Dacia : Taking stock after the strike.

They held out for almost three weeks, whereas the previous “big strike” lasted three days. Work resumed on Friday April 11 at the Dacia factory in Pitesti, Rumania, after an unprecedented industrial conflict. The automobile trade union at Dacia was demanding a 148-euro a month gross wage hike, and the workers actually obtained 97 euros a month (practically twice what management was offering in the initial days of the strike). And “70% of the workers agreed to accept the offer,” according to the leader of the union. The workers ended their strike and the factory was to return to normal beginning today, April 14.

The strikers, whose industrial conflict won the support of the local population and of the European automobile trade unions, won a sparkling victory for themselves and for the labor movement in Europe, putting an end to the myth of Rumania as an “easy” country where the multinationals could do as they pleased.

Moreover, management at the factory had emphasized the multinational aspect by sending the workers a letter in the first days of the strike to remind them, “innocently,” that the Renault group owns factories around the world, including in Morocco, Russia, and soon in India, all expected to be every bit as productive as the one in Rumania. The attempted blackmail didn’t work, no more than the lawsuit that tried to take advantage of the laws that seriously limit strike action. The strike was ruled legal on Wednesday by the court in Pitesti, two days before management finally decided to take the union’s demands seriously.

Renault’s obstinacy has cost it a lot, to the point that it is difficult not to see in management’s hard line a desire to stifle demands that could spread to other sectors and to other factories around the world. On Thursday, a “source close to the group” suggested that the strike had cost Renault 50 million euros in losses ; this figure matches the calculations made by several analysts, but was estimated at only 13 million euros by Christian Esteve, a member of Renault’s management committee and the president of Dacia’s board of directors. The figure takes on a new dimension in view of what the wage hike represents for the group.

The workers are going to have to work hard if the factory is to make up its backlog before the end of the month, which is what the unions want. It is Eastertide for the Orthodox church and there are five holidays in April, but there won’t be at Dacia. Moreover the workers will also work one Saturday and one Sunday in the course of the month to make up the factory’s losses. In the meantime, the families of the strikers will face difficult months before the wage hike begins to be felt. The long strike took a deep bite out of family budgets which were already stretched due to the big price rises in Rumania. Hence, it is necessary to continue to answer the appeal for solidarity launched by l’Humanité last Friday.