Six Unions, One Tuesday: France's School Staff Join the Students

On Tuesday, October 13, the adults who run France's schools join the students in the street.

Six education unions — the FSU, UNSA Éducation, FNEC FP FO, the CFDT's education federation, CGT Educ'action and SUD Éducation — have issued a joint call for school staff to strike across the country. It is the first national education strike since October 6, when teachers walked out in support of the student movement that has been growing since mid-September, and the clearest sign yet that the protests that began in the Paris suburbs have become a wider argument over what France spends on its schools.

Why the unions are striking

The unions' statement starts with the students. For weeks, it says, lycée pupils have been protesting the conditions of their own education: the state of their buildings, the inequality between schools, the selection system that decides who gets into higher education, staffing shortages, absent teachers who are never replaced, and timetables they describe as unworkable. Beyond money, the statement says, the students are asking for "more equality and social justice."

The government, the unions say, has not answered them. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu "announced nothing concrete" on October 7, in their words, and the unions note that many of their own complaints are the same ones students are now making.

That is the shift in this call. The unions are not only backing the students. They are putting their own demands into the same day.

What they are asking for

The joint statement calls on the government to:

• Cancel the job cuts planned in the 2027 budget and create the posts schools need
• Raise pay without conditions attached
• Improve working conditions for all staff
• Open a path to permanent posts for non-permanent staff
• Set a national pay scale for school assistants
• Create a proper status for the aides who support disabled pupils
• Fund a plan to renovate school buildings

One union puts numbers on the fight. SNUDI-FO says the government's budget carries €54 billion in savings, including 1,588 teaching posts, and is demanding the cuts be withdrawn, a 10 percent rise in the pay index, the end of Parcoursup, the university selection platform, and an end to police violence against protesters. These are union claims, not government figures, and the government has not accepted them.

Where to watch

In Paris, the FSU's secondary-school union, the SNES, is calling staff to a 2:00 p.m. demonstration at Place d'Italie. In Niort, in the Deux-Sèvres, the six unions have called a 10:00 a.m. march outside the regional education authority. Elsewhere, the CGT's education union is asking staff to hold workplace assemblies to vote on staying out and to decide what comes next.

Two dates matter beyond Tuesday. The unions say they will meet again quickly to decide the next step. And the CGT is already preparing a strike across industries over pay for November 5 — a sign that some unions hope to turn a student revolt into a wider budget fight.

Why this matters for this site

The strike is not a separate story from the student protests. The schools with the worst buildings and the fewest replaced teachers are concentrated in France's working-class suburbs, where many Black and North African families live. When students in Seine-Saint-Denis talk about inequality between schools, they are describing who goes to which school.

History suggests that when teachers join students, governments begin to listen. In May 1968, a student movement became a general strike when French workers and teachers walked alongside them. In Soweto in 1976, students were dismissed as manipulated until the adults around them started repeating what the students had said.

Nor did student movements stop with Soweto. In Chile in 2011, students occupied dozens of their own schools and drew rallies of up to 100,000 people to demand affordable public education. In the United States in 2018, the survivors of the Parkland school shooting turned grief into March for Our Lives, a day of marches that by one crowd-counting estimate brought out between 1.3 and 2.2 million people nationwide. In September 2019, the global climate strike put an estimated four million people, most of them students, into the streets in a single day — the largest climate demonstration yet recorded. And in 2020, the George Floyd protests drew an estimated 15 to 26 million Americans, perhaps the largest movement in the country's history, with high school and college students at its front. In each case the sequence was the same as Soweto: the young were told they did not understand, and then the adults arrived.

What Tuesday produces — money for schools, or simply more arrests — depends on the numbers in the streets and the reply from the Ministry of Education. HistorianSpeaks will report what happens.