May Day! May Day!

Since 1947, the Fête du Travail, on 1 May, has been a paid public holiday in France. It is a legal requirement that on this day, all employees are entitled to a paid holiday. Traditionally a day on which trade unions protest across the country, it is also la fête du muguet, or the Lily of the Valley Day, on which it is customary to exchange lily-of-the-valley flowers for good luck.


May Day has its origins in 1886, when on that day, 200,000 American workers won the right to work an eight-hour day. The battle for an eight-hour day was not won by all workers, and riots broke out in Chicago. The Haymarket Square event was a turning point for the labour movement of the time. Three years later, the International Socialist Congress, meeting in Paris, adopted 1 May as International Workers Day and began an international campaign for the eight-hour working day. On 23 April 1919, the French senate sanctioned the eight-hour day and remarkably made 1 May a public holiday.

After having been officially named the Fête du Travail et de la Concorde sociale (day to celebrate work and social harmony) on 27 April 1941, the post-liberation government of 1947 legislated to make 1 May a paid public holiday, without actually officially naming it the Fête du Travail.

Members of the Socialist Party sometimes distribute their symbol, a red rose, on this day. Most public offices and buildings are closed on May 1st in France, as are many smaller businesses. Many, if not most restaurants and cafes, remain open as usual. While in years past, the day was often a day for protest, today union members and citizens gather, listen to music and speeches, and probably more speeches, and then march through the streets in a family-friendly festive atmosphere.

It's been a difficult year for workers in France. The Charlie Hebdo and HyperCacher attacks have created a national concern for security. The pressure to implement measures that will ultimately curtail free expression and movement, is significant. As well, the French economy continues to struggle, and nearly 10 percent of the workforce is without employment. Unemployment numbers among young males is much higher of course, especially in the usual ethnic communities. This adds pressure to the impressive social structure that makes France enviable in the eyes of many.




Since our last visit to Paris five years ago, there appears to be a significant increase in the number of homeless people and of beggars. They appear on street corners, at transit stations, and in churchyards. As they do in Canada.

May Day is a celebration to be sure. In France, and elsewhere too, it is a day to consider all that needs to be done to create the society described in their national motto. Liberté, égalité, fraternité.  In France, in Canada, we're all in this together.

Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray.

Charlie Hebdo & the HyperCacher

Going to the scenes of terrorist attacks is not a tourist-thing to do. Yet, where were these places that figured so prominently in our news of only a few months ago?

We know the story about Charlie Hebdo. 

At 11:30 on Wednesday morning, 7 January 2015, a black Citroen drove up to the building housing the offices of  Charlie Hebdo in rue Nicolas-Appert. Two masked gunmen, dressed in black and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles got out and approached the offices.

They burst into number 6, Rue Nicolas-Appert, before realising they had the wrong address. The two then moved down the street to number 10 where Charlie Hebdo is located on the second floor.





The gunmen killed 11 people and injured 11 others in the building. After leaving, they killed a French National Police officer outside the building. Several related attacks followed outside Paris, where another 5 people were killed and 11 wounded.










It was easy to come to the neighbourhood by Metro, and the area appears to be an extension of China Town with new clothing stores and the Mandarin language heard more often than anywhere else I've been in Paris. It's also on the limits of the Marais, with its fashionable merchants, cool coffee shops and artsy bistros. The church yard near the Metro appeared to be filled with homeless people. It's an interesting neighbourhood.



Rue Nicolas-Appert appears on maps, and it seems simple enough to navigate, but it's a short little back street of sorts, and found only by meandering through another dead-end street to a lane-way, that finally leads to Nicolas-Appert.  Or so it appeared to me... it took a while to find.













At the address, there is little to identify the building in any way with the magazine, though there are now several prints on the concrete walls, and heavily armed National Police patrolling the street every day and all day. They are not keen on photos being taken of the building nor of themselves. There are barricades on both sides of the narrow street.

While I lingered at Charlie Hebdo a man appeared with a little boy. The man held the hand of his son and when they came to the front of number 10 rue Nicolas-Appert the man acknowledged me by nodding and asking what I think was "Is this the place?" I answered softly. The man knelt down and talked quietly to his son about what had happened and why it was important to have come today. Then, the two joined hands and walked away, both looking back with tears in their eyes as they turned the corner.





The HyperCacher story is well known too. HyperCacher is a small supermarket chain that features Kosher products. The chain operates in France and Italy.

On Friday, 9 January 2015, a man, armed with a submachine gun, an assault rifle, and two handguns, entered the HyperCacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes in the 20e arrondisement of Paris. He killed 4 people, all Jews, then took several hostages. A day earlier the same man had killed a Municipal Police officer.

