French Transport Unions Suspend Strikes

French transport workers have started retuning normal as of Friday, which is seen as a victory for French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Union members of both the state-owned rail operator SNCF and the Paris public transport company RATP gathered in the morning and again in the afternoon on Thursday to vote on whether they should go back to work. The majority voted for a cessation of strikes and returning to work.

The result of the vote suspended a nine-day strike, returning French transport networks to almost normal. However, it is expected to take some time until the strike is brought to a complete end as some hardliners in southern France are continuing to strike.

The unions’ decision to halt the strikes only one day after negotiations between labor, management, and the government could be seen as a defeat for the unions and opened the way for President Sarkozy to reform the country, according to the Associated Press on Friday.

“It’s evidently a political victory for Sarkozy. The French are witnessing their nation’s departure from the past when reform attempts surrendered to the threat of strikes,” the AP reported, quoting a sociology professor at the Paris Institute of Political Science (Sciences Po).

French daily Le Figaro ran the headline “Sarkozy’s Victory” on Friday. The daily said in an editorial, “Public pension reform is the starting point of all reforms. Other reform measures such as the curtailing of the pubic sector and the narrowing of budget deficit will gain momentum as a result.”

French public transportation strikes against pension reform were not successful from the beginning. Only 70 percent of union members participated in the strike on November 14, the first day of the strike, and the figure plummeted the next day, ending up at 20 percent on November 21.

Last week, François Chérèque, leader of the union CFDT, called for union members to start working again citing the strikes’ faltering momentum as the reason. Bernard Thibault, chairman of the union CGT, who frustrated the reform attempts of former President Jacques Chirac by leading a three-week long strike in 1995, sought an early negotiation with the government but failed in the face of resistance from hardliners.

However, the overwhelming public opinion was that the government should not succumb to the unions this time. Sarkozy made it clear that negotiations would not change the key point of pension reform that requires workers to work 40 years instead of 37.5 to qualify for full pensions. Though opposition parties including the Socialist Party denounced him for attaching conditions to the negotiations, they supported public pension reform. In the end, the public transportation unions changed their position on Tuesday and accepted negotiations.

French President Sarkozy said on Friday before embarking on a state visit to China that, ”French citizens asked me to continue the reform process.”

pisong@donga.com