Another Day, Another Grève

Look, I'm a lefty. I get strikes. I believe in the power of strikes. Strikes are essential in this no-good, capitalist world in which we live to retain our humanity.
But I'm so over it.
After walking to work (as I do every day, since the buses are to slow in the mornings for me to get to work on time) and then back up the hill to my house, having mulled over this the whole way, I still don't get it. The ENTIRE bus line is on strike not because of wages, hours, benefits, vehicle quality control, or any other reason that I can reckon is the result of a failure of policy. They're on strike because a bus driver was assaulted - which is AWFUL. That's a terrible thing, and I hope the person is okay. But why are they on strike? Is there something that the bus company or a public office like the police could have done to stop that? I mean, I'm sure we could analyze the underlying reasons why racism and the alienation under capitalism might cause someone to rash out at an innocent bus driver, but that doesn't seem like sensible cause for a strike. Are they demanding better barriers between the passengers and themselves? (They already ride behind a locked door with a little window for change that can only be opened from the inside.) Are they demanding risk pay? If they're making any concrete demands, the public, via Facebook groups, news stands, and word of mouth doesn't seem to know it. It honestly just feels like they are, as always, the fickle gods of this island lashing out upon all of the humans present for the impiety of some single Odysseus among us. (Full disclosure: I think Odysseus was a jackass and the source of 98 of his 99 own problems.)
Other things I don't understand: why this iguana was out in the open as I was walking today from my school to the library.

If it isn't en grève, then I wouldn't still be here

Can you, pray tell, imagine if your preschool workers went on strike? Like, you parental figure went to drop you off at the preschool on their way to work, but when you two arrived, a red and black flag was hanging from the front gate, above a poster proclaiming that the workers were subjected to inhumane working conditions and had shut down the school.
Can you imagine it? Personally, I really can't imagine the 60-odd year-old wives up upstanding church men who ran my Baptist preschool pulling off such a stunt, nor can I fathom such behavior at any other preschool I've ever heard of.
But, indeed, the preschool down the hill from my house did just that this week. The parents, a toddler or two in the crook of each arm, walked up to the sign, sighed in front of it, then calmly turned back to buckle their kids in their seats.
What if, on your way out of elementary school, your teacher slipped a letter home to your parents from the cafeteria workers, explaining that they were overworked and were shutting down the cafeteria for the next day? Skipping home with a list of union demands pinned to your backpack?
Again, the sight of my round, elderly cafeteria ladies, again, mostly women who went to church with my family, ever striking, or even complaining about their minimum-wage work, is hardly conceivable to me.
Yet, when I rolled up to my school yesterday, a letter, signed by the principle was posted to the gate explaining just that, as the letters sent home the day before stated, there would be no cafeteria due to a strike, and that parents should, "make the necessary arrangements". The teachers recalled that many students wouldn't come back for their afternoon classes, and others would bring lunch, and others would skip with their siblings up the hill to Grandma's, according to the habits of each family. This has not only happened before, this happens often enough that the teachers judge each parent based on their particular style of handling the situation.
Personally, I think that strikes are essential steps towards workers progressively obtaining humane working conditions and eventually seizing the means of production. I participated in a union in college and do my best to be an ally to those who strike.
But what does it mean to a society and to an economy if strikes are so common that everyone is used to them? What does it mean if everyone has a backup plan already and is hardly inconvenienced by a strike? Is it still effective? Does progress entail a decline in the efficacy of the strike? Do more progressive conditions require more radical action?

If It Isn't En Grève, It Isn't French

What I'm up to when I can't visit my schools because they're on strike

If you've never lived in France or had the deep, gratifying pleasure of traveling in France during a time of social unrest (ever), then you, dear reader, might not be aware of just how important the strike is to the well-being of French society as a whole.
My French/American professor once told the  joint seminar on Diversity that, whereas in the U.S. the government decides what's legal, and the citizens may or may not try to influence it, in France the attitude is much more than the citizens decide what will and will not fly, and the government may or may not attempt to disagree.
And, boy, are the French good at putting a brakes on the world turning.
One of the very first vocabulary items I learned was opération molokoye, known on the mainland as opération escargot. Yes, escargot, that weird snail food found only in American cartoons about France, American restaurants pretending to be French, and at the café at Fontainebleu catering to American tourists. In France the snail operation and in Martinique the turtle operation consists of protesters getting into their cars and driving on the most important roads in a town as slow as they possibly can until a meeting is called to meet their demands. During my first week in Martinique, the molokoye was a serious impediment to my going to visit my news schools and potential lodgings. The cause? According to my supervisor, the supplementary mentoring program, providing part-time work to young people and helping teachers reach out to students having troubles, was suddenly cut off, right before the start of the school year. I had the opportunity to listen in as my supervisor and her colleagues discussed it a bit, and it seems that their sympathies (at least so far as they express them in the office in the presence of the new, foreign teaching assistant) seem to lie on both sides: the financial situation that the new administration inherited was impossible to manage without making cuts, but at the same time, both the laid-off workers, the students, the teachers, and the parents lose out in this new arrangement.
Current searches for news in Martinique are actually flooded with word of a different grève, this one concerning transportation workers at the airport. I don't have too many details on that one, but it seems they've also been blocking traffic, which, as one teacher reported in a school I visited today, is keeping some students from getting to school. She called it an aberration, but most of the other teachers and administration I've spoken to simply agree that this rentrée (a delightfully efficient French work for "back to school") has been difficult, and that it shows no signs of letting up. All of this is also a part of the larger challenges proposed by the last French president, Holland, and the current (former banker) president, Macron's reforms / austerity / neo-liberal modifications to labor laws across France. Their changes have begun to roll out across France, but the media largely paints it as though the administration is underestimating how much trouble the protesters can cause before its over.
When I applied for this job (as well as to the Fulbright English Teaching assistantship - oops), I was interested in how politics and teaching came together. In some communities teachers are at the forefront of social and political change, but in others they are more like passive arms of the socializing/educating/civilizing State. As politically active as French people stereotypically are, I can't yet tell where on that spectrum I think my teachers here in Fort-de-France are. So far the grèvistes are an outside force, arriving in the mornings to either board up the school and write in chalk that it is closed or taking the streets to demonstrate. I haven't met any teachers who are themselves involved, though that doesn't mean that none of them are.
Training, at least, took place, and I'm already completely wooed by my tiny new students as well as by even more local sweets - as if I needed more sugar in my diet.

A bakery-ordered pain au beurre et au chocolat, once only made for communions, baptisms, and other important celebrations but now available more or less whenever you please, this one ordered so that myself and the other newly-arrived teaching assistants could get a taste of local culture. Stay tuned to hear more about my struggle to eat healthy in the very place where so many damn wholesome fruits and vegetables are grown.