Left Arm Folding

Last February's election victory in Spain of the Communist and Socialist United Front was followed by a moderate Left Government and a radical Left rash of riots and arsons (TIME, March 30 et ante). In France last month's Popular Front election victory was followed last week, in precisely the same pattern, by Left-wing direct action, designed to compromise Socialist Leon Blum on the eve of his premiership. In France it took the form of an epidemic of "folded arms" strikes or "lock-ins" in munitions, airplane and automobile factories.

It started in the Nieuport (airplanes) and Lavalette (metallurgical) plants in the Paris suburbs. Workmen stopped their machines and posted one-third of their number to hold the factories against police. They demanded 48-hour wages for a 40-hour week, a closed shop, no married women workers with employed husbands, no employer reprisals. The directors refused to bargain until the workmen came out. Police sat tight.

Workers told off pickets to guard the plants against sabotage, were fed by wives and Communist committees. This superb idea spread fast. Hotchkiss (automobiles, machine guns), Amiot (airplanes) and Hispano (airplane engines, armaments, munitions) granted the demands. Some munitions manufacturers hurriedly shooed their men out of the plants on forced vacations.

In two days the "folded arms" strikes had spread to Fiat (automobiles), Citroen (automobiles), Farman (airplanes), De-woitine (airplanes) Rosengart (automobiles), Licorne (automobiles), Salmson (automobiles, airplane engines), Goodrich (tires), Alsthom (electrical equipment), Panhard (automobiles) and the Paris building trades workers.

When Renault's (automobiles, tanks, airplane engines, shells) 34,000 workers, comprising France's biggest single company, caught retiring bourgeois President Louis Renault inside his Billancourt office, they locked him in. Though the owners were cheerfully remarking that they had never been so well protected against fire, theft and sabotage, Louis Renault had no stomach for his workers' company, shortly gave in to their demands.

All this scared the Radical Socialists, the Popular Front moderate wing, out of their wits. Threatened with the loss of their essential support or with domination by his unruly Communist allies in the next Chamber of Deputies, Leon Blum last week hastened to confer with lame-duck Premier Albert Sarraut.

Blum and Sarraut together met the delegations of strikers and employers. Though his only legal standing was that of a deputy, M. Blum persuaded the employers to back down, give the workers a 10% raise, an annual week's vacation with pay, no more overtime. Of 70,000 strikers in firms busy on Government armament contracts, 60,000 this week went back to work. Delighted union officials threatened to shut down a new batch of factories.

This week, just before the new Parliament met and Premier Sarraut hastened to make way for M. Blum, that anxious old gentleman warned a Socialist Party congress that extreme Left sabotage would invite a Fascist triumph. Said he: "Some people say that ours will be a Kerensky government, that it will be working to prepare the way for a Lenin, who will be the one to benefit. That is not so. In France, if some Kerensky were to fail, it would not be a Lenin who would be the beneficiary."

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