Striking the old year out...

As predicted in my last post, the public transport strike has turned into a battle to influence public opinion between the government and France’s most militant trade union, the CGT. Its secretary general, Philippe Martinez, declared over the weekend that Emmanuel Macron has reached his “Thatcher moment”, meaning presumably that he is determined to fatally weaken the power of trade unions to oppose his reforms. In response, the secretary of state for transport has accused the CGT of trying to bring the country to a standstill and intimidating non-strikers. There is surely some truth in both assertions.

For all its rhetoric, it is easy to forget that the CGT, although strong among train drivers, has seen its influence erode for a number of reasons since the last big public transport strike of 1995. Its former pride of place among unions has been taken by the more reformist CFDT and its leader's stance is not always supported by his own rank and file. It is also worth pointing out that union membership in France in general is among the lowest in industrial countries and concentrated in the sprawling public sector. The spread of the Internet has not only enabled many people to work from home but has also facilitated last-minute on-line reservations for car-pooling rides and trips on long distance coaches and buses (largely liberalised by Emmanuel Macron himself when he was a minister under François Hollande). “How come the trains are empty?” asked one seemingly surprised anchor man on the evening news two days ago, as cameras panned slowly over half empty carriages in high speed trains. The obvious answer seems to be quite simply that many French employees and/or holiday makers have made alternative arrangements to get where they want to go, to work, to join their families for Christmas or take a holiday on the ski slopes. If the usually rapid and efficient trains are seen as temporarily unreliable, they grumble a lot but are quick to find alternatives. Driving of cars, scooters of all kinds, from near motorcycles to electrically driven runabouts, bicycles and walking have increased massively as a way of getting to and from work for instance, and by the time the Christmas holidays end on January 6, strikers, and more importantly, the top managers of the SNCF, will probably have drawn the conclusion that the much feared competition to public sector trains and metros has already arrived. People have been able to adapt and can no longer be stopped going about their business by strike action, as was the case before the Internet era. Some strikers seem to have drawn such a conclusion already and their number has fallen steadily over the past week or so. And thanks to 4G enabled smart phones and mobile apps, it is now possible to see which trains and metros are running and adjust travel plans accordingly. In all likelihood, the strike will eventually peter out, despite desperate and largely illegal action by CGT members to prevent trains running by physically occupying their tracks or temporarily cutting power supplies to some areas.

The government, it must be said, has also, played a skilful hand, even if its announced  grand design of a “universal” pension system had had to be sacrificed for political expediency, in application of the age-old principle of divide and rule: the police force, the fire service, airline pilots, stewards and stewardesses, fishermen and ballet dancers at the Paris opera have all been bought off with promises of specific arrangements for their pension scheme and retirement age, but the determination to put an end to the remaining retirement privileges of many public transport workers and public sector workers in general remains intact.  With some further face-saving concessions in the negotiations scheduled for early January, the government is still likely to have a points-based system for pensions adopted by parliament in 2020 and ensure that when it is finally introduced in 2025, for everyone except those entering the workforce before then, the deficit of between 8 and 17 billion Euros predicted by the official pensions watchdog will have been reduced to zero.

All this being said, the political price that Emmanuel Macron will ultimately have to pay for his probable victory remains uncertain. It was interesting to see for instance that for the first time last Saturday, a street demonstration saw members of the CGT and a large number “gilets jaunes” marching side by side. Does this mean that they have found common ground, and will this show of unity lead to anything? Somehow I doubt it, given that for the moment the only factor that unites them is their intense dislike of the President and their distaste for his reforms.  The next big national test will come with the country-wide municipal elections next March. Macron’s party, la République en marche has invested heavily to prepare them, by selecting or supporting candidates for all of France’s major cities and most towns. The “gilets jaunes” for their part, have not moved on much from their stance as a protest movement and the unions traditionally play a very minor role in such elections anyway.

As we strike the old year out and ring the new one in, the only certainty is that 2020 will be another eventful year for France!

Wishing all my readers a very Happy New Year!

