French port strikes: Unions 'will get better working conditions', but can they curb militarisation?

Meanwhile, French ports are expected to be completely shut down this Friday as dock workers walk off the job over budget measures and the so-called militarisation of ports. It's part of strike action called for by unions in a number of countries, including Italy, Greece, Turkey and Morocco. Organisers say the movement could disrupt $2 billion worth of freight. Unions are responding to a European Union plan to incorporate defence requirements in civilian transport infrastructure. But unions say they refuse to, quote, become a link in the chain of wars by transporting weapons. Well, for more on this, I'm joined by Renaud Foucault, who's a senior lecturer at Lancaster University's Management School and an expert in politics and economics. Thank you very much for joining us on France 24. As I mentioned, this strike action involves 22 countries, and they all seem to have kind of different demands in this action. Can you tell us a little bit about those? There's roughly a hundred ports around the world. The one common core, as you described, is this general talk of militarization. So this is relatively specific. I don't think it's particularly realistic, given the world we're living today. But in every country, on top of that, the different ports are adding the national revendication. And so why is France so important in that chain? Several things. France has very high unionization rates in part. So they are going to be very powerful. It's also 7% to 8% of European freight. So they are very, very important. They have a very high bargaining power. But what they are asking is better conditions. So better conditions for them. So higher salaries. They're also very concerned. That's all over the world about automation. So they're scared that automations will take their job. So they want guarantees to keep their job. And then there is the real generic French context of... Struggles and fights and strikes everywhere, and so they are asking out of solidarity with the other social movements, higher minimum wage and the end of whatever budget the government is trying to pull at the moment, which is of course very peculiar given that there is no budget at the moment. We'll get to France's very specific case in just a moment, but could you tell us a little bit about this so-called militarization of ports? I mean, what the EU wants to do here essentially would invest money in these ports. Could that be a good thing? Would it revamp infrastructure? It's a strange trade-off, is it? Is that a lot of the current re-industrialization of Europe is military spending. A lot of the car factories in Germany that are not closed is because the country is massively investing in the military. All over Europe, there has been this deal with the Trump administration that we are ramping up military spending in exchange for not basically abandoning NATO. So this is a core part of public investment, just after COVID, all the public investment was into infrastructure like general civilian infrastructure. This time, it's largely military. So of course, this is not productive. This is not something that civilians directly notice. We don't notice that we produce a lot of guns and cannons. But for ports, it's clearly become a very important part of their business. And this international group is very, very wide. It's all over the world is seen as really A humanitarian cause, so they say we don't want to be complicit in wars in Iran, in Israel, and this is something that I think is very rare in a context where revendication of unions are mostly about living condition, working condition, and salaries. And that coordinated action, as you mentioned, across a range of countries, does that leverage this action? Does it mean that ships can't dock at one port and they can't just go to another one because that's also affected by the strike? Cities and ports traditionally, even in countries like the United States, are heavily unionized. So there are people who know how important they are in supply chains. If you cannot get through the port, you cannot get anything through, including today in Europe, sometimes liquid gas. And so this is something they know how powerful they are. But it's not clear to me what kind of resolution there is on this militarization question. And when you see, when you look around the world at places that strike deals, It's never on that dimension. What they do in the end is to say we're going to delay automation by five years, ten years. We're going to give you higher salaries. But the fact that we are living at the moment in a world where the West and Europe in particular is investing more in the military is not something you can easily stop by a negotiation with port workers. And in terms of the French dock workers specifically, as you mentioned, they're also concerned about domestic budget issues. Can you tell us a bit more about that? So there is a very, I think in my opinion, quite a vague statement about they are breaking solidarity and we want to support social requests, social concerns all around the country in a cost of living crisis. And this is part of what I see as a very strange time of demonstrations right now in France. The school demonstration, I can understand, there are high schoolers, they've seen the result of international ratings of the school, they see that the system is not going very well in France. that the money goes to pensions that should go to school. I get this bit. But the general strikes at the moment everywhere in France and the movement you mentioned for for tomorrow, they happen in a context where there is no majority in France. So the government, if they want to get the budget through, they need to ally either with Marine Le Pen or with the social democrats or with both. And all of them are actually calling for support for the demonstrator. So no one is in charge of the country. And it's not clear What they are asking to whom? So this is really six months before the presidential election, roughly chaos with no particular visible end point. So what concrete concessions, in your view, whether it be in France or more globally, across Europe or across internationally, what concessions would allow the unions to claim a victory in this case? Most of what I see around the world are delays of automation and I think it's a very interesting question because we are talking right now about massive change in the world of work. With intelligence, artificial intelligence and automations almost everywhere. And you see the difference in a context where workers have very, very high bargaining power. So if you're a computer scientist doing coding in your home, you've been replaced by ChatGPT and it's very hard to get any kind of voice in that. And so you see, OK, the world is changing. We all need to find new things to do. We need to transform our jobs and we need to adapt somehow to automation. But when you are workers in something with such... High bargaining power, say 95-90% of the workers are unionized, they can stop the freight, which is the food, the energy, everything of almost an entire continent, they can get those concessions. And I think they will get that, they will get better working conditions, and you will continue to see a lot of dockers working in ports for the next 5-10 years, perhaps much more than any other kind of manufacturing. In terms of the economic impact that organizers say it can have, $2 billion worth of freight disrupted, what does that actually mean? Does it mean that these goods are arriving a little later? Does it mean that companies are spending more on petrol? And who bears the cost of that ultimately? In a world that is as interconnected as ours, supply chains, they often go one day or even half a day time slot. So imagine you're a factory, you're building a car in Great Britain. You need supply chain that runs all over Europe and those things will go through harbors and the moment your item, one of your inputs, arrives in the factory, it's typically the day you use them. So they don't have massive stockpiles because transportation networks are so sophisticated around the world that you can afford that. So they save a lot of money by doing that. Every time you have a delay, of course if it's fresh food, It's rotten, that's very clear. But if you have a delay in one piece of one ingredient of building a car in Sunderland, North East England, because that part was built in Spain, this means that the price of producing a car goes up. And so the price that consumers will pay for the car goes up. All right, Renaud Foucault, thank you very much for your analysis on that. Renaud Foucault from Lancaster University. Thank you.