A huge strike in France starts Thursday

European labor politics are weird if you come from an American perspective. The left, right, and center all to various degrees attempt to gain the favor of trade unions, which in general refuse to permanently ally with any particular party.

December 5th will see at least a strike in the transportation sector of France, which in the days between now and then may become a general strike. The aims are clear and simple (but see below) and probably obtainable, but the union leadership is not enthusiastic about them, and only acquiesced because it was clear they would become a wildcat strike if an official one wasn't called, and the last wildcat strike ended up damaging the unions.

The strike is about a pension reform proposed by the Macron administration. French pension systems are strong but kind of staggeringly unequal: the richest (cough and also whitest cough) workers get much higher pensions than the poorer (cough and browner cough) workers; it's more unequal than their career salaries are. Macron's proposal is to distribute the pension money more equitably, and in fact even more equitably than the career salaries are distributed. Unsurprisingly, this is not popular with the richer half of the workers.

The strike is joining with a strike in the medical sector over understaffing in hospitals and clinics. This has been going on for a while. It is also being joined by the gilets jaunes, or "yellow vests", who just celebrated their 1st anniversary as a movement. This is where it gets interesting.

The gilets jaunes and the unions, to put it simply, do not like or trust each other. The GJs see the unions as part of the bloated urban elite bureaucracy they despise, and the unions are well aware of that. For that matter, one of the GJs' original manifesto points was pension reform roughly along the lines Macron is proposing, to move more money out of the cities and into the countryside, though that seems to have been dropped a while ago. Depressingly, the one thing both of them seem to agree on is that too much money is being spent on public housing.

I'll put my cards on the table that I absolutely do not trust the GJs. Buzzfeed did an article about how Facebook ads were used to stoke the movement from the beginning (and, since the writing of that article, we have learned that Russia paid for many of those ads). Their manifesto was so wacky that even they forgot about it pretty quickly (it called for both lower and higher gasoline taxes). They claim to disavow all political parties but always manage to have a Le Pen flunky on hand whenever there's a protest. When the press interviews participants, the one thing they all seem to agree on is (again) that too much is being spent on public housing, for "those people". It is, in short, populism stripped of any attempt at ideology whatsoever.

The government will probably shelve the plan and it probably won't matter; Paris hasn't had a big general strike in a while and enough people want one that it will probably keep going until everybody finds a face-saving way out. Interesting times, as the old curse says.