FLORANGE, FRANCE, December 6 — Five thousand steelworkers here are fighting the closure of the ArcelorMittal steel plant, but at every turn they run up against the law of capitalism which seeks maximum profits over the workers’ dead bodies.
Workers at ArcelorMittal’s plant in Fos-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean blocked deliveries today in solidarity with steelworkers here. Some shifts struck and prevented rolls of steel from leaving the plant. Steelworkers at the company’s Basse-Indre plant on the west coast are set to strike on December 10 against plans to transfer sixty jobs to the Florange packaging plant.
Meanwhile, the union has been putting up its usual militant front while appealing to the government to force the company to keep the plant open, demanding it renegotiate its deal with ArcelorMittal. The local union leader, Edouard Martin, and a dozen union officials briefly occupied the plant, threatening to stage a sit-down inside. They then left when the bosses promised not to turn off the gas valves which keep the blast furnaces on standby.
While Martin condemned the French government’s “betrayal” of the workers, adding that “those who were supposed to help us are killing us.” Who’s kidding whom? It is these union misleaders who are betraying the workers. They repeatedly steer the workers into depending on a supposedly neutral government to protect them against the capitalist class. But the capitalist government was never supposed to help the workers in the first place.
Martin said, “We’re solemnly calling on you, President François Hollande, to take the matter in hand.” But in reality Hollande’s Socialist government serves the capitalist class. Workers can only depend on their own unity and organization in their fight against the bosses.
Last year ArcelorMittal idled both blast furnaces here because of over-capacity. The anarchy of capitalism leads the bosses to expand production wildly in boom periods and then shut plants in the bust that inevitably follows. Meanwhile, the packaging plant, which makes cans for the food industry, continues to operate because it is profitable.
During the recent French presidential election campaign, Socialist Hollande promised the thousands of steelworkers that if he was elected, he would pass a law forcing “a big company [which] no longer wants a production unit…to sell it” so that the plant will not be “dismantled.” Then, after Hollande was elected in May, a series of promises and “militant” statements by Socialist leaders were ignored by the company (which employs 260,000 workers worldwide), claiming the plant was no longer profitable. On October 1, ArcelorMittal put the Florange blast furnaces on permanent standby, leaving the Hollande government 60 days to find a buyer for the site.
Meanwhile, on November 6, the Socialist government announced a “competitiveness pact,” a “massive and unprecedented” 20-billion-euro gift ($26 billion) to the capitalists aimed at lowering the cost of labor and increasing the competitiveness of French companies against their imperialist rivals.
The measure exonerates the bosses from paying 20 billion euros in social security contributions on their lowest-paid workers. It will be financed by slashing 10 billion euros ($13 billion) from the government budget in 2014 and 2015 — including many social welfare programs — and by a 10-billion-euro increase (another $13 billion) in the value-added tax. That will mainly be paid by the working class.
Pretending to get tough with ArcelorMittal, on November 22 the government minister for industrial renewal announced possible temporary nationalization of the site, to give more time to find a buyer. But this was never more than a hollow threat, given that Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault admitted that nationalizing Florange would have cost the French government over a billion euros.
His “compromise” deal says, (1) there is no “white knight” buyer; (2) the blast furnaces will be moth-balled; (3) the 629 blast furnace workers will be offered early retirement or jobs at other sites; and (4) the workers at the packaging plant must submit to more exploitation to increase its competitiveness.
The union misleaders had little choice but to condemn such a deal that falls so far short of worker expectations. But the government said there would be no renegotiating the rescue plan.
Capitalism is truly the source of these machinations which dump these steelworkers on the garbage heap. Based on the planlessness of the system, the bosses overproduce at this plant the amount of steel they can sell at a profit. To maintain their overall profit in their fierce competition with rival steel bosses, they are driven to get rid of this particular plant and its workers who they have exploited for decades. Then the union misleaders and their Socialist government play with workers’ lives with phony militancy combined with defending the profit system. Their stance absolutely precludes the real solution: communist revolution to eliminate the bosses and their oppressive, exploitative system.
Workers must be won to understand that capitalism can’t be reformed, as the above class struggle reveals. It is driven by the pursuit of maximum profits, in direct contradiction to the well-being of the working class. Only the workers themselves, led by the communist Progressive Labor Party, can make a revolution that will put the steel mills and all of society in the hands of our class, which produces everything of value.
[Late bulletin: On December 7, ArcelorMittal agreed to mothball the two blast furnaces for six years.
