French Workers Are Being Steamrolled by Macron, but They Could Learn a Thing or Two From India’s Farmers

‘Victories for ordinary people are rare and rarer still our times dominated as they are by Money and Strongmen. In France – where I write these lines – the President Emmanuel Macron has decided to whittle away the protections for the French working-class. These are hard-won gains, basic rights to enhance the lives of the French people against the pressures of work to make a living. These rights include overtime pay and vacation time, both barriers against the push from employers to make their employees enchained to their desks and their machines.
Macron takes his orders from the French employers’ association (Medef), which has long been eager to cut unemployment and medical insurance, demolish vocational training schemes, prevent subsidies for housing and annul the minimum wage provisions. Cleverly, Medef hides behind rhetoric of individual advancement. For instance, it does not say that it wants to cut unemployment insurance so as to decrease its own contributions to the well-being of the population. Rather, it suggests that if the workers do not pay into the insurance scheme, they will have more money in their pockets for consumption. But, of course, this also means that when they are unemployed, there will be no mechanism to help them get by.’
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