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International Socialism, Mid-October 1973

 

Richard Kirkwood

Immigrant Struggles in France

 

From International Socialism, No. 63, Mid-October 1973, p. 14.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

WHEN 30,000 North-African workers struck in the Marseilles area on the 3 September they did more than register a protest against racialism. They showed how the problems of immigrant workers are not the peculiar property of any one country.

France has more than three million immigrant workers of all nationalities, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Yugoslavs, Turks and Africans from a variety of countries. And they are vital to its economy. When the Algerian government responded to the recent wave of racist attacks and murders by stopping emigration the press of the French establishment was quick to give the alarm. Papers like the conservative L’Aurore or the right-wing Gaullist La Nation hastened to warn Algeria that it would suffer by not sending its workers. These papers are not known for their love of immigrants. They, like the head of the patronat – the French equivalent of the CBI – know that the departure of the immigrants would spell disaster for production and profits.

Despite their vaunted anti-racism the French bosses are not acting out of love for their fellow men. While they need the immigrants in France they also need them cowed and unorganised. It is immigrant workers who dominate the production lines in the giant car firms Renault, Peugeot, Chrysler (Simca), Citroen. Their passivity has been the base for a shop-floor dictatorship far harsher than anything in Britain.

In some cases like Citroen or Simca this is quite blatantly exercised through strong-arm squads and the existence of a bosses’ union which immigrants are forced to join as a condition of employment. Workers in Peugeot have told me that they think things are moving the same way there too. It has long been the case that a Yugoslav or Portuguese who joined a bona fide union was liable to find himself on his way home. Peugeot has also developed the habit of changing the nationality of its main recruitment – as the Yugoslavs have started to learn to fight, it is now experimenting with bringing in Turks.

But the local tyrannies of particular bosses are not the only forms of intimidation. Workers coming to France have few legal rights. They need a residence permit and a work permit to live in France. Under the latest regulations to have a residence permit you must have a work permit, and you cannot get that without a contract from your employer, who must also certify that you have somewhere to live. Until recently most immigrants were also legally banned from most representative positions in the unions.

All this adds up to a formidable battery of legal, mechanisms for the creation of a section of the working-class totally dependent on the bosses’ whims. With a generally low level of trade-union organisation and involvement – in Peugeot less than one in ten workers is in a union – it is a formula for easy exploitation. The racism of police and sections of the public completes the series of pressures on immigrant workers.

When the new regulations came into force this spring they created a whole mass of illegal residents. To those who had been brought into France without legal contracts or visas were added those who had a residence permit but no job or no ‘adequate’ housing. The response was a wave of protests, although the best organised section of immigrants, the Algerians, were not affected by the new regulations. In most of the major towns immigrant workers staged hunger strikes backed by demonstrations supported by the extreme left and, largely nominally, by the second biggest union the CFDT.

At the same time the French ruling-class received a sharp reminder of its dependence on immigrant labour. At Renault the predominantly immigrant semi-skilled assembly-line workers brought production to a complete and chaotic halt for nearly a month. This had no direct connection with the new residence rules, but undoubtedly reflected the profound discontent of immigrant workers in the most exploited sections of the car industry.

Despite the limited nature of the actual immigrant protest the French government retreated. Although residence is still to be dependent on job contracts, it will not be automatically cancelled when an immigrant leaves a job or is sacked. Immigrants will have a three month period of grace to get a new contract. ‘Illegal’ residents also won three months grace until the end of September to get themselves ‘legal’.

This minor victory showed the possibilities of a fight-back. It did nothing, however, to contain the steady increase of racism. The same month as the government retreated the authorities at Grasse – the perfume capital of southern France – reacted in a more traditional way in turning riot police to attack savagely a peaceful immigrant demonstration. The wave of attacks and murders which followed the killing of a Marseilles busman by a demented Algerian was the high-point of a process which has been going on for some time now.

Emboldened by the earlier struggles, however, the immigrant community fought back. This time it was the Algerians who led the way and they were able to mobilise their real strength. The strikes in the Marseilles area on 3 September and the Toulon area the day after, paralysed large sectors of local industry. Significantly the most dramatic effect was at Fos-sur-Mer, where a vast industrial complex is being built and is a sort of symbol of the immigrants’ situation. The thousands of immigrant workers who are building the complex struck only a few months ago when they learned that their jobs were in danger, that the workforce was to be run down and that the new advanced industries would have no place for them. Racism and industrial exploitation combined to make the 3 September strike almost 100 per cent.

The strikes began almost spontaneously. A small group of ‘leftist’ immigrants, the Arab Workers’ Movement (MTA) had put out leaflets calling for protest action. When a molotov cocktail was thrown by racists into a house occupied by North African workers it was the final straw and workers in the shipyards of La Ciotat between Marseilles and Toulon came out.

The MTA call for immigrant workers in Paris to repeat the action showed both the strengths and weaknesses of the situation. The MTA was almost entirely based in the south, immigrants in Paris were not facing the same climate of racist hysteria, and the response was limited. But there was a response – several hundred did turn out in Renault and in other factories the response was 100 per cent.

The other weakness that was revealed was the largely passive if not hostile attitudes of French workers. The unions made little or no effort to support the initiative and often opposed it. Where they did support it – usually under pressure – numbers of white workers did come out.

But the fight back of immigrant workers in France has already given rise to certain lessons of enormous importance for the fight against racialism elsewhere.

It has shown graphically that modern capitalism is dependent upon immigrant labour to man some of its key industries. When there was a further increase in the level of legalised racialism in Britain with the House of Lords’ decision on ‘illegal immigration’, the International Socialists raised the call for strikes of immigrants and their supporters. The French experience shows that such strikes are a viable way to fight back.

 
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