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NEWS & LETTERS, JUNE 2003
Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Mass French strikesOn May 25, some 500,000 workers and their supporters demonstrated in Paris. The week before, on May 19, hundreds of thousands of teachers, as well as health care, postal, and telephone workers went on strike across the country in an attempt to block a rollback of retirement and pension benefits. Around 500,000 also took to the streets in various cities on May 19. On May 13, an even larger strike halted the above sectors, as well as air and ground transport, electric power plants, and newspaper delivery. A million people also demonstrated in the streets. This was clearly the biggest outpouring by labor since the 1995-96 mass strikes, which defeated a similar austerity plan by an earlier conservative government. This year, as is typical of large strikes in France, sectors of labor not directly affected by the austerity plan nonetheless joined in again, most notably the railroad workers. In a separate action, postal workers in Paris have been carrying out strikes for weeks against automation. If President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin thought they could take advantage of the fact that French public opinion had strongly supported their opposition to the Iraq war, they were proved wrong by a large wave of public support for the strikers. |
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