A strike for pension reform

Former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard once quipped that “pension reform has the potential to bring down several governments” (avec la réforme des retraites, il y a de quoi faire sauter plusieurs gouvernements). On Thursday of this week, France will suffer once again what promises to be a more or less total shutdown of public transport in the Paris area, a very limited number of mainline trains in the rest of the country and union sponsored street marches, probably accompanied by masked and helmeted hooligans hiding behind them. Many people who remember the three week long public transport strikes of 1995 are openly wondering whether the current President and his government will suffer the same fate as President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé, who were eventually forced to retreat ignominiously and withdraw the pension reform that they had proposed. In 2019, Emmanuel Macron’s chances of bringing his five-year term to a successful close by introducing a reform that has been fiercely resisted every time it has been attempted, hinge on the outcome of this show of force. Be that as it may, it is such repeated failures to bring about fundamental structural reform that have earned France a reputation among foreigners for being ungovernable.

The terms of the current conflict are deceptively simple. Back in 2016, when Emmanuel Macron announced that he was standing for President in 2017, he declared that one of his main policy ambitions was to reform the French pension system, turning it into a “universal scheme” in which every contribution would give rise to the same pension entitlement, regardless of whether one worked in the private or public sector or was self-employed. The simple message was that “1 euro of contribution would give the same entitlement to every pensioner”. Nothing was said at the time about raising the retirement age or increasing contributions or the dire and converging forecasts about future deficits, but it is worth noting that the French pension system as a whole absorbs more than 14% of GDP, quite a lot more than in other comparable countries. Much of it comes out of the state budget.

In contrast to the proposed reforms put forward by Alain Juppé’s government in 1995, for which there was hardly any prior consultation with those most directly concerned, there is no doubt that this time the government has fallen over itself to consult as many parties as possible and public debate has been vigorous and encouraged. However, as these consultations have proceeded, under the guidance of the avuncular Pensions Minister, Jean-Paul Delevoye, what looked like a simple solution has turned out to be a lot more complicated and the attempt to merge 42 individual pension schemes into one has hit many obstacles. For a start, to whom should the reformed system apply? To those who are 5, 10 or 15 years from retirement? Or only to those entering the workforce after the reform is adopted, a situation that would be tantamount to no reform at all for the next 40 years or so? What about the pension schemes that have managed themselves quite happily for many years, whose demographic characteristics are favourable and who are likely, under the proposed reform, to lose control over the reserves thy have built up? Is it fair that metro and bus drivers in Paris should be able to retire almost ten years earlier than their colleagues in other large French cities? Is it true that their working conditions are so much worse than those of nurses and doctors, whose jobs can be considered just as demanding and essential for society but who have no particular pension privileges? And on top of the proposals for a systemic reform, other more short-term but constantly recurring questions have also been raised: should the retirement age be raised for all, contributions increased, or existing pension entitlements reduced?  In the face of the number and complexity of such issues and the very different possible outcomes, the government had been criticised for not making its intentions clear, and by the more suspicious in nature (a large majority of French citizens!) for having a hidden agenda! But when all is said and done, the point has now been reached at which it is clear that the crux of the current reform effort is the reshaping of pensions in the public sector and particularly in big public transport companies like the SNCF and the Paris based RATP. And once again, the majority of unions in these and other public sectors have made it clear that they are prepared to bring the country to a standstill to stop the reform. Listening to a union representative on the radio this morning describing what he characterised as appalling working conditions in the Paris metro, I was left wondering why he and so many of his colleagues had not already left their jobs to look for something more congenial. But rightly or wrongly, their determination seems as strong as ever. In this respect at least, nothing has changed since 1995.

And in this conflict, as in so many others between the government and the unions, it is the evolving state of public opinion that will ultimately determine the outcome. For the moment, the attitudes of men and women in the street are inconsistent and contradictory. Some polls indicate that a majority is in favour of a straightforward, one-size-fits-all pension system, but other polls have found that many also have sympathy with those who are presented as, or loudly proclaim themselves as, losers in the process of simplification.  Now that the strike has been called and is likely to be massively observed, any objective assessment of the “facts”, difficult at the best of times, will take second place to a battle of soundbites and images against the background of all too familiar scenes of demonstrations and paralysis. In 1995, one of the reasons the strikers won the day was that Chirac was perceived, correctly as it turned out, as a half-hearted reformer. Macron is of a very different mettle. It is too early to tell whether Michel Rocard’s prediction will once again turn out to be true or whether Emmanuel Macron is the President who will at last break the curse of fundamental structural reform in France and succeed where many others have failed.