November 5 strike: wages and purchasing power top the demands

This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the report above. Click on the video to watch it in full. High school students, environmentalists, social demands... On the signs, this Thursday, November 5, there is also a lot of talk about purchasing power and the cost of living.

Coming to demonstrate, this mother, for example, receives the RSA: “Inflation, I took it in the teeth. Even hamburger steaks have become a great luxury. And at a given moment, it is very easy to increase the prices of products, but VAT also increases.

I have many pirouettes at the financial level. There, it's the electricity that will soon be reduced, it's the meals that we skipped with the kids... I can't count them anymore," she testifies. Slogans to demand an increase in the minimum wage and retirement pensions.

Laurent Jacquet is 61 years old, he is a former employee in collective catering and earns 1,600 euros net per month, paying 700 euros in rent. "I'm getting there, but hey, it's not easy every day, and every month, because when you want to go out for an outing or two in the month, you're quickly impacted. When you worked for 43 years, I know very well that it was collective catering, but I find that... No...", he laments.

More than a quarter of the population considers themselves to be in a precarious situation. Limiting yourself to the essentials is also the case for Ingrid Gaudin, who calls for more tax justice. Employed with a dependent child, she receives 2,200 euros monthly. “From my point of view, it’s not enough compared to the implication it represents.

We must increase salaries, yes, without reducing social security contributions, because this is still what ensures us a system that allows us to take care of ourselves, and for retired people, to have a decent income, this is not the case for everyone", estimates the employee in the associative sector. Her solution? "Tax the rich, tax justice, the very rich.

“According to the latest Ipsos barometer for Secours populaire, 26% of French people, or a little more than a quarter of the population, believe they are in a precarious situation.

Machine-translated from French