FRANCE: Sarkozy’s Honeymoon May Have Ended

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Oct 17 2007 (IPS) - Five months after taking office as president, Nicolas Sarkozy has run into a crisis over labour issues. Railway workers and staff at electricity companies, among others, plan to strike Oct. 18.

The strike by leading unions has been called to protest against government plans to reform the pension system, particularly the “special regime” of pensions for railways and electricity workers. That regime allows these workers to retire at 50, with pension benefits.

The strike call came as no surprise, but leading officials have publicly expressed concern over the political consequences of the industrial action.

“This Thursday (Oct. 18), neither train, nor bus, nor metro will be working,” labour minister Xavier Bertrand said in a radio interview Oct. 14. At a press conference the same day, Sarkozy admitted this would be a “difficult week” for his government.

Meanwhile, doctors at public hospitals announced Oct. 15 that they would extend their strike launched Sep. 27 until the government recognises that “we can settle professionally wherever we want.”

The government wants to distribute doctors according to the regional needs. Location determines income, particularly reimbursement by the public health service.

In the face of such protests, Sarkozy has been trying to appear both conciliatory and tough. He has said reform plans can be “negotiated” and implemented “by mutual agreement” with the unions. But he has said also that his government “will not give in” to pressure through strikes. “I will see (the reform plans) through to the end,” he said last week.

In 1995 the government of former president Jacques Chirac tried similarly to reform the pension system for railways and electricity workers. A three-week strike then by more or less the same unions paralysed the country, forcing the government to withdraw the plans.

The government never did recover from the defeat; less than two years later it lost parliamentary elections to a leftist coalition formed by the Socialist, Communist and Green parties, forcing Chirac to share power with Socialist leader Lionel Jospin as prime minister.

The unions have lost some of that political stamina. Strikes at the railways company SNCF (Societé du chemins de fer de France) are now fewer. Last year there were about 700 partial strikes at the SNCF, against 1,182 called 11 years before. In 1995, 5.82 days per worker were lost in strikes, against 0.79 in 2006.

Sarkozy has been countering unions with the argument that at a cost of eight billion dollars a year to the state, the pension system is too expensive.

Union leader Marc Lasserve told Sarkozy at a recent meeting that railway and electricity workers perform “an extremely painful job, and, if it is true that we can retire at the age of 50, it is also true that we receive the smallest pensions of all workers.”

Unions are looking for new support from younger workers, especially at the SNCF, who may not want to lose the benefits their senior colleagues have enjoyed. The SNCF has recruited more than 70,000 new workers since 1995, and the recruits since then are now almost 40 percent of staff.

And the unions are also aware that if they give in now, they might not have the force to resist other attacks on French welfare state institutions.

More strikes are foreseen at schools, at the national employment agency, airports, state-owned airlines such as Air France, at the ministry of finance, and even in private enterprises.

“People will be striking not only to defend the pension systems but to point out to the government how national income has been distributed in favour of the rich,” Annick Coupé, spokesperson for Solidaires, a federation of several unions, told IPS.

“The strike of Oct. 18 is actually a national expression of our discontent with the social and economic situation of France,” Coupé added.