There have been 360 mass layoff plans to date and 200,000 to 300,000 job cuts across the country and now three major corporations are making matters worse as ArcelorMittal plans to cut 630 jobs, STMicroelectronics 1,000 and LVMH 1,200.

These layoff plans show just how greedy the bosses of major corporations are and how much power they have over the economy and society.

Where LVMH is concerned, it’s downright grotesque. The multinational corporation brought in over 12 billion euros in profits and paid out three billion euros in dividends to its primary shareholder, a certain Bernard Arnault, the king of luxury goods and richest man in the country. The man who made a month’s worth of minimum wage every 15 seconds last year.

This man counts in billions, but he still craves more: he wants the Moët Hennessy part of his business to be even more profitable. As a result, 1,200 jobs will be cut by not replacing workers who retire. And it will be up to those who remain on payroll to compensate and work harder to bring in more money for His Lordship!

Both ArcelorMittal and STMicroelectronics made over one billion euros in profits in 2024. Not only that but they also received loads of public money through government grants under the so-called reindustrialization plan.

The government granted ArcelorMittal 300 million euros and promised to invest 850 million euros to decarbonize its plant in Dunkirk. STMicroelectronics got an even bigger grant because, in exchange for creating 1,000 new jobs, the government promised 2.9 billion euros in subsidies to help expand the semiconductor plant in Crolles in the Isère region.

Whenever anyone in the working class receives government aid, we hear cries of “nanny state” and “milking the system” from the bosses and their watchdogs. But here, we’re talking about billions of euros being handed out to extremely wealthy corporations that don’t even keep their promises to develop industry and create jobs. And yet we won’t hear the government or the media exposing them as liars or profiteers.

All the political leaders running this country ever talk about is “reindustrialization”. But they aren’t even capable of stopping the bosses of major corporations from laying workers off or closing down factories! There’s no way we can rely on these bourgeois lackeys to guarantee our jobs and wages.

Meanwhile, the left-wing political leaders and those of the CGT (France’s main trade union federation) have brought back the idea of nationalizing companies. At a gathering in Dunkirk on May 1, they explained that nationalizing ArcelorMittal would help save both jobs and the French steel industry.

They fed them false hopes. That’s easy for them to do – they’re not in charge!

When they were in office, under Hollande’s presidency, they themselves bowed down to Lakshmi Mittal and let him close down the blast furnaces in Florange. Because nationalizing companies against the capitalists’ will means having the courage to confront them – something left-wing leaders lack and will never have because they too defend the capitalist system.

And when the state and the bosses of big corporations jointly decide to nationalize a company, they always do so in the interest of shareholders and against the interest of the working class.

That was the case with the steel industry in the 1980s. The De Wendel family which owned the main blast furnaces pulled out of the sector and went into finance. The workers of the Lorraine region remember it bitterly because the state then laid off workers en masse and closed down unprofitable companies. Once the steel industry was modernized through public funding, the government privatized it again – a well-established method to nationalize losses and privatize profits!

We must, of course, prevent the bosses of big corporations from doing so much harm. The logic of the capitalist market and the race to make profit mustn’t apply to essential goods and services like electricity, transportation, healthcare or housing. We must put an end to all that is wasted through competition and replace competitiveness with cooperation and a planned economy on an international scale to meet the needs of all.

In order to achieve this, we must take control over big multinational corporations. And it isn’t by buying these companies back from their current shareholders that we’ll wrest power from them. It’s by expropriating them and turning these companies into a common asset run by workers themselves.

The only way to do this is through a mass mobilization of the working class with the determination to overthrow the capitalists. Such a fight begins by setting the objectives demanded by the situation: ban bosses from laying workers off and bring companies under the control of the workers!

Nathalie Arthaud