Strikes in France disrupt rail, air service in opening shot against Macron's labor plans

PARIS — Railway workers and air traffic controllers led strikes across France on Thursday, opening a bitter showdown over labor overhauls sought by French President Emmanuel Macron.

The strike — which disrupted travel across the country — signals a critical test for Macron as his government seeks to challenge France’s tightly controlled labor markets in attempts to stimulate a stagnant economy.

Macron, a 40-year-old former investment banker, faced only minimal resistance to the first wave of workplace changes last fall, and unemployment figures have already begun to drop.

But France’s powerful public sector, which employs more than 5 million people, is putting its foot down against the next stage: proposals to cut 120,000 public-sector jobs, hire more contract workers and slash budgets across the board.

Rail workers planned to go for the jugular with a new type of “rolling” protest: a two-day strike every three days, a major upheaval to a transport system that handles millions of passengers every day.

Many high-speed trains — including the famous high-speed TGV service — were canceled between Paris and other French cities on Thursday’s opening salvo. Commuter trains within the capital were also suspended.

[Macron and Germany’s Merkel seek to counter rising populism]

Meanwhile, the Eurostar, connecting Paris with London, canceled some runs across the English Channel, and many short-haul flights at the Paris-area airports of Orly, Beauvais and Charles de Gaulle were grounded.

Teachers and other workers also joined the strike.

Elisabeth Borne, Macron’s transport minister, defended the labor plans as crucial to ensure the strength and survival of France’s state-owned railway company.

“This is a necessary, indispensable reform,” Borne said, appearing on France’s BFM TV on Thursday. “My hope is not a test of strength, my hope is for negotiations.”

So far, Macron has been spared the kind of devastating strikes that have unraveled previous French governments.

For his earlier, broad-ranging labor revisions, Macron and allies reached out to union leaders during a long process of dialogue. The changes, which included broader rules to hire and fire employees, sailed through with relatively little outcry.

But the public sector plans — which still need parliamentary approval — may prove to be a different story.

For one, Macron seeks to forge ahead with these reforms without the same level of calculated exchange with labor leaders.

[Opinion: France is now proving ground for Europe’s labor battles]

But on a deeper level, these new reforms — particularly with regard to the railways — strike at the heart of system that has long been a model of the French state’s collective commitments, both to transport and to those who run it.

For as long as anyone can remember, railway workers have enjoyed expansive benefits, including generous pensions and, for some employees, the option of retirement at age 52, a full decade before the official retirement age of 62.

These benefits stem from an era when the job entailed intense manual labor — a time that Macron has said is long gone.

“How old are you?” the young president responded to a railway worker at an agricultural fair last month, when asked about the proposals.

“You do not have the same work rhythm as my grandfather, who was a railway man,” Macron added. Macron's grandfather, André Macron, was an SNCF employee in the Somme, a northeastern region of France.

Opinion polls suggest that most French voters agree with Macron’s proposals, but the full extent of the looming transport strikes have yet to take their toll. Regardless of social station, few French citizens will be unaffected by the planned strikes.

In the past, governments have quickly backed down.

In 1995, the center-right government of Alain Juppé withdrew proposals to overhaul railway pensions after a strike brought the country to a standstill.

Union leaders are threatening much the same this year, said Jean-Marc Canon, the secretary general of UGFF-CGT, a large public sector union.

There is also symbolism at work. Thursday marks the fiftieth anniversary of a 1968 student uprising that grew into the largest public protest in modern French history.

“Either they listen to us and it will have been just a warning shot, or they don’t listen to us and then, let me tell you that public sector workers are very mobilized,” Canon said Thursday, speaking on French radio.

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