Railway workers and workers in health, education and other sectors on strike against the pension reform briefly invaded the Parisian headquarters of the luxury giant LVMH on Thursday with smoke bombs and whistles, noted an AFP journalist. Leaving from an interprofessional general assembly at Gare de Lyon, more than 400 strikers took the metro for this surprise action, at the prestigious address of 22 avenue Montaigne, near the Champs-Élysées, a symbolic place a week after a similar action against a symbol of finance, BlackRock. They did not, however, enter the nearby Louis Vuitton store.
“The street is ours,” chanted the demonstrators in front of the building, many of whom got into the seat before leaving after about ten minutes, without clashing with the security guards. Red smoke bombs flooded the entrance hall for a few minutes. The demonstrators took up the slogan “there is money in the pockets of employers” or “and we will go as far as withdrawal” and “anti, anti, anti-capitalist”.
Several demonstrators stuck stickers in the hall of LVMH but many of them also called not to commit degradation. “We have been mobilizing for three months, that is to say the most important mobilization since 1968. We are going to show Macron that the determination is not him, it is the camp of the workers”, has declared at the GA earlier Fabien Villedieu of SUD-Rail.
“If you are looking for money to finance pensions, well take it from the pockets of billionaires starting with Bernard Arnault”, he then explained on BFMTV, speaking of the boss of LVMH. The figure of the yellow vests Jérôme Rodrigues was also present at the starting GA. “We are touching our democracy. We take 47.1, 49.3 which show us that democracy only goes in the direction of the powerful. The fight must go beyond retreats,” he said.
Last week, SUD-Rail and CGT activists invaded for about twenty minutes a building in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris where the offices of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, are located.
