THE WORKERS OF FRANCE

BEYOND the Paris the world knows --resplendent Boulevards and leafy esplanades, elegant restaurants and sunny sidewalk cafes--lies a ring of small communities with names like Aubervilliers and St. Ouen, Boulogne-Billancourt and St. Denis. No soaring monuments to Western civilization grace their drab and grimy streets. Instead, the stigmata of the worst of the 20th century abound: the sprawl of brick factories, the grey, faceless slabs of low-income housing projects. All day big diesel trucks thunder up and down belching fumes, their oversize tires slapping the ancient cobblestones. This is the Red Belt of Paris, so called because most of its towns have Communist mayors. It is here that the Parisian worker lives and plies his trade.

sb

Out of the Red Belt came the muscle that nearly overturned De Gaulle; what the students began, only the French workers ever had any chance of finishing. On the surface, the cry for "worker power" seemed an unnecessary and ungrateful response to the Fifth Republic. In the decade of Gaullism, France's workers, particularly the skilled ones who earn an average $195 each month, have enthusiastically entered the consumer economy. Fully 70% of all workers' households have a refrigerator, a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner. Though only 46% of all French families own TV sets, at least six out of ten workers' families are able to set tle down on the canape at night to watch le football matches and the pop-singer contests. More than half of all French workers own a car, and a vacation in Spain or even Greece is no longer the province of the well-to-do Frenchman.

The worker's car and TV set are often bought on credit, a relatively new notion in France and one whose in escapable rhythm of monthly bills has proved a painful education. Wives often must work to make ends meet; workers seldom have any savings to fall back on in times of sudden disablement or job loss; life insurance is virtually unknown.

French inflation has cut heavily into the wage gains of the decade, and, among their Common Market peers, French workers lead the way both in the number of hours spent on the assembly line and in enduring the highest national cost of living. Though he made less money several years ago, Citroen Worker Pierino Fausti, a bachelor, says he used to be able to go to the local dances and meet girls whom he could then afford to seduce in the grand and proper French style. "Well, I can't any more. Now, it's no drinks, no food, no coffee, just straight to bed."

Nearly 200 years after the French Revolution, the French worker remains tightly fettered near the bottom of a rigid social system, one that he has little hope of ever escaping. Adult education is virtually nonexistent in France, and though some companies offer evening courses for advancement, the training is almost always on the employee's own time. The room at the top of French life is restricted largely to those who were born there. A recent survey of 2,530 prominent French, ranging from Pop Singer Sylvie Vartan to Charles de Gaulle, showed that 68% came from families that belonged to the top 5% of French society. Only 5% of prominent French men and women came from what could be classified as the working class. Nor can the French worker reasonably hope that his offspring will inherit the chance for upward mobility that he was denied. For the vast majority of lower-class children, education ends at about 16, whereupon apprenticeship begins. Only 10% of French university students come from the working class, and many of those few fail to get through the maze of exams to the final degree so necessary for admission to the French Establishment.

Such narrow horizons shape the French workers' attitudes toward politics. Most workers are largely apolitical, openly cynical, and mistrustful of all shades of politicians and parties. The feeling is not entirely unjustified, since in the past France's established parties have indeed done little for the worker. Such support as the Communist party enjoys stems from the fact that the workers feel that the Communist labor unions have fought hardest for their economic gains. Furthermore, unlike bourgeois Frenchmen, the worker feels little or no fear about ultimate Communist intentions. "Even if they were to get the control," said one worker last week, "France wouldn't change very much. They would be moderates like the Czechs."

When the students first took to the barricades last month, the affair seemed as remote to the workers as almost everything else that happens in the "other Paris" of the bourgeois world. But as the violence grew, the workers--often ahead of their own union leaders-sensed an opportunity to turn the disorder to their own economic advantage, and the strikes and sit-ins began. From the discovery of their ability to bring the government to heel in money matters, it was only a short, logical step to the demand for worker power in political terms. But the evidence is that it was a step not taken by the great majority of French workers. Only a vocal few, in protest against their long history of being flattened to a single dimension by their unions as well as management and the government, demanded "direct democracy" and "participation" in factory affairs. They were sufficient in number to shout down Pompidou's wage increases. But they were not numerous enough to prevent the great bulk of French workers from wanting to go back to their workbenches, once it was clear that De Gaulle intended to stand firm. In that sense, the fundamental revolution of workers who are demanding genuine opportunity in French society still seems as far away as ever.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.