strike this.

Ah yes, nothing says France like a country-wide transportation strike. I'm not really affected by it because I live 2 minutes away from work. But I still think it's bullshit. Two out of the three main opinion polls that came out yesterday suggest that the majority of the population is against this strike. Get. Back. To. Work.

So what is it this time? The government is trying to reform the pension system, which is founded on antiquated principles and is costing a lot of money. In a nutshell: a long time ago certain professions had special pension schemes because their jobs were considered more physically demanding or dangerous: so while all other workers pay pension dues for 40 years, these special workers only have to contribute for 37,5 years. Now the government wants to even it all out and make it 40 years for everyone. Polls show that a large majority of the french population supports these reforms. Even the opposition party is keeping its mouth shut.

I think what it comes down to is that these unions are itching to strike. It's been a long time since they've brought the country to a standstill, so they figured this was probably a good time. The fact that, in this particular case, they don't even have the support of the population highlights the specificity of French unions. Because they were placed at the centre of the social playing field after WWII, they gained far too much power in shaping the economic and social life of the country. Furthermore, a law was passed in the 1950s establishing that the 5 large unions could represent any worker, from any domain, regardless of whether or not they were even members of the union. Subsequently, these unions became much less interested in what their workers wanted, and began veering towards extremism. This lack of representativeness is aggravated by the fact that in France, there is a very low rate of union membership, thus limiting the funding coming from adherents. Which raises another important and controversial question: where do these unions get their money? Answer: nobody really knows because there is a law that protects them from having to publish their accounts. So the result is that these unions are weak, financially opaque (ie: corrupt), extremist, not representative of the workers they are meant to be protecting and lack negociating skills and power.