France: why are unions protesting against Macron’s pension reform?

Protests against liberal President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform intensified on Tuesday in France with fuel blockades, canceled trains, closed schools and threats to prolong strikes until the unpopular project is withdrawn.

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The second economy of the European Union (EU) lives its sixth day of strike at the call of the unions since January 19 to protest against the tightening of the conditions to access a full pension promoted by the Macron government.

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“The responsibility lies solely with the government. You cannot turn a deaf ear to this social movement,” CGT leader Philippe Martinez told France Info, stressing that they are entering a “new phase” with extendable strikes.

Martínez, leader of the country’s second central, stressed that the common motto of all unions in this new phase that opens today is “paralyze the country.” That means – he specified – disturbances in transport, in electricity, in gas, in garbage collection but also “strikes in the private sector”.

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Garbage collectors, train drivers, employees of the energy sector… Several sectors stopped their activities the day before or days before with the aim of achieving the strongest day of protests since the beginning of the mobilization.

The strikers blocked the shipment of fuel from all the refineries on Tuesday, according to the CGT. On Monday, they paralyzed three of the four methane terminals for “seven days” and, since Friday, they have brought down electricity production in the nuclear sector.

After weeks of unsuccessful peaceful protests, including the most important in three decades against a social reform on January 31 with 1.27 million people, according to the police (2.8 million, for the CGT), now they seek to “paralyze” the economy.

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The Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, described this objective as “irresponsible” on Monday night, on the France 5 channel, now focused on discrediting the opposition movement after failing to convince them of the need for reform.

Two out of three French people, according to polls, oppose his draft delaying the retirement age from 62 to 64 years by 2030 and bringing forward to 2027 the requirement to contribute 43 years (and not 42, as now) to collect a full pension. But raising one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe seeks, according to the government, to avoid a future deficit in the pension fund, in a context of increasing life expectancy of the population. The last time the French managed to stop a pension reform was in 1995.

The unions paralyzed the train and metro services for three weeks and managed to maintain massive support in public opinion.

This Tuesday, the unions hope to get “more than two million” people onto the streets, FO leader Frédéric Souillot told RTL radio. A police source estimates that between 1.1 and 1.4 million will participate in the sixth day of protests.

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‘Limited’ impact

Around 320 demonstrations are called this Tuesday throughout France, in which the police information services expect between 1.1 and 1.4 million people. That is to say, that the 1.27 million of January 31 could be exceeded (always according to the Ministry of the Interior), which until now has been the most massive.

With the train service and public transport in Paris, key to the capital’s economy, “very disturbed”, the government called on French people who can to work from home.

But with 60% of early childhood and primary education teachers on strike and thousands of schools closed, according to the unions, many of them were forced to look for alternatives to care for their children.

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“They have no choice. Luckily, there is the grandmother,” Michèle, a 75-year-old retiree in Bordeaux (southwest), told AFP on Monday, who must take care of her granddaughter on Tuesday because of her parents’ work. Although the goal is to lock down the economy, the economic impact of the strikes will be “limited”, according to ING bank analysts, for whom, even in the event of long lockdowns, it will not exceed 0.2 percentage points of GDP.

Macron is gambling an important part of his political credit, after The pandemic forced him to abandon a previous reform during his first term, also marked by the social protest of the “yellow vests”.

In the absence of a majority in Parliament, which is currently discussing the measure, the government chose a controversial procedure that allows it to apply it from the end of March, if the two chambers have not ruled on it.

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WILLIAM MORENO HERNANDEZ
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
TIME