DAVID COMMON: DIARY
It's not just another strike in France
November 15, 2007
I know. What's new about the news that France is grappling with yet another set of crippling strikes?
But this labour dispute is different. France is at a crossroads between maintaining the status quo or making reforms, following the footsteps (decades ago) of many other Western democracies.
Related
VIDEO: The City of Light is the City of Commuter Chaos, tonight. A worker's strike has shut down public transit in Paris.The CBC's David Common is there tonight...and shows you how Parisians are adjusting to life without transit. (Runs 2:07)
First though, let's take care of some housekeeping.
If you plan to visit France in the next few days (or perhaps weeks), good luck. Transport on the ground is either gridlocked or non-existent. Though the service levels change by the day, for the most part the high-speed inter-city trains are not running, Paris's metro is severely restricted and the suburban trains (which connect the airports to the cities) are, effectively, not running. If you are headed to Paris, once you pass the hours in the quagmire that is the taxi queue, you'll be slowly driven to a city that is, compared with other world capitals, quite small. One can easily walk between many of its major sites.
Now, back to why this strike is different.
You may be under the impression that France is a hotbed of union activity, where the French are always sympathetic to the cause of organized labour. Be surprised then, that less than eight per cent of the workforce is unionized — less than in Canada, and about half what it is in the United States. But the unions have historically held great power.
Whatever is won (or lost) by unions negotiating for a particular set of workers is applied to the entire workforce. So if you are a non-unionized maker of car parts and the union representing your competitors negotiates a raise for its members, you get that raise too.
That power of the unions — particularly in the public sector — is so strong that union organizers often assist in the operation of government departments and, sometimes, big businesses.
Mandate for change
The new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, campaigned on a platform of change, including what amounts to a reduction in the power of those unions. He won with a larger majority than many of his predecessors got, and now he's proposing to do what he promised.
Among all of his controversial proposals, what the transport unions have chosen to fight on is pension reform — specifically, a measure implemented after the First World War that allows certain workers to retire on full pension as early as age 50. Those workers include firefighters, police and train drivers. Why train drivers? Because their jobs were considered dangerous and difficult, shovelling coal into burning-hot boilers.
Sarkozy says those measures are outdated and need to go.
In 1995, Jacques Chirac tried the same thing. Three weeks of strikes ensued, the public supported the unions, and the government proposals were withdrawn.
What's different now? Sarkozy was elected to change this. Polls show 55-60 per cent of the French continue to support the pension reforms. An anti-strike movement has popped up in Paris. Right now, the unions are losing the popularity contest.
The government and the unions are back negotiating, with both sides, once intractable, now talking about flexibility.
If your trip isn't for a few more weeks, you'll probably be fine. But you might just be visiting a changed France.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
David Common is the CBC News correspondent in France. He has travelled to Afghanistan several times, often spending many weeks covering the actions of Canadian soldiers in that country. He recently returned from Riga, Latvia, where NATO leaders met to discuss their self-declared "most important mission."
