Watch French unions set for major protest

French unions set for major protest


President Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reform has brought about a showdown with powerful unions who sunk a previous effort 15 years ago
ollowing a close Monday vote in the French senate that raised the country's official minimum retirement age from 60 to 62, several major labour unions have vowed to strike for the fourth time in a month, viewing this week as a defining moment in a showdown between labour and President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Three prior protests have attracted crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands but have not halted Sarkozy's pension reform plan. This time, the unions have threatened to stretch Tuesday's strikes past the one day they have previously lasted.

Sarkozy faces re-election in 2012, and his opinion poll ratings are at all-time lows. David Assouline, an opposition leader, accused Sarkozy of trying to provoke a "showdown" and bring unions "to their knees".

The 174 to 159 Monday vote to raise the retirement age shut the door on the most controversial aspect of the reform package, which Sarkozy's administration hopes to pass by the end of the month. The senate also voted to raise the minimum age to receive a full state pension from 65 to 67.

Strike will halt train and air transportation

The walkout will hurt air transit in and out of Paris particularly hard: Half of all the flights landing and departing the Orly airport will be cancelled, along with a third of the flights at Charles de Gaulle and Beauvais-Tille airports, the AFP news agency reported.

While two-thirds of the high-speed TGV trains were expected to be cancelled, those running between Paris and London were due to operate normally.

The oil industry and education workers have also joined in the strike. Employees at France's biggest oil port, Fos-Lavera, have now halted work for 15 straight days, and the education ministry predicted that more than a fourth of the country's elementary and pre-kindergarten teachers would strike on Tuesday.

Unions have threatened to extend the strike beyond Tuesday; it is technically open-ended and subject to a renewal vote by workers.

One poll of around 1,000 people published in the newspaper Le Parisien found that 69 per cent of the respondents supported the new strike, while 61 per cent supported a "continuous and lasting" one.

Like other European governments looking at austerity measures, France faces a yawning deficit and a need to improve its finances if it hopes to retain a AAA credit rating, enabling the country to borrow money at a lower interest rate.

Francois Chereque, the head of the French union CFDT, told French iTele on Sunday that Tuesday's strike is "one of the last chances to make the government retreat".

The reform bill has already been approved in its entirety by the lower house of France's parliament, the National Assembly. The senate is now voting on it piece by piece.
Coppied by http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/10/20101012051949142.html