May Day’s social counter strokes.

Forty years later, labour unions will also celebrate the month of May 1969 out on the pavement. Labour Day, this year, focuses on the main topics of buying power, retirement pensions and clandestine workers.

After strike calls from labour unions in Education (FSU, Unsa-Education, Sgen-CFDT, Ferc-CGT et Sud-Education) and among those representing civil servants (CGT, FSU, Solidaires, Unsa, CFTC, FO, CFDT) for May 15th, the five French labour union leagues (CGT, CFDT, FO, CFE-CGC, CFTC) agreed, on Tuesday, upon a national day of action and of demonstrations, the following week, "in support of a collective retirement". The trade unions "Unsa, Solidaires (Sud) and the FSU" announced, Wednesday, that they would join the movement.

In many French cities, several unions will demonstrate their common ideals beneath the same banner : "wages, purchasing power, employment, retirement and peace" ; in Paris, as in Marseilles, Lille, Tours, Strasbourg and Bordeaux, the labour unions : CFDT, CGT, FSU, Unsa and Solidaires will take part in the same procession.

In the capital, the leaders of those organizations, with the exception of Alain Olive (Unsa), who will march in Strasbourg, will demonstrate side by side from la République (departure at two thirty P.M.) to la Nation.

Following its own lead, in the movement it initiated in Ile de France, a fortnight ago, the CGT will place the clandestine workers at the head of its group of marchers.

"Who could better illustrate Labour Day and international solidarity than the clandestine workers ?", underlined Francine Blanche, federal secretary of the CGT, considering that "they have earned their place among French wage earners".

The retirement question will equally take on a new importance after the unanimous front shown by labour unions against the government’s proposal.

Yet, everyone does not have the same objective : if FO and the CGT are fundamentally opposed to the changeover after 41 years of paying contributions to the retirement system, the CFDT and the CFTC are not opposed in principle, but consider that nothing has been done, particularly in regard to the employment of senior citizens, to avoid the continuation of individual contributions to the system, in 2012.

The watchword for May 22nd, deliberately wide in scope, does not presume "to deny the differences which exist among the several organizations in the way to approach the response to be given" the union organizations specified in their joint press release.