal educational reforms of the past decade. It recommends giving greater autonomy to local educational authorities to hire, fire and re-allocate staff, individual contracts between teachers and the local authority, rather than collective statutes upheld by central government, and the elimination of 11,200 teaching posts as of September 2008, and a further 80,000 (not a misprint!) will be lost by 2012. New teachers will be hired on insecure temporary contracts. The “suppression of posts” as it is referred to, will see class sizes increasing dramatically, the elimination of vocational courses, and teachers being required to teach an extra 71 hours a year, for which they will be paid substantially less than the current hourly rate. In all, the attacks are a clear prelude to British-style privatisation and private-sector involvement in state schools, the breaking of the teaching unions’ strength, the “precarisation” of teaching, and the creation of a two-tier system for pupils, leading either to academia and management or to deskilled McJobs. The government is throwing down a political gauntlet to the union; but it is workplace assemblies of teachers, unsupported by the union itself, who are taking it up.

I spoke to Angela, a leading member of the LCR’s teachers’ group. “The attacks are serious, and clearly part of a political programme”, she said. “The government is talking about ‘choice’, about giving schools autonomy and making them compete with each other; about subjecting teachers to close scrutiny; about taking kids who are struggling academically out of normal lessons like music and history, and putting them in intensive French and maths classes, to make sure that they come out with the basic skills necessary for shit jobs. It’s an employer’s dream. It’s no accident that these cuts and reforms are mainly being carried out in working-class areas.” 11% of the national cuts will be taking place in Paris and its poorer outlying suburbs, so the movement there is particularly intense. “The action is very sporadic at the moment. Some lycées (post-16 colleges) have been on strike either fully or on-and-off since the middle of February. Some have only just started coming out. Some aren’t moving at all. It depends how the teachers are feeling, how mobilised the kids are, and how badly the reform is hitting that particular school.”

The national majority teaching union, FSU, had only called a handful of days of action. On the first national strike, called after pressure from unofficial action in dozens of colleges, 55% of teachers went on strike, and the demonstration in central Paris drew 10,000 staff and students. But teachers, recognising that this was insufficient, continued the strike in many colleges, voting each morning or each evening in staffroom meetings. In neighbourhoods like Montreuil, where the cuts will be keenly felt, all the local colleges sent delegates to meetings in the Trades Council building (the Bourse du Travail) to co-ordinate their action. Several institutions are holding regular meetings with parents and students, and at more than one college, parents have come along to help build barricades and picket on strike days. A citywide general assembly of teacher activists called an unofficial demonstration on the 18th of March which drew around 4,000 people. But the lack of national union backing means that action is isolated, and concentrated in Paris, Dijon, Toulouse and Reims. “The union leaders are desperate for social peace”, Angela says, “They want to cave into the government. They haven’t even sold their dignity – they’ve given it away. If you don’t have a vision for a different society, you’re not a union. The FSU isn’t acting like a union. They’re trying to sell us out, but we won’t let them.”

The week before, I had gone around the East of Paris with comrades from the Communist Revolutionary Youth (JCR) to build for a demonstration in colleges. At Lycée Dorian, there was little movement, and too few teachers were striking to shut down the school. Up the road at Lycée Paul Valéry, however, teachers had blockaded the road in front of the school, and the pupils were clearly preparing to organise with them. A union activist told me “In the past 11 years, we’ve lost 11 support staff at Valéry. That’s the work of the Parti Socialiste and the PCF. But the UMP [Sarkozy’s party] is speeding things up – we will lose 11 teaching staff this September in one go. It’s crazy.” At Lycée Voltaire, teachers and pupils had come out together and blockaded the school, building a barricade across the doors from bins, crash barriers and planks of wood. I asked a teacher why they had done that. “After losing six days’ pay from striking”, she replied, “a lot of staff, including caretakers and assistants, are reluctant to vote to strike. If we blockade the school, everyone has an excuse for not coming in. They’re not treated as strikers, they don’t lose pay, they’re at less risk of being victimised. Students likewise, they often lose state benefits if they strike. A blockade of the school like this one protects them.” Some commentators say that blockading a school, and forcing teachers to go on strike when they had voted against was undemocratic. “It’s not democratic to destroy jobs, to destroy courses. Did we get to vote on whether we want to work for an extra 71 hours on crap pay? Did they think to ask us before destroying our education, democracy in our schools? They’re the one’s blockading education. They’re not blocking a school for a few days, they’re blockading the freedom to learn.”