Collapse of Rail, Subway Strike Is a First Success for Sarkozy

Source: nysun

President Sarkozy of France is on the verge of a breakthrough in his ambitious plan to wean his country off the restrictive working practices he believes stand in the way of national prosperity.

Yesterday, the strike of rail and subway workers that has crippled France for nine days was clearly crumbling, as workers began returning to work in large numbers and union branches conceded that support for the dispute is collapsing.

"We think a dynamic of return to work has begun," Julie Vion, a spokeswoman for France's state-owned railroad network, SNCF, said.

Union leaders began to concede defeat yesterday. "We have to face reality. Since yesterday's negotiations, things have changed. The strike is no longer the solution. The strike strategy is no longer winning," a leader of the Sud union representing Paris underground railway workers, Philippe Touzet, said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

The collapse of support for the strike by individual rail workers marks the first success in what Mr. Sarkozy considers the key goal of his presidency, the abandonment of expensive entitlements and special conditions for public sector workers, including generous early retirement and pension benefits for half a million rail workers, which he believes make France uncompetitive.



Read more: http://www.nysun.com/article/66884

They all were OK with the best deal the State could give them.
If there's $9 in the piggy bank and 10 people to divide it
up, you simply can't give everybody a dollar any more. Giving
in to common sense does not mean you have lost.

France will be better off the sooner they face that (I wish the USA would
realize it, too--my children do not deserve to be stuck with Bush's Iraq
bill, but they are).

The support for the strike was about 30% among the populace. Maybe that
got compared to a similar statistic in the USA, and somebody got the message.

and i couldnt agree with you more.

In spite of the opinion of many on DU that all strikes should be supported, regardless of the facts in the case, you clearly spelled out some of the issues and the reasons the transport workers went on strike in the 1st place. If it is unsustainable, it is unsustainable.

You sound as if you live an interesting life, living and working in Europe. I lived in Athens when i was a child but have not been back to the continent since the 60's.

I have never been to Athens or Rome. I haven't even learned Greek yet (I do speak Italian).
Some things, you just don't find time for.

Even though Prague is just a 70 minute flight from here, we never went down
there until last year, and one of the most famous archaeological sites in the
world is a 20 minute drive from our German house, and we didn't go visit it
until visiting friends from Russia expressed an interest in seeing it this
past January.

(For the record--some very important fossils and artifacts were found there in the
19th century. It was in the small valley of a stream called the Neander, and since
"valley" in German is "Tal," the valley is called the Neandertal, and you can guess
what site I am talking about.)

As for the strikes, there are always two sides to a dispute, but I just think the French
one was unjustified. The one here in Germany threatened to get nasty, but it was resolved
quickly. The union claimed that their engineers only earned €1500 month, which is slave wages.
The Railroad pointed out that with bonuses that ALL engineers got, their real monthly salary was
€2750, almost double. Anyway, they both postured, struck for a few days, and then got down to
business and did their deal. Train travelers in Germany are foregoing the high price of train
travel for cheap flights now being offered all over the place, and the Railroad here is having a
problem attracting riders for the high prices they need to charge to pay the costs of running the
operation.

Germany has just about the best rail system in the world. I hope they can keep it.
They're gonna need it.
We need a rail system like that here.

Beyond the fact that they tack on "fuel surcharges" that surpass the cheap fares,
a travel agent told me that they supplement the passenger fares by carrying lots of
small packages for services not big enough to have their own planes. Hell if I know.
Last year, I bought (way in advance) a round trip ticket, same day up and back, from
Düsseldorf to Copenhagen. This is a 70 minute flight for which Lufthansa would have
charged about $1200 or more. I got the flight for 1 (that's one, as in uno, eins) euro
each way. Of course, they tacked on fuel surcharges and stuff, so the fare really came
out to 87 euros for the whole trip, but it was still laughably cheap.

The rail system here in Germany is usually great, but needs to have someone at its head
who really travels by train a lot instead of some suit and tie who gets a chauffeured
limousine everywhere. They think up these "bargain" fares that you can only take advantage
of if you travel between 2 AM and 6 AM on a Friday, and start travel no later than Monday
morning, or some set of stupid conditions like that. If they would figure out a fair system
of fares to charge, their ridership would increase (with gasoline at $8 a gallon here, you
can imagine), and their financial woes would diminish.

You could do something to find a way to put an extra dollar into your piggy bank so that everyone can get their fair share.

and there is no where else to get the extra dime without going into debt for it, where should it come from?

If your fair share is $.90, why would you demand $1.00? I mean, what's fair is fair, right? The strike was not over what was fair, but keeping something, come hell or high water, that has been clearly unsustainable.

The French transport workers have gotten WAY more than their fair share for a long time. Sarkozy was voted in by a clear majority to address exactly these issues.

As as far as him being right wing, he would be considered about as far to the right in this country as Edwards is.

these European countries were "able to afford" good benefits for workers back when they were still half digging out of the rubble but now they can't. (Just as the U.S. had good schools with music, art, home ec., shop, foreign languages, and gym classes during the Depression and somehow there are schools that can't pay for them now. Just as the UK instituted its National Health Service in the immediate postwar period and somehow "needs" to privatize it now.)

Perhaps if France weren't setting off nukes in the Pacific or trying to maintain part of its colonial empire it wouldn't have trouble with generous benefits for its citizens.

Thatcher broke the coal miners' strike, and Reagan broke the air traffic controllers' strike, and they both become popular and electorally unbeatable on the backs of those workers.

