PARIS, July 3 — On June 24, nearly 2,000,000 workers protested the bosses’ government’s pension “reform” which will cut pensions by up to 40% over the next 40 years and raise the minimum age for a partial pension to 62 as well as the minimum age for a full pension to 67. The 1.9 million demonstrated in 201 rallies and marches across France. In Paris, 130,000 marched.

Thousands struck — almost 20% of civil servants, 16% of local government workers, and 12.5% of hospital workers as well as half the Finance Ministry workers. These figures doubled the number striking during the previous May 27 action.

Polls reported two-thirds of the country supported the June 24 actions and 56% oppose the government’s retirement “reform.” Half of those opposing the reform said they would fight it.

Pushing back the legal retirement age will especially penalize the working class, most of whom don’t attend college and consequently begin working earlier.

The CGT union leaders who called the demonstrations were surprised that twice as many turned out as they had forecast. The campaign will continue throughout the summer, including holding protest rallies at stops of the Tour de France bicycle race.

The French cabinet is to approve the retirement “reform” on July 13. Demonstrations and another 24-hour strike are planned for Sept. 7, when the French parliament will debate the issue.

But the trade unions remain firmly attached to capitalism. They denounce the pension cuts as a “brake on consumer consumption” which will stall any recovery from capitalism’s economic crisis. Instead of worrying about saving the profit system which constantly attacks the workers, the working class needs to destroy capitalism and its exploitation with communist revolution. 

In Bangladesh, some of the most exploited workers in the world are militantly fighting back and are beginning to come together as a class. Since June 13, tens of thousands of garment workers (85% of whom are women) have closed down 700 factories, shut down main roads to Dhaka (the capital), erected barricades and lobbed bricks at the police who have tried to tear gas and beat the workers. Large demonstrations of workers have divided up into smaller groups and visited factories and brought the workers there out into the streets.

Three million textile workers toil for less than $25 a month. They work in 4,500 factories turning out garments for Walmart, Levi Strauss, H&M, Zara and Carrefour, who sell them for many times what the workers are paid. Besides receiving pennies an hour in wages, the workers work long hours, and are often not paid on time.

The workers are demanding that their wages be tripled. The big retailers like Walmart have made a fortune off the low-paid labor of women workers in Asian countries. But workers in Bangladesh, Vietnam (where 10,000 shoe factory workers recently went on strike), China and other Asian countries are demonstrating once again that exploitation engenders class struggle and some day, revolution. 

PARIS, June 29 — The strike is not over for all of the 6,769 undocumented workers who struck here since last October. On June 27, their delegates decided to maintain their action against all bosses who have not yet signed a “promise to employ.” This document (called a Cerfa in French), is required for “legalization.” But many bosses must be forced to sign them. And there are many details to be followed to obtain “legalization.”

All this week, informational meetings are being held by trade (construction, restaurant, cleaning and security, temporary worker, etc.) to explain the June 18 agreement ending the eight-month strike (see CHALLENGE, (7/7). Next week similar meetings will be held for all the strike-support organizations.

The strikers and their supporters are establishing a massive organization to monitor every striker’s application for “legalization.” This includes opening two or three offices in Paris and one in every département where there are strikers; local and Paris copies of individual data sheets, so that snags at the local level can be ironed out at the Immigration Ministry in Paris; and special monitoring of the “legalization” of undocumented workers against whom deportation orders are outstanding. All this must be done during the July-August holiday months.

While the strikers’ applications will be given top priority, other undocumented workers also will be helped to file for “legalization.”

Mass Multi-Racial Action The Key

Amid all these bureaucratic capitalist roadblocks, it should be remembered that it was mass, militant, anti-racist rank-and-file action against the racist French government that brought these immigrant workers whatever advances they’ve made. As the CHALLENGE article stated (7/7), “The very fact that they struck as undocumented workers was itself a huge victory. It shows the international working class that immigrant workers worldwide can make such a fight and should be supported by all workers.

“A crucial factor essential to conducting the strike was the forging of multi-racial unity, notably between workers of African and Chinese origin, which gave the workers the fighting spirit needed for the ‘illegal’ occupations of work sites….

“PLP has consistently pointed out that as long as the bosses can divide workers by defining some as ‘illegal’ because they have crossed capitalist-created borders — and enables the bosses to super-exploit them and use them against native-born workers — it will weaken the entire working class. That’s why PLP says workers should ‘Smash All Borders!’ — which can only be accomplished through a communist revolution that eliminates all bosses and all borders….

“The continued existence of ‘conditions’ still differentiates these immigrants from France’s native-born workers….”

As soon as the bosses think they can get away with it (and they do hold state power), they will try to break the “legalization” agreement. The racist labeling of some workers as “illegal” undermines working-class solidarity. It enables the bosses to super-exploit the world’s 215 million immigrant workers with lower wages, worse conditions and constant job insecurity, under threat of deportation if they fight back.

Like the outcome of many workers’ reform struggles under capitalism, this one is a compromise. However, by turning the continuing struggle into a “school for communism,” workers can go beyond the struggle for “legalization” and take state power for ourselves through communist revolution. 

Three and one-half TRILLION dollars….That is the net worth of the 1,011 billionaires in the world today! The wealth of these 1,011 capitalists is probably enough to feed, house and clothe all the billions who live in poverty. But that’s not the way capitalism works.

These blood-sucking bosses accumulated that wealth on the backs of all those who are ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed. It could take care of all the so-called “deficits” afflicting hundreds of millions of workers today.

But again, these bosses’ drive for maximum profits — the cornerstone of the capitalist system — is what puts tens of millions out of work, cuts budgets for schools, forecloses houses, all growing out of the nature of the profit system. When every president, finance minister, governor and mayor says “we” have to “share the sacrifice” of the crisis of capitalism, they represent the interests of these rapacious billionaires. And in cases of politicians like NYC’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, they are one and the same person, cutting budgets for schools, mass transit and all social services.

A recent Forbes Magazine reports all these gory details: the average net worth of these 1,011 is $3.5 billion (multiplying those two figures produces the above $3.5 trillion). The richest is Mexico’s Carlos Slim, with $53.5 billion, slightly ahead of Bill Gates. The U.S. has 403 on that list; China has 64; Russia has 62.

A system that produces such exploitation of the world’s working class is begging to be destroyed, to be replaced by a system — communism — where our class which produces all that wealth will share it according to need.