The French trade unions live on a double illusion. To believe that they can always influence the course of history and to think that the French are convinced that they have the power to do so. The CGT, perhaps even more than any other organization, suffers from this profound and incurable disease. For a long time, the central Montreuil dominated the trade union landscape but, over the years, it has continued to lose ground in the street as well as at the ballot box. Weakened, deeply divided, without strategic vision, it goes from semi-victories to semi-failures.
Obviously, the CGT – like all the other employee unions – sees in the pension reform a golden opportunity to show its muscles. To prove that it can still federate struggles and frustrations, forgetting in passing that it was not its demonstrations of force in transport in the winter of 2019-2020 that precipitated the abandonment of the previous reform but the epidemic of Covid. Is its mobilizing power greater today?
Towards a “giletjaunisation” of society?
Nothing is less sure. The recent conflict between the SNCF controllers at Christmas is rich in lessons: the protest arose outside of any trade union framework and the CGT railway workers, initially judging the movement too corporatist, jumped on the bandwagon so as not to be left behind. Like the political world, the unions are afraid of the “giletjaunisation” of society, of these outbursts of anger, which are difficult to master and control.
During his televised wishes, on the evening of December 31, Emmanuel Macron hammered that the French will have to work more. Will the postponement of the retirement age be the detonator of a conflagration of the roundabouts as were four years ago the increase in the price of gasoline and the battle of 80 kilometers per hour? ? For now, it is inflation, wages and more generally the preservation of purchasing power that are at the heart of concerns. Perhaps because the French know that the totem of retirement at 62 is no longer one.