The outcome of the four month old struggle at the Lip watch factory in Besancon in France. where the striking workers were evicted last week by 3,000 armed police, may well be decided in the next ten days or so.
The move by the police, for which the French prime minister, Pierre Messmer, has taken personal responsibility, was timed to make it as difficult as possible for the workers to hit back. Much of French industry simply closes down in August for the holidays, reducing the immediate possiblity of sympathetic strike action to a minimum.
The Lip workers are now deprived of the organising base which they had at their disposal when they held the factory. This makes a rapid extension of the struggle to involve other workers a vital condition for the success of their struggle. Despite brave talk about continuing to manufacture and sell watches in new workshops - 'the factory is where the workers are' Lip workers seem to realise that such idealistic plans offer no real way forward. Indeed, although they still have a 'war chest' of 60,000 watches in reserve, smuggled out earlier for just such an eventuality, there are even doubts now as to whether there will be enough money to cover all their wages for August.
In this situation, the Government has not been slow to take the initiative. M. Charbonnel, the Minister for Industrial Development, has made it clear that the police will not leave the factory until the Government's redevelopment plan is accepted and work is resumed. The main elements of this plan are: conversion of the different departments at Lip (watch-making, armaments, and machine-tools) into separate companies; creation of a fourth company, probably to make watch-cases; and at least 300 redundancies. There are no guarantees about maintaining previous wage levels; and the Government has been extremely vague about how this redevelopment is to be financed. The workers have declared that this is unacceptable. They insist that Lip should remain one company, rightly regarding the Government's proposals as an attempt to split the unity of the workforce. They are also demanding-firm guarantees that there will be no redundancies and no reductions in wage levels. Moreover, they have rejected renewed suggestions, made by M. Charbonnel and encouraged by the right-wing paper Le Figaro, that they should set up a workers' co-operative - "how can one struggle against the employers if at the same time one becomes an employer oneself?' But as the strike leaders begin to formulate their own alternative plan to put to the Government, it is clear that the pressure is beginning to tell. Thus, while still insisting that the whole workforce must be kept on, they are now prepared to accept a gradual reduction in the number of jobs through 'voluntary redundancies' responsibility' of the Lip workers, which he and 'natural wastage'. Such a concession, partiHundreds more people have signed the petition cularly in a region where several other firms have already made cuts in the workforce, will affect many other workers besides those at Lip. If it is clear that victory at Lip depends on an extension of the struggle to other sections of the working class, it is equally clear that the potential for this exists. The determination shown by the Lip workers as the struggle developed, the imaginative methods of struggle which they employed, the way in which all major decisions were democratically referred to mass meetings of all the workers - these found a ready response in the working class as a whole. M. Charbonnel, Minister for Industrial Development An opinion poll conducted by the weekly paper, Les Informations, before the action of the police, showed that two out of every three people interviewed supported the struggle of the Lip workers. The Government's attempts to characterise them as law-breakers found little response — as one group of Paris workers commented, 'the law of tomorrow is decided by the workers in struggle today'.
Considerable doubt arises, however, as to the willingness of the trade union leaders to initiate such action. Even before the Government raised the stakes by sending in the police, sections of the union bureaucracy were coun selling moderation, fearful lest the movement might go beyond their control. In particular, the CGT, the Communist Party-led trade union federation, warned that: 'It is not a question of mindlessly copying forms of struggle which, while positive in a given situation, could prove to be not so good, and even detrimental, in other cases.
In his first statement after the eviction of the strikers, the leader of the CGT, Georges Seguy, was careful to praise the restraint and sense of "trusted would be maintained'. Georges & Conference:
In the Autumn, possibly in October, it is hoped Marchais, leader of the Communist Party, stressed the need to find a solution in the national interest.
The leaders of the other main union federation, the CFDT, and of the Socialist Party with which it is increasingly allied, were slightly more outspoken. But nothing has been heard of their original pledge to call out all CFDT workers in the public sector if force was used. Their vehe ment declarations of support, like those of the CGT and the CP, have so far not been accompanied by any plan of action to organise the extension of the struggle.
Part of mass rally held in Paris last week in solidarity with the Lip workers This lack of action by the reformist leaders despite their rhetoric flows directly from their electoralist perspective. A massive campaign of industrial disruption could upset the electoral applecart. So they have been careful to stress that, as M. Etienne Fajon of the CP put it, the "major lesson' of Lip is that it has shown the correctness of the 'common programme' put forward by the 'Union of the Left' (Communist Party, Socialist Party, and Left Radicals) in the ast electors. For them, any kind of mass action must assist their electoral campaign, rather than the other way around.
As a result, the solidarity actions which have so far taken place have tended to be spontaneous and scattered in character. The leaders of the main industrial groupings within the CGT and CFDT have endorsed strike action but left the actual details to their local bodies.
The only co-ordinated actions took place on the railways, where there was a one-hour national stoppage between 11 a.m. and midday last Thursday, followed by a large number of local 24-hour stoppages. affected were Toulouse, Dijon, Tarbes, Chalonssur-Marne, Chambery, Bordeaux, Limoges, Strasbourg and Grenoble. Otherwise, industrial action has occurred on a purely random basis - miners in Lorraine struck last Friday, for instance, while gas and electrici ty workers in Loire-Atlantique voted for a one-day stoppage on Monday. Most common have been brief stoppages to coincide with the many demonstrations and public meetings held in solidarity with the Lip workers; a mass rally in Marseilles, for example, was accompanied by , strikes in the sugar refineries, on ships in the harbour, and in the banks.
There have also been a number of actions by journalists after police in Besancon seized three journalists last Wednesday, beat them up, and held them for nine hours despite being shown their credentials. at France's main news agency, Agence France Presse, and on Thursday employees of the State 'radio and television network were due to hold a one-day stoppage.
But such actions are already beginning to peter out, with no perspective offered for developing them. In the absence of any initiative from the trade union leaders - a situation which is almost certain to continue even after the end of the holiday period - everything will depend on the ability of local militants to take up the necessary tasks of organisation, explanation, co-ordination etc.
Only in this way can the Government be forced to take responsibility for the capitalists it represents, by providing the necessary finance to ensure that no jobs are lost and no wage cuts forced through. Otherwise whole sections of the working class, which have come to identify the struggle as their own, will face demoralisa. tion as the Lip workers are forced to pay the price for the ills of a system in which they have no interests. John Marston