Season Of The Strike

Sunday, May. 11, 2003 By BRUCE CRUMLEY | PARIS

RITES OF SPRING: Teachers protest Raffarin's reforms

JEAN CLAUDE MOSCHETTI/REA

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It's that time again. spring is in the air and France is going out on strike. Last week teachers walked off their jobs for the fourth time this school year to protest a range of proposed reforms, and this week the country will grind to a halt as millions of other public-sector workers demonstrate against planned government pension reforms — measures that a majority of French people say are both inevitable and long overdue. Unions warned such "limited 24-hour strikes may not be enough," but Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin vowed to stand firm. "The street should express itself," he said. "But the street doesn't govern."

The strike season seems like tiresome déjá vu — France is a country where a popular website, www.lesgreves.com, is dedicated to tracking who's walking out when — yet the most important fight this week won't be happening on the streets of Paris. The crucial struggle will be inside the French labor movement itself, as intransigent hard-liners wrestle with more progressive leaders who acknowledge that the pension system must be revamped to ensure its future. "The government proposals make some good sense," says François Chérèque, head of the French Democratic Labor Confederation (CFDT) and the country's most prominent progressive union leader. "If they try to block this proposal altogether, it will be the end of a negotiated approach to reform in France."

"They" in this case means Marc Blondel, Chérèque's opposite number in Force Ouvrière, the famously combative leftist union. A balding, portly man, Blondel is an old-fashioned hard-liner who threatens that this week's walkouts may be followed by a prolonged "interprofessional general strike" that could run until Raffarin modifies his proposals — or drops them altogether. The two proposals Blondel hates most: increasing the number of years public employees must work before they qualify for full pensions, and reducing the size of pensions for those who retire earlier. Instead, Blondel argues that the country's pensions shortfall should be bridged by increasing taxes — above all on income and capital gains by businesses and the rich.

"Our retirement system is being threatened, and the danger grows if we fail to act," Blondel says, urging French employees to send "a signal to the government and its plans of destruction. We must plan not only on mobilizing through demonstration, but also by striking." He's also fond of reminding politicians that the last attempt at pension reform, in 1995, ultimately led to the ouster of Prime Minister Alain Juppé and his conservative majority in Parliament.

Chérèque is urging his 865,000 members to come out in force this week, but he stresses that his intention is to protest the government's refusal to negotiate, not to torpedo its reforms. "We want to be part of an evolutionary process," he says, eschewing the revolutionary rhetoric sometimes heard within France's divided labor movement. Chérèque wants a place at the table, and believes the government wants him there too: Social Affairs Minister François Fillon "is convinced that we need to change the means of dialogue about these issues. Does the government want to do it alone? We think they need us, the reformist unions."

Though other union leaders view the CFDT as overly eager to make concessions, Chérèque says those critics will come round to his view. But for now they're "having trouble giving up" the militant stance that has long dominated the French labor movement. Labor historian René Mouriaux already sees signs of this shift. "Whereas in 1995, the union position was a flat non!, today they are demanding the government consider their amendments and counterproposals," he says. The way this week's strikes unfold, Mouriaux argues, "could be the start of a new era of proactive labor leadership — or the end of unions as a pole of blockage and opposition."

Whether that happens may be determined by the CGT — historically France's most influential union, which under leader Bernard Thibault has broken with decades of Communist Party domination and made modest moves in Chérèque's direction. In 1995, it rejected the planned pension overhaul outright; now it acknowledges that reform is necessary. Though its problems with the government plan run far deeper than the cfdt's, its willingness to negotiate also forced Blondel to the table to avoid isolation, observers say. Given that, Mouriaux notes, the CGT in some ways reflects labor's shift from Blondel toward Chérèque.