Factory despotism | Humanity

The employees of the multinationals Total and Exxon Mobil are rightly demanding increases in their remuneration in line with foreseeable inflation. Immediately, a cohort of lackeys and parrots, who for the most part have little end-of-month worries and do everything to prevent an additional levy on the « superprofits », call for order and peddle lies about alleged levels of remuneration that Total workers obviously do not receive.

Depending on the coefficients and qualification, gross wages fluctuate in the company from the SMIC to €2,995.92. To this amount must be added bonuses for employees who work 3/8, including weekends, in difficult sanitary conditions.

Remember that bonuses are not taken into account in “continued salary” at the time of retirement. Those who cry out loud and spit lies, warm in air-conditioned television studios and within the union of ministers and parliamentarians who sit from the benches of the Macronist party to the far right, do not know obviously not what they are talking about.

Above all, they want at all costs to hide the indisputable facts that say everything about the system they defend. Total made a profit of 18 billion euros in the first half and has just paid 2.5 billion euros in dividends to its shareholders. How ? By the genius of the CEO? Of course not! It is an annuity.

Money is flowing over them like a torrent under the double effect of speculation and the war in Ukraine.

This money resulting from work and extracted for months from the pockets of motorists, with the complicity of the State which takes its share.

This system, its iron law, commands to deny employees a 10% increase while their CEO receives the only compensation (not counting attendance fees, shares and other conveniences) 500,000 euros per month. Yes. Half a million € monthly!

The worker paid 2,900 euros only claims 290 euros better. With this amount he will only maintain his purchasing power. And, the power, which militated to destroy the collective agreements and the national negotiations with the profit of the internal negotiations with the companies takes, today party not for the general interest, but for a private capitalist group which is enriched by the labor force, the exploitation of the basements and the oceans, and on the backs of users with ever higher fuel prices, not to mention the years when the Total group was exempt from taxes.

And this taking a stand in favor of the oil groups goes as far as the decision to requisition the workers to run the refineries which, it must be remembered, are… private property.

So here is a government and leaders of big over-vitamined multinationals who are doing everything to make the conflict last and the very real embarrassment it produces in order to be able to deliver to popular condemnation workers who are only claiming their due. and sacrifice days of wages to achieve it.

That is to say how much getting Total and Exxon to pay, this time to remunerate the work and not to puncture it, becomes an issue of very great political significance.

Our fellow citizens, for the most part, have understood that these large companies and their shareholders can pay. It remains to be won that they can express it together in the name of interests that concern us all. The victory of the employees in struggle will be that of the whole world of work and creation.

This would be an asset for all of us to ask, in a big way and everywhere, with more force, the question of remuneration for work and employment.

This is what neither government nor big business wants.

By fighting this movement, it is against all the workers that the proxies of globalized capitalism are fighting. In the same way, this same power transforms the most important parliamentary act, the vote of the budget of the nation into an act of authoritarianism by preparing to use article 49.3 of the Constitution.

We are therefore witnessing the pursuit of a transformation of the political forms of capitalist domination. The centers of political and economic power no longer succeeding, by means of parliamentarism and presidentialism, in overcoming the contradictions inherent in capitalism, they decide, as elsewhere in the world, on a structural regression of social and democratic rights in a more or less open alliance with far-right forces.

This shows that the current movement in the refineries concerns multiple social, democratic and political issues. It is up to us to help expand it against « factory despotism » with the new mobilizations proposed by the unions, in particular the CGT, and so that the march on Paris succeeds next Sunday, at the call of all the united components of the Nupes and a dozen organizations.