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France comes to a standstill

— Photo: AP

PRESSING AHEAD: Thousands of civil servants demonstrate in Marseille, southern France, on Tuesday.

Paris: Some five million public sector workers — employees from administrative, hospital, postal, electricity and gas services as well as teachers, tax collectors, air traffic controllers and others — staged a 24-hour work stoppage in France on Tuesday to protest against frozen salaries, massive job cuts and dwindling purchasing power.

This is in addition to the railway workers and students who are already on strike. Their action brought the entire country to a grinding halt.

If the general public is less sympathetic to the strike by railway workers protesting pension reforms which entered its seventh day, there is wide support for the striking public sector workers and what has been described as the “steady pauperisation of the middle classes”.

Many schools remained closed, hospitals provided minimum service and newsagents had no newspapers to sell, adding to the public’s exasperation after seven days of severe transport problems. Demonstrations drew tens of thousands in Rouen, Marseille, Grenoble, Lyon and other cities. According to government figures, some 30 per cent of civil servants were on strike. The unions said it was double that. Protesting students disrupted classes in half of the country’s 85 universities to protest a law giving faculties the right to raise money from private companies.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has kept an unusually low profile since the strike began, is expected to speak publicly in the coming days, possibly spelling out new measures to boost family budgets. A recent poll showed confidence in the President falling to 51 per cent.

Unions representing 5.2 million state employees — around a quarter of the entire workforce — say their spending power has fallen by 6 per cent since 2000, though the figure is disputed by the government. They also oppose plans to cut 23,000 jobs in 2008, half of them in education.

“In brandishing the theme of the cost of living, the civil servants are pushing where it hurts,” said the pro-government newspaper Le Figaro in an editorial. Budget Minister Eric Woerth conceded that “civil servants are not well-paid”, but he said, “in order to earn more, they must accept more responsibilities, do more overtime and also accept there will be fewer civil servants.”

In a climbdown, the government agreed to start negotiations on Wednesday, setting aside its demands that the workers return to service before any discussions could take place.

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