Manti-lockdown attacks, minimum service, threats against the militant actions of the CGT-Energie: since January 19, the attacks of the executive against the right to strike have intensified. Faced with the massive mobilization against a very unpopular pension reform, the danger of new attacks against what has always been a right to protest should be a major concern for all those who fight for the defense of our democratic conquests.
The right to strike, a right to “block”
In French law, the protection of the strike has a constitutional value, enshrined in article 7 of the preamble to the 1946 Constitution. A fundamental conquest, the strike consists of the suspension of the employment contract and therefore of the bond of subordination to which the is submitted. The right to strike constitutes a real right to insubordination and revolt. And, in this matter, the contours of legality are constantly evolving.
According to Philippe Waquet, former dean of the social chamber of the Court of Cassation, “labour law was built, in large part, thanks to strikes. And the difficulty of regulating the strike is precisely due to this irreducible character of the phenomenon, which escapes the classic categories of a law built around the image of the good father of a family, prudent and diligent”. Thus, from the celebrations at Renault-Billancourt in 1936 to the strike by Lip employees in 1973, the right to strike has always led to much more than the “blocking” of the economy: strike pickets, roadblocks, occupations factory are all ways of expressing this fundamentally political freedom.
In the name of the “duty to work”
Faced with this, attacks on the right to strike have marked the history of the social movement. We can of course think of the thousands of miners dismissed for having participated in the great strike of 1948, marked by the brutality of police repression. Later, successive governments sought to tame this right to protest through the establishment of permanent legislative measures. In this sense, the law of July 31, 1963 established mandatory notice in public services. Adopted a few months after the victory of the miners despite their requisition, it aimed to prevent any strike without union intervention and to repair the affront to President de Gaulle.
Since then, with each major strike, the debate on the establishment of a minimum service and the hardening of disciplinary sanctions against strikers resurfaces in the name of the “duty to work” or the “continuity of services public”.
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