The strength of the French striking workers lies in their ability to identify a larger common cause and stick together. The weakness of American workers, by contrast, lies in their fragmentation and disunity. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on issues of labor and immigration.

Strikes -- long ridiculed by business as an anachronism in today's global market economy -- are making a stunning comeback in France. Is there a lesson here for American labor activists looking to rejuvenate their movement's sagging fortunes?

For years the message to unions -- from Maggie Thatcher's triumph over Britain's coal miners union to the recent halt of strikes at the Caterpillar plant -- has been the same: strikes have become ineffective and dangerous. What makes the French strike different?

The answer lies in its inclusivist approach. This is a strike in which much of the French public feels a direct stake, not only because of the way it is being conducted but because of the political demands it is making of the government.

Since the end of World War II, working people in France have received only part of their wages in their paychecks. By social contract, the rest was put into a huge fund, jointly administered by unions and employers, which paid for the entire public health care system. That system made medical care available to all of the country's workers, regardless of where they worked, or whether they were even employed.

The fund was part of a wide network of benefits (public housing, vacations, unemployment, disability and maternity leave) French workers won at a time when the country's left enjoyed enormous prestige for having led resistance to the Nazis. But the key factor in the success of French unions was their strategic decision to bargain with the government for the country's workers as a whole, rather than win benefits for a smaller segment of the workforce.

In the pro-business climate which gripped the U.S. at the beginning of the Cold War, American unions made the opposite choice. Those who called for fighting for the interests of all workers together were ignored or expelled from the labor movement. Instead, the strongest unions negotiated contracts with whole industries, like steel or auto, and the weaker ones company by company, or just factory by factory.

Over the last two decades, as employers in the U.S. grew stronger, these contracts were torn apart as employers demanded ever greater concessions from workers. Caterpillar is only the latest example of a company demanding lower wages than its competitors, then destroying the union to get them, and finally setting the wage standard for the entire heavy construction equipment industry.

French workers also suffered erosion of the political arrangements they had made after the war. In recent years, the government began allowing employers to not pay into the health care fund for newly hired employees. This created an escalating financial crisis, which was then used to justify calling for further reforms in the system -- the Plan Juppe amounted to the French version of the Contract with America.

Unions not only blame the government for causing the crisis by giving a break to corporations. They fear that government control over the fund will lead to cutbacks in the money spent on the health care system itself in order to free up funds to pay for other government projects or reduce the deficit. The money involved, they argue, does not belong either to the government or to the employers but to the workers themselves.

The strength of French strikers lies in their ability to identify a larger common cause and stick together. When two of France's largest unions, the CGT, affiliated with the Communist Party, and the Force Ouvriere, which the AFL-CIO helped to establish as a counter to the CGT's radicalism, started the strike last October, they acted in defense of nothing less than the integrity of the entire health care system. Rather than keeping workers isolated and fragmented, bargaining with individual employers, they have pulled in successively greater sections of the workforce, reflecting the philosophy of French labor -- class-based unionism, rather than enterprise-based unionism.

The basic weakness of U.S. workers, by contrast, is their fragmentation and disunity. When Caterpiller strikers fought their long, dirty war with a company bent on permanently lowering their standard of living, they did send emissaries (called Road Warriors) across the nation to explain their cause. But ultimately the union relied on striking workers to so cripple production they would force the company to settle. There was no call to spread the strike to other companies in the same industry, let alone other industries. There were no mass demonstrations or job actions with Caterpiller workers to generate a political crisis which might have forced the government to pressure the company to settle. There was no joint bargaining, or possibility of combined job action, by Caterpiller workers in all the countries where production goes on.

Given the vast diversity of Caterpiller Corporation's global operations, the strikers' approach may have been unwinnable. By contrast, when the United Mine Workers struck the Pittston Coal Co. a few years ago, they set up Camp Solidarity and invited unionists from around the country to come. Together, they sat down in highways in front of coal trucks, occupied coal processing plants, and made West Virginia ungovernable. That strike was won.

As U.S. unions engage in a process of self-examination under new, more militant leaders, they need to examine why the Caterpiller strike failed and why, for the time being at least, the French workers appear to be winning.