Michel Spingler/AP Photo
Striking workers gather at the entrance of the TotalEnergies oil depot, October 13, 2022, outside Dunkirk, northern France.
PARIS – One of the oddities of the high inflation and the debate in the U.S. about its causes and appropriate cures is how little attention has been paid to the class aspects of it.
For instance, rents are rising far faster than the overall rate of inflation. Renters are generally lower-income than homeowners, who are typically protected by long-term, fixed-rate mortgages and face no increased costs.
Workers’ wages are rising at less than half the rate of price increases. Meanwhile, the Fed’s imposition of higher interest rates is a bonanza for banks while they clobber small businesses and consumers.
Here in France, however, where they invented class consciousness in 1789, there is a great deal of attention to who is helped and hurt by inflation. Two weeks ago, the largest union federation, the leftist Confédération Générale du Travail, called a strike of oil refinery workers.
With the worldwide cut in crude oil production, refinery profits have been exorbitant. At TotalEnergies, which booked a $10.9 billion profit in the first half of 2022, CGT demanded a wage increase of 10 percent, 7 percent to compensate for inflation plus 3 percent for “wealth sharing.”
The companies refused wage increases on this scale, and workers have shut down six of France’s seven refineries. Paris is literally out of gas, and frantic motorists are driving to the far suburbs in search of fuel. On Friday, two of the more moderate unions reached a deal with Total for a 7 percent increase plus bonus payments of 3,000 to 6,000 euros per worker, but the CGT is continuing the strike.
The government is prepared to fine resisting workers and bring in scab labor. French railway workers and civil servants plan a one-day solidarity strike next week.
For now, public opinion is divided. A French friend observes that strikes like this begin with sympathy for the strikers, but where vital services are affected, public sentiment often turns in favor of just getting the strike over.
But this very French strike has accomplished two things, one of which has yet to be achieved in the U.S. First, it has made very clear the class implications of the current supply-driven inflation. In this case: windfall profits for the oil companies and real-wage cuts for workers.
Second, it’s a reminder of the urgency of moving to a post-carbon transition. Thanks to some Biden initiatives, such as the clean-energy spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. is ahead of France, which has the lowest percentage of renewable energy in Europe. France got used to cheap energy from nuclear power and did not invest adequately in renewables. Now, several of its aging plants are offline and France is importing more dirty sources of fuel.
Coda: On Wednesday, I wrote about the oddity of Ben Bernanke’s Nobel. It was based on a weak paper about banking and the Depression, using dubious Chicago school economic assumptions, published by the 29-year-old Bernanke in 1983. Yesterday, I learned that I was in very good company.
Bernanke had solicited pre-publication comments from the great scholar of the Depression, Charles Kindleberger. My old friend, Perry Mehrling, who teaches economics at Boston University, went to the Kindleberger archives and found a carbon copy of Kindleberger’s letter. The comments, which you must read, are withering, apt, and delicious to read.
(“You wave away Minsky and me for departing from rational assumptions. Would you not accept that it is possible for each participant in a market to be rational but for the market as a whole to be irrational because of the fallacy of composition? If not, how can you explain chain letters, betting on lotteries, panics in burning theatres, stock market and commodity bubbles as the Hunts in silver, the world in gold, etc.”)
Bernanke’s published paper ignored these and other devastating comments—to his discredit and that of the Nobel committee.
