Strikes do not make sense. I can personally testify that public transport strikes cripple the general economy and otherwise bring the country to a virtual standstill. It penalises those who rely upon public transport to get from point A to B. It betrays the trust which commuters have invested in public transport.
Mostly, it is annoying and while striking may make sense on the surface, probe deeper and it simply does not make sense at all.
I apologise for my lengthy absence: I have been travelling quite a bit. This means that I have also been affected by the transport strike in France by quite not a bit. When the trade unions called for a 'one-day' strike last month, I cleverly pre-empted it by booking by train tickets for Britanny a day before. Voila, problem solved - or so I misguidedly thought.
When I returned to Paris, no RER lines (trains which serve the suburbs) were working. No sweat - I managed to stay overnight at a friend's place in Paris which also allowed me an arresting view of the Eiffel Tower at night.
So I thought that the worst is over and that things would return back to normality. Unfortunately, the obstinate Dider Le Reste, President of the Communist-inspired CGT, had other ideas in mind: he called for a strike on the 14th of November with the intention of bringing the Government to its knees. I didn't know what to do, really. I was scheduled to fly off to Italy on that very day.
Fortunately, not all train drivers believed that going out onto the streets was way of influencing public policy from afar. Sporadic trains ran every hour during the wee hours of the morning and I hopped onto the earliest train. When I came back yesterday, I took a night bus back. The strikes, it seem, offer loopholes for the observant commuter to exploite and get around it.
This got me thinking on the rationality as well as the economics of going on strike on the 1 hour 15 minute bus ride back to my place. Yes, I can certainly empathise with the train workers and how the overwhelming motif of this strike is justice - or rather the lack of. They probably see it as a question of fairness and that, frankly, does not matter much in conventional economical wisdom: by assuming that if both parties make a deal which make them better off, the size of the pie has been increased. But in the real world, if the deal seems unfair to one party, he would accordingly reject it even if doing so makes him worse off.
The train workers are tentatively being offered a higher pay scale in their final years to make up for the privileged pension schemes they stood to enjoy under the current system. It is likely that these schemes would be abolished regardless of the outcome. It is thus rational that the both sides come together to work out a solution that would appease the militant train drivers and abate union anger at what they perceive to be the 'high-handedness' of the government.
For the moment, it is very unlikely that the more bellicose elements of the unions would budge. They are ready to fight like a dog cornered even if this means that they end up losing more than they should.
Seriously, I am awfully fed up with the strikes. So is the French public. Even the left-leaning Liberation concedes that a fully 59% of the public back the President rather than the strikers.
But fed up as I am, I hope that the Government is not discouraged by babaric street action presses on with badly-needed reforms. A victory over the special pensions scheme would easily stiffen his will for pushing through reforms in other sectors. This would not be easy, but it is a small short-term price to pay for big long-term benefits.
greg in noord-frankrijk
loic wrote:
Strikes do not make sense.
Yet they are constitutional in France. However, no employer is entitled to intimidate strikers, nor retaliate against them, nor even thwart the effects of strike through hiring new staff that would be holding no open-ended contract of employment (CDI) unless those new recruits agree to work for free for the employer. The employer may be contracting, at his own expenses, with another company to get the work done, though.
loic wrote:
I can personally testify that public transport strikes cripple the general economy and otherwise bring the country to a virtual standstill. It penalises those who rely upon public transport to get from point A to B. It betrays the trust which commuters have invested in public transport.
Which brings the question of the responsibility of the government, knowing that Sarkozy deliberately banked on provocation, division and deterioration but failed miserably.
loic wrote:
This means that I have also been affected by the transport strike in France by quite not a bit. When the trade unions called for a 'one-day' strike last month, I cleverly pre-empted it by booking by train tickets for Britanny a day before. Voila, problem solved - or so I misguidedly thought.
They did not call for a "one-day" strike : they called for a *renewable* strike starting on the 14 as a response to Sarkozy’s refusal to negotiate.
loic wrote:
So I thought that the worst is over and that things would return back to normality. Unfortunately, the obstinate Dider Le Reste, President of the Communist-inspired CGT, had other ideas in mind: he called for a strike on the 14th of November with the intention of bringing the Government to its knees.
No, quite the contrary in fact. It’s the ultraliberal, outdated revanchist faction led by Sarkozy who wanted trade-union leaders’ heads brought on a plate to redeem the humiliation of 1995. They thought they could easily flex their muscles to make strikers give in and then impress the public opinion so that further attacks against French workers planned for 2008 would be facilitated. They failed. So much so that Élysée spin-doctors urged Sarkozy to renounce his provocation strategy, that would be meet strikers on the spot to add fuel to the fire, meet blocked passengers on an overcrowded platform and label strikers as privileged. Yet they could not stop him from organising phoney counter-demonstrations (using classical propaganda tools, essentially ultraliberal activists like Liberté chérie, Alternative libérale to name but a few) but those manifs proved a total non-event. Sarkozy’s men were so panicked by the degree of resolve which strikers showed that they even had him avoid TV studios at all costs (a real première since that egregious May 16), at least until things eventually cooled down once unions got what they wanted : make the government negotiate. Sarkozy wanted to be Thatcher : he’ll just be a kind of sous-Berlusconi. By the way, be aware that new renewable strikes are due shortly before Christmas, should Sarkozists mishandle negotiations.
loic wrote:
The train workers are tentatively being offered a higher pay scale in their final years to make up for the privileged pension schemes they stood to enjoy under the current system. It is likely that these schemes would be abolished regardless of the outcome. It is thus rational that the both sides come together to work out a solution that would appease the militant train drivers and abate union anger at what they perceive to be the 'high-handedness' of the government.
No, train workers are not being "offered" anything : they stood up and won what the government was initially "resolute" not to offer.
loic wrote:
Seriously, I am awfully fed up with the strikes. So is the French public. Even the left-leaning Liberation concedes that a fully 59% of the public back the President rather than the strikers.
That’s what media say. In reality Sarkozy’s addiction to polls (then quite alarming : a downswing that could backfire was looming) forced him to backpedal in emergency and rush to the negotiation table. After a mere six months spent at the Élysée, Sarkozy is already Chiraquising. Life is cruel... (Sarkozy’s obsession is do just the opposite of what Chirac did) The real winner is Olivier Besancenot (radical left). Rugby cup, anyone ?
loic wrote:
But fed up as I am, I hope that the Government is not discouraged by babaric street action presses on with badly-needed reforms. A victory over the special pensions scheme would easily stiffen his will for pushing through reforms in other sectors. This would not be easy, but it is a small short-term price to pay for big long-term benefits.
I don’t want your dreams to disintegrate, but that little showdown (not even ten days so far) clearly illustrated that Sarkozy cherishes polls over "reform" — what reform by the way ? He doesn’t have the guts to deliver what the most ideologically radicalised of his supporters want him to. Sarkozy would have been fired by any board of a typical private-owned company : he is a poor manager, incapable of "communicating" properly although the matter was "a piece of cake", lacks vision and wants stamina. If I were a French ultraliberal, I’d seek asylum in the UK : it’s a complete Waterloo here ! Above all the most informative bit is Sarkozy’s amateurism : 1] he spends a 15-bn € package for the better-off, his clientèle — 2] he awards himself a 200 % "pay"-rise (pocket money actually) — 3] then he targets "privileges" supposedly enjoyed by lower-class workers earning between 1.300 € & 2.000 € a month on average. That was neither good tactics nor sound strategy...
