the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The CGT union at the hospital in the town of Montélimar north of Marseilles called for a strike on July 23 to protest French President Emanuel Macron’s mandatory vaccination rule. More than 150 protesters gathered, including many who don’t work there.
Caregivers pointed to hospital management’s hypocrisy in preparing to discipline workers who refuse to be vaccinated, while at the same time forcing workers who have been in contact with people with Covid to still come to work. The threat of losing their pay or even their job is a humiliation as well as a punishment.
Protestors also spoke out against the division set up between vaccinated and unvaccinated workers. This is one of the government’s goals: to pit workers against each other, while letting management eliminate more beds and make the working conditions worse. One protestor said, the real demand that must be imposed is for the hospital to hire all the workers sorely missing now, and to bring back the beds that were cut years ago.