I think Sarkozy is looking to take a page from the Thatcher/Reagan era - a symbolic victory over unions - to advance his platform: "the abandonment of expensive entitlements and special conditions for public sector workers" Sarkozy is on a mission, IMO, and he's apparently won round one.

The number of prominent Socialists he brought into his government from day one
caused howls of protest from both his party and the Socialists. When he broke
off the stupid CBS interview, he showed that he had a mind of his own, and wasn't
there to play childish MSM games. Bush and his idiots like to claim they now have
a friend in the Élysée Palace, but Sarkozy is no Thatcher fawning on his American
counterpart. He is also very smart, in which case he knows how very much less so
Bush is, and thinking he sees America as a role model is about as naive as looking
into his eyes and thinking you see his soul.

Thatcher had the advantage that Scargill was a pompous ass, and Reagan was just an ass.
The majority of the French people still take many benefits for granted that Americans
would consider progressive innovations that are beyond reach. Sarkozy has no intentions
of touching the basic ones (health care and education). Any Democrat daring to propose
to offer the USA half of what the French enjoy in that regard would be lucky to lose the
presidential election by a three to one margin.

Unless he gets steamrolled by forces beyond his control, I think he has the chance to
make some real reform in his country, much as Bill Clinton did, and since the French
president can wield more power domestically than an American president can, he might
make it. He'll face as much opposition from both left and right as Clinton did, and he
knows it.

and suspect he won't: French presidents do not on the whole have quite the same power as an American president, or a British PM with a large majority.

On Thatcher: she got in at the beginning in 1979, partly indeed as a result of her policy of 'reigning in' the trade unions. Just as in the French case, there were some genuine problems to address in the UK, over the fact that some workers - those who belonged to the larger and more powerful unions - were disproportionately advantaged over those in less powerful unions, who often got a pretty raw deal in comparison. And no doubt in 1979 a lot of Brits were fed up with all the strikes during the 'Winter of Discontent. But Thatcher, as it turned out, did not simply seek to reform the unions, but to crush them, and much of British industry with them. I think it would be harder for Sarkozy to do the same, even if he wishes to do so - but sadly that could be wishful thinking.

As I remember, people here were *extremely* divided over the miners' strike - which was not even mainly over pay or conditions, but over the very survival of the mining industry. Many of us were horrified by the actions of Thatcher and her henchman, Sir Ian Macgregor the Chairman of the National Coal Board. Of course, they won, and mining in Britain was essentially destroyed. I don't think that Thatcher got back in 1987 because of her handling of the miners' strike, but because of a combination of her 'bribing' voters with her policy of enabling people to buy their own council homes; and weak leadership and deep divisions in the Opposition.

I also think that the coal miners' lot in Britian might have ended up better
had they been represented by someone less grandstanding than Arthur Scargill.
I think the rank and file had no friends on either side of that one--neither
in Thatcher nor in Scargill. They didn't stand a chance.

Sarkozy has no intention of trying to crush the unions. I think he is smarter
than that. But I do not think that the CGT or the CFDT have lost their claim
to omnipotence, and considering their successes of the past, I can understand
why. It will be a gradual process to wean them from it, but I don't think that
their destruction is an intended result, nor do I get the impression that Sarkozy
has any such goals in mind. Progress only comes subsequent to resolving a conflict,
not while it is ongoing.

The military had to reassign its most senior personnel to the civilian sector.
I can't imagine people would worry that mid air collisions over their heads could possibly be a factor of a strike fallout -
pun intended

The contract and the law said they could not strike. They fgured Reagan could not fire them all. He did.

So was/is Bush, Putin, Chavez, Musharraf, Saddam.

They are all doing good to their country, I suppose.

I'm sure he's working very hard to abandon them as well.

He has the same ones all French presidents get. The same ones Socialist président Mitterand
took full advantage of, the same ones Séloène Royal would have enjoyed, had she won the election.
Striking workers during Mitterand's presidency didn't demand he live in a tent, either.

His monthly salary as president will go up from 7,084€ to 19 331€.

Word of this came out just before the strikes. It did not make most people happy when they looked at their own paltry salaries and their decided lack of purchasing power.

The latest popularity polls have Sarkozy down 5 points from last month, now 51%.

Sending a dictator to the power without knowing it.

All he done is not give in to the strikers. Is that your definition of a dictator - anyone who doesn't say yes to all the demands of strikers?

The workers will have to work those three more years afterall.
Still, who's going to pay the taxes that support all these future pensioneers?

--I think this is a good result for the French people and the French economy. Sarkozy chose his battle well; the French are tired of "business as usual," whereby the Communist-dominated rail/transport unions would hold the country hostage, the government would capitulate in the face of protests, no reforms would go through, and higher taxes would be imposed on business owners to pay for the spiraling cost of public section perks. Rinse, lather, repeat. This is not a question of left vs right but of right vs wrong, of reason vs excess.

I say this because I'm pro-French. I want my beloved France to be dynamic again, not mired in the old doctrines and habits that only hold it back. At the end of the Chirac era, France was barely limping along. Now, I believe, it can position itself again as a model to the world, a role that it has played so many times in the past. Vive la France!

and you end up like we are here with people losing our jobs to jobs to service jobs that don't pay enough to support a famiy.
You have let in a man who will lead you to the place where America is going. A two class society of rich and poor.
If you like unrestricted capatalism...vist MEXICO. No guarantees there and you can get an MBA and not earn enough to live in anything but a 3 room apt.

but I know it not.

they will regret what they did.