Thank you for organising this meeting and for sending us the working documents in advance.

Today we will give you a quick overview of the situation in France. We are all living in similar situations because we are all living with the consequences of the political choices of our governments which are subordinated to the European Union.

As you know, we are not speaking on behalf of the CGT Confederation but of our CGT departmental union.Our confederation has made choices to support liberal policies and in particular the European recovery fund.

And yet, as we know, the European recovery fund will be accompanied by additional austerity measures, increasing the debt, and condemning our public services, whose destruction and dismantling will accelerate. The intervention of a State strategist for the recovery and planning of our industrial production will be even more impossible than today.

The transformation of capitalism in crisis has begun, using ecology as a screen for their policies of capital accumulation. The capitalists have found a new opportunity for profit and distribution of roles to the countries: some for industries, others for services…accentuating relocations and the setting in competition of the workers.

In France, their objective is to dismantle the sector of energy, chemistry and petrochemistry, to achieve the deindustrialisation of our country.

So, over the last year, we have had more than 800 lay-off plans in the country. Social rights are being destroyed : theft of paid holidays, increase in working hours, for example. Repression is the corollary of these policies. Adding to an already very repressive legal arsenal, the members of Parliament have just adopted the “Global Security Law” allowing the government to have a free hand in the use of police and legal violence.

It is in a context of exploding unemployment affecting about 19% of the population that the reform of unemployment insurance is imposed, depriving or lowering the benefits of nearly 1.7 million workers.

In the face of all this, the workers are resisting, with strikes and hard and long struggles. They suffer from the refusal of our confederation to organise and coordinate struggles, to lead a global response.

The CGT 13 proposes to the workers in struggle and to their CGT organisations to federate and to build together the conditions to achieve victory. We have before us in a short time 3 federative dates:

• On April 23th, a national day of struggle against the reform of unemployment insurance, which we are building in the department linked to the artists who have begun a long-term struggle, with the occupation of theatres since 1 month now.
• The 1st of May, which is our common international date, must be given a repercussion equal to the We could raise common slogans and give May Day its internationalist side.

On 20 May, when we will hold a national meeting on the Gardanne Thermal Power Plant (where our comrades are leading a hard struggle and are on strike against the closure while carrying an alternative project) with the CGT unions mobilised in the country, to prepare the fightback together.