French unions threaten wider pension strikes
By Ben Hall in Paris
Published: October 11 2010 18:17 | Last updated: October 11 2010 18:17
France is braced for an escalation of protests against Nicolas Sarkozy’s flagship pension reforms as metalworkers, dockers and refinery employees threatened to join an open-ended strike.
Union leaders are holding another day of mass demonstrations and strikes against the French president’s pension overhaul on Tuesday, the fourth such protest since the beginning of September.
But the often ritualised protests took a more ominous turn for the government on Monday as calls for unlimited strike action spread beyond train and metro drivers. Student unions called for a mass boycott of universities, adding a flavour of 1968 radicalism, and refinery disruption created the risk of panic buying of fuel.
Jean-Pierre Delannoy, who represents northern metalworkers for the powerful CGT union, said members were “fed up with simply strolling through the streets”.
He attacked the CGT’s more moderate leadership for leaving it to individual branches to choose whether to strike. “The strategy of episodic sheep-like protests is wrong and will fail unless we step up our movement and listen to the grassroots, which wants us to take real action,” he said.
The pension overhaul – which includes raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 – has entered a critical phase. The Elysée hopes the protests will peak this week and then fizzle out, but it also fears the risk of radicalisation and even of sporadic violence.
The Senate, where the government lacks an absolute majority, on Monday resumed its debate on the pension overhaul, with lawmakers arguing bitterly over nearly 1,000 amendments. Senators on Friday backed raising the retirement age and the government was pushing for an urgent vote on Monday on the other flagship clause: increasing from 65 to 67 the age for drawing a full pension, irrespective of social security contributions.
Mr Sarkozy hopes that voting through the two age-related measures early on will convince protesters that resisting the pension reforms is a lost cause. The reforms are essential to plugging an annual deficit in the pension system of €42bn ($59bn) in 2018 if unchanged.
The president last week offered concessions to the original reform package to ease its passage through the Senate but is under pressure from employers, the financial markets and European Union partners not to water it down significantly.
However, even if the reform passes the Senate, Mr Sarkozy is not necessarily home and dry.
Union leaders remember that in 2006 mass demonstrations forced Jacques Chirac, the president, to abandon a law introducing flexible labour contracts to tackle youth unemployment, even though it had parliamentary approval.
The participation by students and high-school pupils in the pension protests is a blow to the government as they will help broaden the movement beyond public sector workers and rank-and-file union members, and lend a flavour of youthful radicalism.
France’s centre-right is still traumatised by the events of May 1968 when students joined striking workers in rebelling against Charles de Gaulle’s economic and social policies.