France, Flying, and Football (or: Parti Socialiste Scores An Own Goal) ROY BLAKEY

I like football, I really do. Maybe that's why I'm so bothered over the reaction of a lot of my mates to the strike by Air France pilots just days before the World Cup was to begin in Paris. See, I look at football as a working class sport, a universal sport really, that ties in with working class culture in that same way that polo or blood sport does with the upper classes. In an ideal world, I would like to think that football fans would automatically show a sense of solidarity with any situation where the rights of workers are under attack. To my great dismay, I learned otherwise when I spoke to a few people at my pub during the strike.

'Stupid bastards trying to bollocks up the World Cup,' came the response to my question about what people thought of the timing of the strike. Other rather ignorant and embarrasing comments followed about the French, as if there was something particular to that nation about labour and wage issues that we somehow didn't have in Britain. It was down to me to point out that the timing of the Air France Strike could have not been more perfect, at exactly the time when the world's attention was being focused on - what else - people traveling to France! The strike reached a worldwide audience in a time when unemployment across the continent is at an all-time high, and the power of the market to erode the power of labour appears to increase with each passing week.

Yet after explaining my thoughts about the strike, and how the issues of that strike affect each of us who work for a living and are concerned about the future of the jobs we have (or in the case of a couple of this lot, don't have), the consensus of this small group, most of whom consider themselves to be socialists or at least socialist sympathisers, was expressed as follows: 'That's all well and good, but you can't go mucking up the World Cup.'

So it is with an understanding of that common and widespread reaction, even from a few working-class lefties, that I approach the matter of how the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin intervened to end the strike. Air France has been a thorny issue for the year-old government since it took office, the main point being the privatisation of the state-owned airline. Rhetorically tough on privatisation at the start, to the point of provoking the resignation of the company's president, Christian Blanc, the Jospin government has gradually moved to a conciliatory position with those who are just itching to have the French national air carrier on the capitalist auction block. Now the Jospin government has agreed to put 42% of their stake in Air France on the market, still giving them a majority share of 53%, but opening up the ownership of the airline to global investors.

The pilots, who are the among highest paid in Europe, have opposed privatisation, even when it was proposed that they would be given 10% of the shares in return for a 15% cut in pay. The idea was that the pilots would love the chance to own a part of the company, the shares of which are supposed to grow in value and thereby provide enough to compensate for the pay cuts. But with long established European national businesses being hunted down and consolidated into multinational mega-congloms as fast as rabbits breed, the pilots looked at the long term prospects and decided to reject the offer. The job that pays the bills today is far more valuable to a worker than unsure promises from the stock market of tomorrow. And that brings us to the strike itself.

Unlike the strikes of November 1995 which helped topple the conservative government of Alain Juppé, the Air France strike was not popular. The issues behind it were the same as almost any other strike these days: wage cuts, working conditions, and most significantly job security in the midst of labour market reforms taking place everywhere in the new Europe. But despite the brilliant timing of the strike to coincide with the World Cup, it nevertheless placed the Jospin government in a no-win situation. A World Cup that no one could get to presented the possibility of an international embarrassment for France on a scale which, as bizarre as it may sound, would have likely toppled the government. Stronger governments have been toppled by less.

The fact that this government is one of what the French call 'co-habitation,' with a Socialist prime minister and a conservative president (Jacques Chirac) who has the power to call elections, means that any large blunder will offer an opportunity to Chirac to do just that. Depriving the French people of their moment to shine as hosts of the World Cup because of a strike would have been a massive political blunder for the Socialists, an act of political suicide. That choice between the two is what made the strike unpopular, the same choice that my mates made in Britain, not for workers who fear for the future of their jobs, but for a speckled ball. It raises the question of how much a Socialist government or a trade union can do if the people are against them.

For those of us who stand by our politics over and above most other things, we shouldn't take this matter lightly. It's something we have to think a great deal about before we simply dismiss the Jospin government as going against the workers. We have to ask ourselves to what extent French workers even saw this strike as being in their interests. Of course we could do as we always do. We could stand up and say, 'I don't give a toss about the World Cup, there are workers here who are making a statement not just for their livelyhood but for all of us!' We could take the stand that the World Cup should very well be cancelled until the question of European unemployment and jobs is settled. Perhaps I'm the mad one, but those things don't seem unreasonable to me. However, the ugly truth of the matter is that to take such a stand is to find ourselves overwhelmingly rejected by the working class itself, a working class that can't understand why anyone would go 'mucking up' their World Cup.

I'm not happy about the way the Jospin government handled the strike, but I also understand that no government, particularly in a political democracy, can go against the will of the people who put it there. Whether one wants to view Jospin as justified in saving his government or as someone who sold out the pilots, what continues to irk me more than the disappointing results of this strike (the pilots did settle on the shares, although one would be wise to watch this story develop as the year goes on) is that I could not change the views of my own friends on the matter. That makes me think that at the heart of it, as much as we'd like to blame them, it's really not our parties in government that are the problem. As socialists, we need to go back to organising the people at the grass roots, so that when the choice between a job or a football match arises, we have a working class that can put the games away and get down to the serious business of defending their interests, instead of helping our team score goals against ourselves.