[reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.]
Mayday came early to Paris this year: earlier than in 1968, when it fell on the 13th. That was the day when a Parisian workers' march, a million strong, ignored the union handlers telling them the march was over, the point had been made, it was time to go back home and back to work tomorrow.
This past Friday a group of workers, three hundred strong, ignored their union handlers and decided to occupy the Bourse du Travail, the umbrella union hall in Paris. The struggle goes on, or rather, the struggle reaches that particular point in all struggles where there’s no solution except forward.
Same union, different workers. The workers who presently occupy the Bourse are members of the "sans-paps," the "undocs", workers, mostly African, who like undocumented workers in America provide a vast, underpaid and expendable labor pool, somewhat better off in France than in America because a fair number are highly skilled workers in small shops; worse off than in America because Sarkozy’s government has had some success pandering to the xenophobic fears of its constituents. Roundups and harassment of immigrants are common, and the Government recently created a "Minister of Immigration and National Identity," one of whose higher-ups was recently overheard telling a black employee in a supermarket to "go back where you come from."
Into this the CGT, one of the largest unions in France, has been dragged, or perhaps has dragged itself. The CGT is traditionally allied with the French Communist Party, and like the Communists it’s been hobbled by its own priorities. Like most American unions and like the PFC the CGT has so closely tied its power to negotiations that it can’t stop negotiating even when there’s nothing to negotiate. That was the motive for Friday’s occupation: after months of struggle and negotiations the CGT had managed to get legal working papers for all of two workers.
Beyond that, the CGT, like the Communists, has a long history of discomfort with the very concept of colonial exploitation – it’s okay to denounce racism and colonialism in general, just not racism and colonialist exploitation by the French Government – hey, isn’t that what Americans are for? So the CGT’s cautious and gradual realization that it had no choice but to stand up for all workers has put them in a place that the French Left has tried to steer clear of for over a century: caught between a repressive state, a resentful white working class, and now an immigrant worker’s movement that’s starting to feel its strength. Last week sans-paps staging an occupation of a building site in Paris were set upon by right-wing thugs with metal bars: a CGT representative had his jaw broken in the melee. No wonder the union higher-ups who today see their offices invaded by the people they want to organize are bawling about ingratitude. But then, they were bawling about ingratitude in 1968. Sorry, comrades: there is no way but forward.