Perilous Times
France strikes again over pensions leading to travel chaos
Travellers to France face air and rail misery on Tuesday as hundreds of
thousands of French workers begin a strike in protest against President
Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reforms.
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Published: 5:14PM BST 11 Oct 2010
Travellers to France face air and rail misery today as hundreds of
thousands of French workers begin a strike in protest against President
Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reforms.
France faces major disruption on 12 October 2010 for the fourth time in
a month as workers take to the streets Photo: AFP
Air France's unions have called a 24-hour strike starting at midnight
on Monday while a third of flights to and from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle
and Beauvais airports and half of those to and from Orly are to be
cancelled. Air France said all long-haul flights would be maintained.
A third of national rail services will be running while Paris' bus and
metro transport face severe disruption, but Eurostar trains between
London and Paris should run normally.
Teachers, truckers and postal workers will also take to the streets.
Three mass protests in the past month have only forced minor government
concessions, but unions hope that their rolling strike call will
strong-arm Mr Sarkozy into calling off a reform that will raise the
legal retirement age from 60 to 62. They have called for a further day
of demonstrations on Saturday. All unions at the state railway company
SNCF have called for renewable strikes, along with the main union in
the major gas and energy utilities.
Mr Sarkozy sees the reform's success as key to him being re-elected in
2012 and has vowed not to back down.
"(He) cannot give in, otherwise he will become a one-term president,"
one of his close aides told Le Monde, the daily newspaper, on Monday.
Union leaders are hoping for a repeat of 1995, when massive national
strikes forced Jacques Chirac, the former president, to revoke his
pension reforms and fatally weakened his government.
"This is one of the last chances to make the government retreat," said
Francois Chérèque, head of the CFDT, one of France's main unions.
Mr Sarkozy has predicted that the strikes will fizzle out when
parliament approves the entire bill by the end of the month. The Senate
has already voted in the clause increasing the minimum retirement age
to 62, and was last night due to push through another key change –
raising the full pension entitlement age from 65 to 67.
However, a CSA poll published yesterday said 69 per cent of French
people still back Tuesday's strike, with 61 per cent in favour of more
open-ended industrial action.
The Elysée, and to a lesser extent the unions, are concerned that the
enlistment of students in the protests could lead to a "radicalisation"
of the conflict that neither camp could control.
In 2006, students managed to force the government to withdraw a reform
in the employment law introducing more flexible short-term work
contracts after paralysing the country. They have vowed to do the same
today with "operation dead university day".