PARIS — Unions went on strike Tuesday across France as lawmakers began debating President Nicolas Sarkozy’s bill to raise the retirement age, and as many as 10,000 subway workers in London staged the first of a planned series of 24-hour strikes over proposed job cuts.
In France, the strikers disrupted trains and planes, hospitals and mail delivery amid street protests. Many Londoners, meanwhile, rode their bicycles or walked to work.
Some suspect that the protests are a prelude to a season of strikes in Europe, from Spain to the Czech Republic, as heavily indebted governments cut costs and chip away at some cherished but costly benefits that underpin European life. It’s a scaling back process that has gained urgency with Greece’s $140 billion bailout.
French protesters are angry about the government’s plan to do away with the promise of retirement at age 60, forcing people to work until 62 because they are living longer. The goal is to get the money-draining pension system back into the black by 2018.
People poured into the streets in 220 French cities, setting off flares and beating drums. A banner in the southern port city of Marseille called for Europe-wide solidarity: “Let’s Refuse Austerity Plans!” The Interior Ministry said more than 1.1 million people demonstrated throughout France, while the CFDT union put the number at 2.5 million.
Civil aviation authorities asked airlines to cancel a quarter of their flights at Paris’ airports. Only two out of every five of France’s highspeed trains operated during the strike, which ran Monday evening through Tuesday night.
Some commuters were annoyed by the disruptions - even in strike-accustomed France.
“I’m just getting tired of this because this is not the first time,” said Henda Fersi, a passenger at the Part-Dieu train station in Lyon in southeast France. “I understand the strikers’ point of view but, still, they put us in a difficult situation, and we’re penalized.”
As debate on the subject opened in the French Parliament, Labor Minister Eric Woerth said the plan was one “of courage and reason” and that it is the “duty of the state” to save the pension system. He later told TF1 television that the president would announce minor changes to the plan today, though its fundamentals would remain the same.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon reminded the French that it could be worse: In nearly all European countries, the current debate is over raising the retirement age to 67 or 68, he said. Germany has decided to bump the retirement age from 65 to 67, for example, and the U.S. Social Security system is gradually raising the retirement age to 67.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, the opposition Socialist Party leader in the National Assembly, said his party wants “a fair reform that isn’t just done on the back of workers.”
In London, workers unhappy about job cuts closed much of the city’s subway system - the first in a series of 24-hour strikes planned for the fall. The thousands of London maintenance workers, drivers and station staff members who walked out say the estimated 800 job cuts will hurt service and safety.
No talks were reported tobe scheduled between transport officials and the striking unions, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, or RMT, and the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association.
With the underground train service shut down, buses had to take on extra loads, while vehicular traffic was heavy and city sidewalks were teeming with walkers and bicyclists.
“It was a nightmare,” Alain Portmann, a partner at Web Liquid Group online advertising agency in London, said after his journey by bus and foot took 2 1 /2 hours instead of the usual 35 minutes. “With the amount of traffic, people were just getting off the bus and saying they were goingto walk.”
As in France, news reports didn’t mention any injuries resulting from the strikes.
Other protests are set for elsewhere in Europe this month.
A general strike was planned in Spain for Sept. 29 over labor-market changes, and in the Czech Republic, a protest against proposed austerity measures, including 10 percent salary cuts for state employees, was set for Sept. 21.
In Greece, all public-transportation workers in the Athens area are to stop work today for five hours to protest planned changes in the indebted railway company. Rail and suburban rail workers are to repeat the work stoppage Thursday.
Information for this article was contributed by Angela Doland, Jill Lawless, Gillian Smith, Jean-Marie Godard and Pan Pylas of The Associated Press; and by Gregory Viscusi, Helene Fouquet, Mark Deen, David Altaner, Steve Rothwell, Christopher Spillane, Ben Martin and Gregory Viscusi of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 09/08/2010