LABOR BRIEFS
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Pension strike in France spreads,
teachers boycott exams

Compiled by Seán Marquis

May 20 (AGR)— Nationwide protests kept France’s social tensions simmering Tuesday, as Education Minister Luc Ferry prepared to meet teachers’ unions who have taken the lead in the campaign to block controversial pension reforms. On Monday several hundred thousand people — including teachers, train workers, tax collectors, postal workers, hospital staff, and police officers — marched nationwide, police said.

A Paris protest drew at least 38,000 people. Over 25,000 people marched in the southern city of Marseille while at least seven other cities and towns saw marches with more than 10,000 people.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s government wants to end the privileged status of public sector employees by requiring them to work for 40 years to gain full retirement pay, putting them on a par with private sector employees.

Schools were worst affected, as around half the country’s primary and nursery teachers and 40 percent of other teachers reportedly joined the stoppage.

Postal workers, bank staff, and employees of the state-controlled communications giant France Telecom also joined the strike.

Striking teachers sealed off education ministry offices in the southeastern city of Lyon and took over the toll-gates on a motorway near St.Etienne. In the northern port of Le Havre they picketed roads leading into the town to hand out leaflets explaining their action. The teachers have been waging a separate campaign of protests against the government for several months, and have added the pensions issue to their list of grievances.

Many are angry at proposals made by Ferry to re-classify thousands of assistants’ posts and to devolve responsibility for parts of the education system to departments and regions. This they fear would herald inequalities between different parts of the country.

With hostility to Ferry increasingly vocal, some have begun to boycott end-of-year exams -- earning swift denunciation from the government.

Tuesday’s strikes hit schools hard, with about half of the staffs in elementary and high schools skipping class, the Education Ministry said.

At the Deodat de Severac high school in the southern city of Toulouse, about 100 teachers chained and padlocked the entrance and urged colleagues not to supervise the exams.

The action prevented students from taking elective sports tests that are part of the high school graduation exams.

Nearly 2,000 college students at the nearby University of Perpignan were also unable to take scheduled exams Monday because of teacher protests, the university said.

Government employees, who include most transit workers, began their strike last week and the gravest effects were felt in the French capital, where subways, buses, and suburban rail transport were largely shut down and many flights were canceled at the city’s two airports.

In Paris, an estimated 250,000 state employees and their supporters marched through the streets when the strikes began on May 14. More than two million people joined similar marches in 100 French cities and towns.

Government officials said their essential strategy will be to chip away at union solidarity with minor concessions that will entice some branches of the labor movement to vote to give up the strikes and return to work.

The government did just that when the CFDT — France’s second largest union — and the smaller CGC accepted Raffarin’s offer to modify the pension plans and lifted their opposition last Thursday.

But the two unions have relatively few members in the public sector which is dominated by the Communist Party-linked CGT and leftist Force Ouvriere (FO). These have called a mass demonstration against the reforms for next Sunday, May 25.

Aging population

The strikers want Raffarin to withdraw the entire regressive proposal.

But the minister for labor and social affairs, François Fillon, told a May 15 session of the senate that no alternative existed to the government’s basic proposals for more payments for a longer period by government employees to prevent the state pension system from collapsing in coming years because the number of retirees is growing faster than the number of workers contributing to the system.

The funding of pensions, when the retired population is exploding and the working population is shrinking, is an economic time bomb for the whole of the EU. The dangers are especially great in France, which has done the least to prepare itself for a greyer future and funds pensions entirely from the contributions of those in work and, in the case of civil servants, taxes. France also has some of the most generous retirement terms -- especially for state employees -- of any large developed country. The average “real” retirement age in the European Union is 64. In France it is 57.5.

Within 10 years, France will have more citizens over the age of 60 than under 20 for the first time in its history. From 2006, its “active” population – already one of the smallest in Europe – will start to fall, for the first time in half a century. By 2040, if the present rules remain unchanged, France will have seven pensioners for every 10 people in work. Without reform, including a later retirement age, the government warns that it will become impossible to sustain the present system into the next decade.

Raffarin wants to erode the privileges of state employees and increase the number of years which workers must contribute to the system (now 37.5 years for civil servants and 40 years for the rest) and gradually push up the nominal retirement age from 60 to 65.

His hopes of doing so without provoking a street rebellion have been undermined by the poor performance of the French economy, which has sent unemployment climbing towards 10 per cent again. Pensions reform, plus widespread job losses, plus a threatened budget freeze, plus a determination by some on the left to recapture the initiative after last year’s electoral disasters, add up to an explosive political formula.

Raffarin has sought to tread carefully, knowing that the last conservative government of Prime Minister Alain Juppé, which sought to overhaul public sector pensions, was brought down in 1995 by huge strikes in which the entire national railway system was closed for 24 days.

Sources: Associated Press, Agence France Presse, BBC, Independent Digital (UK), New York Times

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