After a Week, Transit Strike Has Parisians Growing Weary

Civil Service Workers Join Protest With One-Day National Walkout

PARIS, Nov. 20 -- After seven days of strikes by French transit workers, Daniel Ribeiro, a 20-year-old flower salesman, is intimately familiar with the three-hour commute to work.

That's how long it takes to go the nine miles from his suburban home northwest of Paris to the shop where he works in the northern part of the capital. On Monday, he waited two hours on the commuter train platform near his home before a train finally showed up, and he arrived at work three hours late. Last Friday, a friend drove him to work, but the strike had forced everybody else into their cars, too, resulting in gridlock across the city; he was two hours late.

"I know walking is good for me, but I've had enough!" Ribeiro snapped as he smoked a cigarette in the Adonis flower shop, which is always empty now, he said, because everyone is so focused on getting where they are going that they don't take time to buy flowers. Transit workers "don't realize the effects these repeated strikes have on our economy," he said. Most people at the train companies "don't even know why they're on strike -- they're just against any change."

What was a bad week for Ribeiro and seemingly everyone else in the French capital took a turn for the worse Tuesday when hundreds of thousands of government workers -- from teachers to air traffic controllers, postal employees to telephone repair crews -- also walked off their jobs on a one-day strike to protest low pay and job cuts. About a third of France's 85 universities were hit by student unrest.

The supposedly separate strikes raised the stakes in the evolving showdown between France's powerful unions and the six-month-old government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who won office promising vigorous free-market restructuring, tax cuts, deep reductions in the country's 5.3 million public employees and rollbacks in expensive state pensions.

In his first statement on the strikes since they began, Sarkozy told a group of mayors that voters gave him a mandate for change and that he would push it through. "These reforms have been put off for too long," Sarkozy said. "We will not surrender, and we will not retreat."

Political analysts have warned that capitulating to the strikers could seriously weaken Sarkozy's presidency.

Transit workers, angry at a proposal to reduce special benefits that allow some to retire at age 50, began their action a week ago and have severely disrupted train service across the country. In the capital, commuter trains, subway lines and bus services have been dramatically curtailed, leading to massive, chaotic gridlock on city streets and surrounding highways.

Earlier this week, French officials said the transit strike was costing the country as much as $584 million a day.

According to opinion polls this week, a solid majority of the public opposes the transit strikers and supports Sarkozy's efforts to rein in their special retirement privileges, which many see as archaic and unfair. And while ever-smaller numbers of transit workers are heeding the strike call -- only 27 percent of the country's rail workers stayed home Tuesday -- many of the strikers were drivers, and their absence was having a crippling impact.

But there were signs that the strikes could begin to raise pressure on the government. Sarkozy's job approval rating slipped about seven points, to 54 percent, in a survey last week by LH2 polling company for Liberation newspaper, signaling growing concern about his government's failure to improve France's economy.

Of those polled, 56 percent said Sarkozy had failed to improve employment, 59 percent said he had failed to improve economic growth, and 79 percent said he had failed to improve their purchasing power in his first six months in office.