Nuit debout and the movement against the "labour law" in France

Workers' Liberty activists spoke to Gabrielle, a hospital worker and revolutionary socialist activist in France about the "labour law" and the attacks on hospital workers.

The situation at the moment: there is a double movement – the situation in the movement, and the situation in the hospitals. I’ll talk about the situation with the movement overall, which is currently somewhat paradoxical.

By that I mean, most of my colleagues are totally fed up, and are sympathetic towards the movement, but are not joining the mobilisations. So, they are not active, they don’t go to the demonstrations, the general assemblies. People are fed up, but there is not an expression of anger. There are workers who are saying, “there’s nothing we can do”; others saying, “well, the law has already been passed” – as the law was passed by governmental decree without a vote, under what’s called Article 49-3 of the French constitution, which is not at all democratic and was quite a shock.

But yes, there is a general feeling of impotence from quite a few people, who say, “there you are, you can’t do anything”. But there is a minority of people who have come out of the woodwork and are super-active and engaged: these people have really come from nowhere, and they want to fight. So, generally, these minorities have grouped themselves together around Nuit Debout, the famous protest movement in squares, which have created a bit of a climate within which people can get together, meet and so on.

On the other hand, these minorities are becoming more and more radical. So, you are getting increasingly substantial police violence on demonstrations – you can’t go on a demo any more without getting teargassed – and so, people are refusing to back down. So on the Mayday demo, the cortege was split in two by the police and the rear half was kettled and repeatedly gassed over the course of two hours. I was with colleagues from the hospital, and no-one said, “let’s go, it’s getting dangerous”. Instead, we stuck around, we got out the megaphone and started chanting “let us march! Let us march!”, and we stayed in a face-off with the police for two hours, saying, “we’re not going anywhere”. You see small signs of radicalisation like that, people who have had enough and decided that they are just not going to back off. And the movement isn’t going away either – but you get people looking for alternatives, going off in all sorts of directions.

The unions have been doing what they can to smother the movement. Now that there isn’t much of a movement going on, the unions have issued notices for an open-ended strike, while doing nothing to build it. In my workplace, I could go on strike until the end of May, but it would be pointless. The union has done nothing to promote the mobilisation of my colleagues. And in sectors where workers could go on open-ended strike, in a majority, and where there is a real mood for it, I am thinking here mainly of the railworkers, they have smothered the movement, to prevent such an action. It’s the betrayal of the century. But there is some pressure from some sectors. So there have been declarations of open-ended strikes lodged over the last week from various workplaces: some on the rails, some in freight driving, some in docks. So we’ll see where that goes.

Right now, we just don’t know where it’s going to go, the situation could turn around very quickly. I reckon we could have a little surprise next week.

In the hospitals, next week, I don’t expect a lot to happen. But amongst the railworkers, comrades aren’t sure whether you’ll have people turn out or not, or whether they’ll be able to carry on with the strike or not. There was a previous attempt to start an open-ended strike, which didn’t work out, so there is a little scepticism on this point. But, there is still a real mood for that kind of action, rather than 48-hour strikes. So the action might bring some people along, but not others. It’s very hard to know. It doesn’t look at the moment like it is really going to take off – but we’ve seen before in this movement that things can really turn around very quickly.

As for conditions in hospitals, and the mood amongst hospital staff: we have been having a lot of discussions about worsening conditions which the workers find frankly scandalous and abhorrent: about patient care and staff working conditions. So, for example, we discharge patients before they have been properly treated, and with no plan for proper outpatient care. So people find themselves out in the street with no help. This is because of a drive for so-called efficiency, to make sure that people spend the minimum possible period of time in the hospital, to save money. So, sometimes we have to discharge patients who have not finished a course of treatment. And they’ll turn up in A&E a week later.

In terms of working conditions, we had the Hirsch Plan introduced last year. It was a kind of pre-labour law. It concerned the 37 hospitals in Paris, and was a reorganisation of working hours. There was an attempt to introduce it into other hospitals in France as well. So, the Hirsch plan reduced rest days on a pretext of getting us to work fewer hours each day. And whereas previously your working hours were organised well in advance in blocks, with the Hirsch Plan, the objective is to organise your working hours around filling gaps in the service.

So, you’ll find yourself working an early, a late, a few earlies and then a late again with no logic at all. The consequences on private life and family life are serious. And the consequences for care are bad, too. So, you’ll be attached to this or that team permanently, with the same staff, the same location, the same kinds of conditions: and now, you find yourself being shunted off to other departments and teams as required. You get there, you don’t know the team, the protocols, the organisation of work and care that are particular to that department. So people get moved around like pawns.

The discussions in hospitals are very much concentrated around the Hirsch Plan and working conditions. But there is a big feeling of impotence about these things. There was a movement against the Hirsch Plan last year with a few days of strike action. But the Plan passed, so people felt the impact of the defeat. That is weighing on the discussions now. But the thing that you notice now is that it is really very easy to discuss politics and ideas. People might not be on the far left, not agree with it, but they are very willing to talk, and that is new.

Hopitaux Debout is an initiative of hospital workers who wanted to get involved with the Nuit Debout movement. They are really a collective of workers who were involved in the struggles around the Hirsch Plan last year. They’re not mostly from my hospital but they have undertaken various actions. They have done some really good things. There were various colleagues of mine who were really attracted by Nuit Debout, and I said, let’s go, but let’s go as a group of hospital workers, and try to meet up with other hospital workers, and then we can co-ordinate ourselves within hospitals. We tried it out, we set up an initiative called Hopitaux Debout, and we pulled in some colleagues from a nearby psychiatric hospital. We held some talks at the protest site. The issue with Nuit Debout today is that as there’s not much in terms of strike action in the hospitals, the involvement of our group of hospital workers in the protests is flagging a bit.

But the experiment allowed us to meet other groups of hospital workers, allowed us to discuss with colleagues, to try some new things – so, although it’s run out of steam a bit now, it’s not a failure. It’s really something positive.

Read more about the labour law - our interview with a railworker here.