French marchers demand 35-hour week

May 11, 1994
Issue 

Tens of thousands of people are expected to demonstrate in Paris on the weekend of May 28-29 to demand a 35-hour week with no loss of pay. Demonstrations and meetings will be the culmination of five separate marches from different parts of France organised by United Action against Unemployment.

Since the formation of the campaign, organisers have collected 40,000 signatures on the 35-hour-week appeal, in 1200 different workplaces.

The five Paris-bound feeder marches, each of which has its own tributary demonstrations, are already under way. The first started from the small town of Carmaux, where there is 13% unemployment, in the south of France on April 6.

Thirty people, mostly unemployed, began the 800 km trek to Paris in pouring rain. Nearly 200 people turned up for a rally to see them off. Before they left, the rally was joined by local coal miners, members of the CGT union federation, who had gone on strike to join the demonstration.

Jose Sanchez, secretary of the Carmaux miners, said: "Governments have introduced poverty and poor living standards through their so-called 'social' plans ... Together let us create conditions to stop the loss of jobs and redundancies by reducing the hours of work with no loss of pay, by job creation, by maintaining public services."

Also speaking at the rally was Hubert Constacias, secretary of the National Movement of the Unemployed and Poor, who presented the aims of the march: 35-hour week moving to 30 hours, creation of jobs in sectors where needs are not met, no more redundancies, support for organisations of the unemployed.

The other four feeder marches come from Calais and Boulogne in the north; Brest in the far west; Narbonne and Marseille in the south-east; and Mulhouse and Strasbourg in the east.

The campaign has existed for five months. A leader of the movement, Raymond Vacheron from the CFDT union federation, explained in an interview with the French socialist paper Rouge: "We launched the appeal with an initial list of 1000 signatories. It has been an enormous success — no petition in France has ever got such support. We built the campaign by intervening in every social struggle in the autumn and winter ... The other aspect which gives it strength is that it is supported by people in every trade union federation — cooperation between the different federations is very rare.

"The demand for 35 hours with no loss of pay offers a unifying theme that can be used to mobilise. It is our alternative to those who want to lower the price of labour, attack union activists and the unemployed and deny the right to full-time employment."

The actions to demand a shorter working week to deal with unemployment represent a breakthrough for the European labour movement. Since the German union federation IG-Metall ran a campaign for 35 hours in 1984-5, the demand to cut working hours to share the work has remained at the level of propaganda by socialist groups.

Then in the March 1993 French elections the ruling Socialist Party proposed cutting working hours, but at the same time cutting pay. This created the opportunity for a national debate on how to solve unemployment, with wide sections of the labour movement demanding work sharing with no loss of pay.

As Hubert Constacias puts it: "Every day in France on average 1000 people lose their jobs. Productivity increases amount to one extra hour's work per worker every week, but the employers got the benefit. The idea of work-sharing has become a fundamental question in French politics."

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