The HyperCacher was much easier to find than Charlie Hebdo. In fact it's down the street from a Metro stop. It's a bit on the outside of central Paris and the buildings are slightly newer, and generally less iconic than what we see in other parts of the city. The grocery store is found just on the other side of the Boulevard Périphérique, a major highway that literally rings the city. One of the busiest roads in Europe, the Périphérique is often considered the boundary between the city of Paris proper and its suburbs.





Like the street at Charlie Hebdo, this is a depressing place. The barricades are here too, and must be a deterrent to business. There are many candles littering the sidewalk in front of the store, and many more bunches of dried up and rotting flowers left long ago, and I wonder why the mess hasn't been cleared.

The police presence is slightly more subdued here than at Charlie Hebdo. Instead of machine guns toted by National Police, the two officers here are from a municipal force and they carry only side arms. They watch me as I walk back and forth in front of the store, but we acknowledge each other politely when I walk past them to enter the HyperCacher.






Inside, the store is subdued. There isn't the usual supermarket music playing and there aren't many staff and certainly not many customers. Perhaps it gets busier at other times though I assume the attack has not been good for business. I wander the aisles of the smallish store, and linger for some time in the wine department. There are many wines from Israel, France and Italy, and I am impressed to see a number of recognisable-even-to-me French wines that are Kosher. I didn't know.

As I walked through the store I imagined the horrific events of that day in January. And I thought about the route to the basement of the store, to the cold locker, where an employee of the supermarket, and a Muslim, Lassana Bathily, helped hide 15 hostages. He then managed to escape in an attempt to get help for the people in the basement, whereupon he was immediately arrested and only released after ninety minutes. Perhaps he is working here today.

Staff at the store paid me no interest, except to say hello. Several customers, both older citizens, were wary of my presence and uncomfortable. I am an outsider.

The two places are not on any tourist agenda, nor should they be. What happened here in January and how it shook this modern European state, will always be important to remember. Today in Paris armed police or military can be seen at virtually all synagogues and Jewish memorials. They are seen patrolling the streets around the Grande Mosquée de Paris and at Sacré-Cœur. Something terrible happened here in January, and no one is going to forget anytime soon.

Photos by Jeem. Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray.

May Day and zero-hour contracts

May Day approaches.

It is the Labour Day most of the world celebrates, including France, where your faithful scribe finds himself today. In France, the first day of May is one of the few days of the year when all workers must have the day off, or legislated compensation, save those in essential services. Many businesses here in Paris will be closed and parades will occur throughout the city. At least that's what they tell me.

In Britain, a nation going to the polls in another week or so, it's a different story. There is talk there about the insidious policy granting businesses the power to hand out what are called "zero-hour contracts." Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the program has expanded four-fold and over 1.5 million workers now have zero-hour contracts. These employees are often young and female, many with dependent family members relying on their income.

Simply put, these contracts aren't really contracts at all. They do not guarantee a minimum number of hours of work, nor do they provide for a standard working week; a person could in fact be asked to come in to work at 7:00 in the morning as little as five hours before. Or after finishing a full week of nighttime hours.These people are on-call in every sense of the word. By signing a zero-hour contract, the worker grants full power to her employer.

It is, in the words of the Labour Party leader and Opposition Leader, Ed Milibrand, "An epidemic undermining hard work, undermining living standards, and undermining family life. Because if you don't know from one day to the next how many hours you're going to be doing, how can you have any security for you and your family?" He has pledged to give employees the right to a regular contract after 12 weeks of working regular hours. The problem here, from my perspective, might be the as yet, undefined "regular hours" Milibrand is talking about, though I suppose it will all come out in the campaign, and then be watered down after election, though that might be too cynical on my part.

For many of these workers in the UK, they receive the minimum pay of about $12 per hour. The "living wage" in London is considered $17 an hour, and that seems bizarrely low.

Business leaders in Britain like the zero-hour contracts and they credit the scheme with providing a "flexible labour market," and that is good for business.

From the vantage of Paris, what is happening across the Channel is bothersome indeed. Yet, it is exactly the same sort of thing that has been happening, in Canada for years. The drive by Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark to promote the slogan: "BC is open for business," and to create more flexible working arrangements that benefit employers under the promise of "creating jobs for British Columbians," provides the same sort of zero-hour contracts for our workers. People can work on-call for years, without being granted regularized employment. It happens in the private sector and within unionized environments too. It is simply wrong.

This May Day we should take time to remember the benefits we all enjoy, largely thanks to the labour movement and progressive political parties. With every concession we make, under the guise of  some slogan, that decreases our commonwealth as a social community and not just as a consumer society, it becomes ever more difficult for any government, even a progressive government, to bring them back. May Day is a day to reflect and remember, and to act.

Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray.