The ’Global Economy’ Threat Moves to France

By Carl Bloice

It was, as French trade unions have said in no
uncertain terms, blackmail. In mid-July the 820 workers
at the Robert Bosch plant voted to accept a new
contract that increases their work week by one hour -
with no increase in pay - cuts bonuses and freezes
their salaries for three years. The company, Bosch
France, a subsidiary of the German Bosch parent, had
placed an ultimatum to the employees: accept the
proposal or a slated new production line will be
relocated in the Czech Republic. The move came quickly
on the heels of a similarly coerced decision by 41,000
workers at a Chrysler-Daimler plant at Sindelfingen,
Germany to give up $620 million in wages and unpaid
hours or see 6,000 of their jobs moved to factories in
Bremen, in northern Germany, where the hours worked per
year is 72 hours longer than at Sindelfingen, or to
South Africa.

The previous month in Germany, Siemens AG put a take-
it-or-leave-it demand to phone factory workers: five
more hours a week with no additional pay or the jobs go
to Hungary. ’They chose to keep their jobs,’ the
Associated Press reported. Surprise.

The drive by the bosses of Europe to extract more hours
work for less pay per hour, to compel employees to give
up break times and accept shorter vacations, is
spreading and the capitalists conducting it are united
in their determination to see it through. It is, in
essence, a move to suddenly wipe out the gains workers
have made in pay, benefits and available leisure time
over the past half century. The aim is to maintain
profits, not by raising prices (they make Mercedes at
Sindelfingen and put together fancy phones at
Venissieux) but by making production workers toil more
hours for no more pay. The BBC recently reported on
’new research’ that revealed that 93 percent of
corporate heads surveyed said they would like to do
away with the mandated 35-hour workweek that became law
in 1999.

Incidentally, the plant at Venissieux is reported to
have turned in 1.1 billion euros last year.

As I mentioned in an earlier column, this is all being
carried out under the banner of ’the reality of the
global economy.’* It comes in the context of the larger
process of economic globalization and the situation
created by the enlargement of the European Union. ’Most
of the 10 new member nations in the European Union
trade bloc - including the Czech Republic - are in
Eastern Europe, where the work force is hungry for
employment,’ reported the BBC July 20. ’If France does
not move quickly, the jobs could move east in droves.’

Across the continent, European workers are being
unfavorably compared to those in the U.S. where we work
longer hours with less time off. Another surprise.

You’d hardly know it by the media reporting,
particularly in this country, where the illogic of the
employers’ arguments shapes the story line, but there
is major resistance to the longer hours drive on the
part of the workers affected and their labor
organizations. "This has to end - us competing with the
last country that joins Europe,’ said Rene Fraresso, an
official of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT)
at Bosch. ’If this is what they made Europe for, it’s
not worth it."

In France, the move to lengthen time on the job through
hard-nosed contract demands and threats to move
production to low-wage areas abroad is being combined
with a more general assault on the 35-hour workweek law
enacted in 1999. French President Jacques Chirac says
the law should be relaxed, but so far has not suggested
reversing it. French observers are predicting that such
a move would evoke massive protests and a major
political conflict.

"When the school year starts in September, we are going
to organize union actions to win back our rights," CGT
union official Serge Trucello told Reuters. "It [the
vote at Venissieux] must not in any case be applied to
other Bosch plants in France," said Jacques Le Bars, a
leader of the other union at Bosch, CFE-CGC.

The Communist daily l’Humanite has termed the longer
workweek drive ’part of a project lowering the
collective guarantees of the workers,’ noting that ’in
the thirties the Comité des Forges, a manufacturers
association, vilified the 40 hour work week and the
paid vacations.’

’Today right wing politicians, business leaders and
neoliberal thinkers condemn ’libertarian hedonism,’"
the paper went on, ’They want to change completely the
labor code, take away guaranteed jobs, claiming to
defend the ’work ethic.’ These big strategies against
all the social rights have Europe as a battlefield.

’The blackmail is the same in France and Germany; the
response of the working people will be strong on both
sides of the Rhine River, and well beyond!’

Carl Bloice is freelance journalist in San Francisco,
California