Cédric Franco is a CGT union representative at the Total oil refinery at Grandpuits, near Paris.
Click here for the Grandpuits strikers' website, which also has a PayPal link through which to send donations.
France's twelve refineries, all on strike. The % figure for each district is the % of petrol stations running out of petrol, as of Friday evening 22 October. Source: Libération.
At Grandpuits, as at France's eleven other refineries, workers are on strike against the Sarkozy government and its pension cuts.
On Friday 22 October, the police, on government orders, broke the picket line at Grandpuits in order to force 17 "requisitioned" strikers to go onto the site and help move stocks from it so as to offset the growing fuel shortage at petrol stations around France.
The legal basis for the police action was a law authorising the "prefect" (a senior local official appointed by the President) to "requisition" property and people when "the foreseeable or perceived breach of good order, public health, tranquillity and public security demands it".
The unions are challenging the "requisition" on the grounds that the law is intended to cover emergencies of war and the like. In the meantime, the pickets remain, and the refinery is not producing.
On 23 October Cédric Franco and other CGT activists spoke to AWL members who visited the picket line at Grandpuits.
They told us that among the 500 workers at the refinery, about 90% of the shift workers are on strike. Among the office workers on the site, about 10% join the strike for two hours each day.
The differential is partly because the production workers, like other workers in France whose work has until now been recognised as exceptionally arduous, stand to lose more from the Government's proposed changes than do office workers.
The strike is organised by the "Intersyndicale" - the joint trade union committee - which at Grandpuits includes only two of France's many union confederations, CGT and CFDT, with the CGT clearly the majority union.
The Intersyndicale organises mass meetings of the strikers - "General Assemblies" - at every shift change, i.e. at 6am, 2pm, and 10pm daily.
Grandpuits workers have sent delegations to do mass meetings at neighbouring workplaces, especially to encourage participation in the national days of action. They have been to France-Télécom, EDF [electricity supply], rail depots, and mail offices.
High school students and other workers have come to the Grandpuits picket line, and links with them are valued. Some of them are sons or daughters of the Grandpuits workers.
What did the CGT activists think about the "Sarkozy out" slogans on the big demonstrations?
They immediately agreed that they want Sarkozy out. But what to replace the current government with? That is more of a problem. "The Socialist Party - well, that's Ségolène Royal or Martine Aubry... There is no-one on the Left in whom one can have confidence".
The mood of the workers seemed to be one of solid self-assurance that they can hold out for considerably longer, but not of lavish confidence about the movement spreading and overwhelming the government.
We shall see, though. One worker from another petrochemical factory nearby, visiting Grandpuits to show solidarity, said that he thought that his factory would stay out on other issues even if the pensions issue is resolved.
He also said that the "requisitions" were really a stunt for the media, to show that Sarkozy was being tough.
At Grandpuits we also met local government workers from Nanterre, on the other side of Paris, who had come to the refinery to show solidarity.
At Nanterre, they said, they had had a strong turnout from local government workers for the days of action, though less in between those days.
Some town halls, and the central "technical services" of the council, including the council kitchens which supply all the schools and offices, have been shut down on the days of action.
There has been a stronger turnout among postal workers in Nanterre than elsewhere, they told us, because Olivier Besancenot, presidential candidate in 2007 of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, and a well-known political figure in France, is himself a postal worker there.
Even with Besancenot's presence, however, the strikes among postal workers have been minority strikes, unlike those among refinery workers and train drivers.
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Getting to Grandpuits
I just wanted to share our experience of getting to the Grandpuits refinery. We found out that this was an important place to visit from French comrades when we arrived in Lille on Friday night.
Grandpuits is in the middle of the countryside, and our navigation skills not great, so it took quite a while to find. When we got there, the road to the refinery gates was blocked by riot cops - the CRS, ie the people who murdered hundreds of Algerian independence activists in Paris in 1961, dumping them in the Seine. We had spoken to a couple of the Grandpuits workers' union reps on the way, and they told us that there might not be many people there on the weekend. When we explained our reasons for visiting, the cops told us no one was there!
Then a worker drove out... We asked the CRS again, and this time were told that they had their orders and we couldn't go in. When another worker drove out, we spoke to him and he advised us to park round the corner, behind some trees where the police couldn't see us. It worked, and from there we walked across a sort of refinery garden to the main gate where the pickets had set up... Weekend or no weekend, there were about fifty people there, and we were made very welcome.
Sacha Ismail