FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron is facing the biggest challenge of his second term over his flagship pension overhaul, which includes raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 and demanding people work longer for a full pay-out.
Macron has faced a series of protests and strikes in France against the reform, with a new day of mass strikes and demonstrations yesterday on the eve of today’s Constitutional Court meeting to rule on whether forcing the pensions changes without a vote was legal.
From Wednesday night until Friday morning (at 6am), 20 per cent of flights were cancelled at the Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes airports, France’s civil aviation authority warned.
France’s national rail service, SNCF, warned that services will be ‘disrupted’ today. On average, about four-out-of-five high-speed TGV trains were expected to run.
As for regional trains, SNCF said that three-out-of-five TER trains would operate according to normal schedules, and one-in-five daytime Intercité trains would run but there will be no night-time Intercité services.
Regarding international train travel, SNCF said in a statement on Tuesday evening that Eurostar and Thalys services will be ‘almost normal’.
The Versailles Estate and Palace announced on its website that it expected to be affected by strike action yesterday, with a message on their website explaining that the opening of the tourist site is likely to be ‘severely disrupted on Thursday April 13th’.
As of Tuesday, fuel shortages were still impacting many filling stations in France, despite strike action at refineries beginning to wind down.
About 9.7 per cent of the country’s fuel stations were short of at least one type of fuel on Tuesday, and 25 of France’s 96 mainland departments had at least 10 per cent of their stations experiencing some level of shortage.
In recent days, the Paris region has been most impacted when compared with other parts of France. In the city of Paris, 44.9 per cent of filling stations were missing at least one type of fuel, and in Val-de-Marne, just outside Paris, that figure rose to 61.4 per cent, with 8.4 per cent of stations running completely dry.
The centre-west of the country was also affected, namely the Indre-et-Loire department where 41.8 per cent of stations were experiencing some level of shortage.
Oil refinery workers went on strike again yesterday, namely at the Donges refinery in Loire-Atlantique. The workers at this refinery had suspended their strike last week, but they resumed strike action yesterday and continued walk-outs at least until today.
However, workers at other refineries have voted to suspend strike action, particularly at the TotalEnergies refinery in the Seine-Maritime department (Gonfreville-l’Orcher).
Unions representing teachers have called for walk-outs on both Thursday and today.
Parents of children in primary schools in France should be informed as to whether or not their child’s teacher will be on strike 48 hours ahead of the strike action. The same requirement is not in place for secondary schools, however.
The vast majority of the waste left on the streets of the capital had been cleaned up as of Wednesday, just ahead of a new rolling strike by Paris rubbish workers which started yesterday.
On Wednesday, the ring road around Nantes in western France was blocked in a wildcard action.
Previous strike days have seen a rising number of unannounced actions, including blockades at airports and rolling roadblocks on the roads.
During the most recent day of action last week, roadblocks were seen outside of Toulouse, Brest, Caen and Rennes.
Ahead of yesterday’s mass strikes and demonstrations, the CGT union federation posted a statement on Monday headed:
Save the civil servants and the civil service
It said: ‘It was the Ministry of the Civil Service who said a year ago: The number of candidates for the civil service competitions has been divided by 4 in 25 years.
‘Already, in 2020, a study showed that the number of candidates for civil service positions had fallen from 650,000 in 1997 to 228,000 in 2018. But this decline in attractiveness is much older.’
Inexorable deterioration of working conditions
‘For twenty years, the working conditions of civil servants have been inexorably deteriorating.
‘The freezing of the index point, the lack of financial means to recruit qualified and statutory staff, the increase in working time and the elimination of leave, salaries that are too low for the level of qualification requested, the career development attractive, the degraded conditions for exercising the public service, the absence of significant revaluation of the grids.
‘Everything contributes to making the three public functions less and less attractive.
‘In August 2019, the law on the transformation of the public service notably abolished the status in favour of the general code of the public service, increased the working time to 1,607 hours, in place of more favourable derogatory regimes and extended the use of contract workers.
‘The law thus favoured direct and patronage recruitment, and contributed to the disappearance of certain competition.
‘These recruitment conditions no longer guarantee independence and autonomy vis-à-vis the employer,’ explains Natacha Pommet, CGT Public Service General Secretary.
The post-Covid era has only reinforced an already degraded
situation.
The statement continued: ‘While the agents, on the frontline during the pandemic, were waiting for real recognition, both in terms of remuneration and the reorganisation of working time; their only response was the Ségur de la santé, a largely insufficient response.
‘Today, the public service functions above all on the good will of the agents, committed to carrying out their public service mission as best as possible.
Imperative revaluation
‘To preserve public services and the quality of service provided to users, it is above all necessary to guarantee civil servants the possibility of carrying out their mission under satisfactory conditions.
‘This is why the CGT is committed with determination to the campaign of “10% immediately for the civil service”.
- 10% increase in the index point, with immediate salary catch-up;
- 10% less working time to work for everyone and have time for themselves;
- 10% job creation in the public service in order to be able to carry out public service missions properly and meet social needs;
- 10% of working time devoted to professional training.’
Meanwhile, speaking at The Hague on Tuesday, Macron spoke of his vision for a new era of ‘European sovereignty’ in which the continent can choose its own partners and ‘shape its own destiny’.
His address was briefly disrupted by protesters who attempted to shout him down.
Macron’s speech, made during the first state visit to the Netherlands by a French president in 23 years, came just days after he sparked concerns among allies after he said in an interview that Europe must not be a ‘follower’ of neither Washington nor Beijing on Taiwan.
‘European sovereignty’ might have once sounded like just a ‘French idea’, Macron said, or even ‘wishful thinking’, but pointed to the danger of a Europe that is too dependent on other world powers, saying it places Europe in the position of not being able to decide for itself.
European sovereignty should mean that the continent can ‘choose our partners and shape our own destiny’ rather than being ‘a mere witness (to) the dramatic evolution of this world’, he said.
‘This means that we must strive to be rule-makers rather than rule-takers.’
But Macron also said Europe would maintain robust relationships with its allies.
He said the pandemic was a ‘wake-up call’ as Europe discovered how dependent it was on other nations.