Crippling Strike in France May Have Been About More Than Labor Law

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/france-strike-labor-francois-hollande.html

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PARIS — It was published several years ago, but a cartoon on the front page of the French newspaper Le Monde roughly summed up the situation across the country last Thursday when several hundred thousand public employees and students went on strike.

“What if we went on strike for nothing,” asks one demonstrator in the cartoon, which appeared in 2010 during one of France’s periodic strikes. “Ah! Not a bad idea,” another answers.

The strike and mass demonstrations by air traffic controllers, train drivers, schoolteachers and cafeteria staff, hospital and museum workers were nominally in protest against President François Hollande’s attempt to change French labor law.

Like a similar but smaller show of force on March 9, the walkout had a crippling effect on Paris and cities across France. Parents had to stay home from work to take care of children, and nonstriking employees were forced to cram onto trains and subways with reduced service to reach their jobs.

In fact, the strike had less to do with the intricacies of the labor law than with a deepening disaffection, particularly among young people, with Mr. Hollande’s government, now heading into the last year of its five-year mandate.

“The young were not only demonstrating against the labor law,” said Roland Cayrol, a researcher at Sciences Po, during a televised debate on TV5. “They were demonstrating against the situation in general.”

With unemployment still about 10 percent — 29.5 percent among those ages 15 to 24 — the mood in France is grim, made worse by lingering fears after the terrorist attacks in Paris last November.

Not all major unions joined the strike, and the effect was varied: Some schools were open, some were shut as a precaution, and some were blocked by garbage cans piled high by striking students; only five airports in France had to cancel flights; the Eiffel Tower was closed, as were many museums.

Newspapers were no help on Thursday, since the strikes prevented distribution, although their editions were available online.

Those who took to the streets, estimated at 400,000 across the country, were mostly public employees and students, two groups with the least to lose if the French Parliament adopts the proposed changes to the labor law this spring.

Chief among these is a proposal to cap payouts to laid-off employees, a move that employers say would allow them to hire more freely.

“In what kind of country do public employees, whose jobs are not affected, take to the streets with high school students, who don’t have jobs but are worried about their retirement?” asked one viewer in a text message sent to the televised debate Thursday on TV5.

The answers could be found — sort of — on signs held by the 28,000 demonstrators in Paris on Thursday. “Labor law = insecurity for life,” or “We don’t want to lose our life in order to earn a living.”

Interviewed on television, students accused the Socialist government of turning its back on leftist principles, without any reduction in France’s high unemployment rate.

The demonstrations hardly stack up against some of Paris’s famous protests, which have drawn crowds of a million or more. But even if their message was confused, the show of force by France’s more militant unions and student associations does not augur well for Mr. Hollande’s chances in the 2017 presidential election.

“And yet, he still believes,” read the headline on Friday in the newspaper Le Parisien.

Mr. Hollande suffered an embarrassing defeat last week when he had to withdraw a proposed change to the Constitution that would have stripped French citizenship from convicted terrorists who possess a second nationality.

That idea, borrowed from France’s right-wing parties and challenged on principle by many of his fellow Socialists, was proposed after the deadly attacks in Paris as a unifying symbol in the fight against terrorism.

Mr. Hollande’s retreat was described in an editorial in Le Monde as “a major political disaster,” the “worst fiasco” of his presidency, “a trap which he set himself.”

Already weakened, with his popularity sinking to historic lows for a sitting French president, he now has no choice but to see through the changes to the labor law — seen as his last initiative — no matter who comes out on the streets next time, or why.