French
strikes: A marathon everyone is forced to run
Strike
fatigue is setting in as the holiday approaches.
By NOGA
ARIKHA 12/23/19, 4:06 AM CET
Hundreds of
people demonstrate against French government's plan to overhaul the country's
retirement system, as part of a 15th day of national striking, in Nantes on
December 19, 2019 | Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images
Noga Arikha
is a historian of ideas, philosopher and essayist based in Paris.
PARIS —
Paris is a famously walkable city. But as we head into the third week of a mass
strike — this one called by unions representing transport and national rail
employees in response to the government’s plan to reform the pension system —
the resulting absence of public transport, save for jam-packed buses and
harshly reduced rush-hour service on some metro and RER lines, is forcing
Parisians to walk more than we ever have.
By now,
everyone is feeling the pinch. Strike fatigue is setting in. Business goes on
as usual, as much as possible, but tempers are getting shorter on the roads and
in the few available trains and buses.
Traffic
jams are explosive, car horns overlapping with ubiquitous and useless emergency
sirens.
Commuting
times stretch into hours. People arrive at work exhausted, and often wonder,
come evening, how long it will take them to get home, especially if they live
in the suburbs. Those planning to visit their families for Christmas have no
idea whether the trains they need to take will run. Small businesses and shops
are suffering. It is hard to visit a hospitalized parent.
Everything
in the city feels half-suspended — a parenthesis opened without any sense of
when it might be closed. People have sore feet. The strike has become a
marathon everyone is forced to run.
The unions
have not realized that different epochs require different policies.
The latest
stand-off between government and unions is familiar to the French, who are
protective of their social welfare privileges, preferring the status quo and
distrusting novelty. These privileges were inherited from a time when politics
still had something to do with social justice, and when the state could afford
to be generous. But its coffers are emptying, and there are many who believe
the strikers, who are refusing to accept the government’s project to replace
the current 42 different pension schemes with a single point-based plan, are
behaving like spoiled children.
The unions have not realized that different
epochs require different policies. And now we are all hostage to these potent
unions, even though they represent a mere 2.6 percent of French employees.
One woman,
queuing behind me at the post office, said with a smile that there is “no
choice” but to watch this familiar stand-off between government and unions, and
accept this disruption to ordinary life. “This strike is absurd,” she added.
“Times have changed since those of our grandparents, the demographics are
different, people now live into their 80s, retiring is not the same thing as it
was back then.”
The train,
metro and bus drivers embody an age-old “corporatism,” as a commuter told me in
a packed metro car: They represent the interests of their own group. They are
striking for themselves, exercising their rights with no regard for the impact
on the rest of the country. Their sole focus is maintaining their social
privileges, which include retirement at 50, something that was established in the
days when trains were coal-powered. They are blind to the fact that reforms are
sorely needed.
But, of
course, the manner of reform matters, and so far, governmental proposals are
not convincing the hard-headed unions.
The
strikers’ greatest fear is that, by standardizing the reform system as the
government plans to do, doing away with special pension regimes such as that of
the public transport drivers, they will lose out economically while working for
two years longer than is currently the case.
Many within
the beleaguered public sector — hospital doctors and nurses, school and
university teachers, national media employees, firemen, airport workers — have
allied themselves to the current protests and joined the demonstrators.
The strike,
ultimately, is also a show of force against a widely disliked president who is
seen as caring only for the rich — and so, for some of its participants, it is
on a continuum with the peoples’ revolts that are rattling far less stable countries
across the world.
The
protesters see the government’s proposed pension reform as belonging to the
neoliberal model of profit-driven economics that has engulfed the world and
that the French rightly perceive as menacing the welfare state. They believe
that they will be the poorer for it, even as the rich get richer.
There are
many reasons to support the strikers, and indeed many Parisians do. There is a
sense of solidarity rather more than of anger in the streets — as long as
you’re not stuck in traffic gridlock, or trying to grab that last Vélib'
bicycle. People are interacting and smiling more; we're all in this together.
For now, most onlookers are simply making do with the disturbance. Everyone
appears to agree that the right of citizens to protest and negotiate
legislation is at the heart of democracy. A society that cherishes this right
is fundamentally healthy.
The likelihood that people will lose patience
with the workers’ cause increases as the holidays approach, and unions say they
will continue to strike.
And yet,
it’s clear that exasperation is mounting. The radically uncompromising stance
of the unions, which are confronting the government rather than engaging in
negotiations, could soon spark a broader backlash. The likelihood that people
will lose patience with the workers’ cause increases as the holidays approach,
and unions say they will continue to strike — disrupted lives and bludgeoned
economy be damned.
For now,
the Ville de Paris has earmarked €2.5 million for small businesses, artisans
and restaurants — which have lost between 30 percent and 50 percent of their
income — and urged residents to shop and eat out in their neighborhoods in
order to sustain the economy at a local level. There are 62,000 such small
businesses in Paris alone, and this is in large part what makes this city so
liveable, lovable and walkable.
Meanwhile,
we tread our daily miles, hoping for a pragmatic compromise and a return to
normality.
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