Truckers win again, with public and state backing

When taxi-drivers protesting at high licence fees and low fares brought Dublin to a standstill on election day, the public was outraged. Yet when a small minority of France's 220,000 lorry-drivers paralysed the country and choked European ground transport this week, the French public supported them.

At Lille-Lesquin, a little girl named Celine played the accor deon for strikers and ate sandwiches with them. At barricades throughout France, motorists tossed coins into collection baskets held out by the truckers, re war ding the men who thwarted their journeys, shut down 40 per cent of French petrol stations and left France's European image in tatters.

In Ireland, the public distinguished between legitimate grievances and the means used to ex press them. In France, the goal - forcing employers to honour commitments made a year ago, raise salaries and decrease working hours - was seen to justify the extreme means. The Jospin government openly sided with the truckers.

Mr Jean-Claude Gayssot, the Communist Transport Minister, warmed his hands around a camp fire with trade-union activists at a Le Mans barricade. A former lea der of the CGT union, Mr Gays sot, was in his element, addressing truckers by the familiar tu. "You can count on us," the chief mediator in the crisis told the drivers. Industrial relations had reached an "unbearable" pass, he said.

In the National Assembly the following day the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, did not say a word against the drivers' heavyhanded tactics. "The action und ertaken by the lorry-drivers can be explained by a demand for dignity," he said, "but also by the desire to see promises kept."

For European business people losing millions of pounds, for foreign drivers forced to live all week in their truck cabins, it was en ough to make the blood boil. In any other country, the French truckers admit, they would go to prison, yet this was the fourth lorry-drivers' strike since 1984 and the third consecutive year industrial action has crippled France.

In the 1984 and 1992 strikes, trucking management encouraged their drivers to set up blockades to protest against high fuel prices, an irony they have had their noses rubbed in this week.

France seems compelled to indulge in an absurd re-enactment of the 1789 revolution every year. "Beneath its flamboyant championship of social causes," L'Ex press magazine said, "France is in fact the country of non-dialogue, the last state in the western world where we play out, over and over, the class struggle."

Role-playing was central to this French drama. In the daily television images of tired men filing in and out of meetings, the trade uni onists could be easily spotted by their unkempt hair, open-necked shirts and anoraks.

Despite the fact that it was the truckers who brought the country to a halt, business managers were cast as the villains, a part they played to perfection. They wore suits, ties, raincoats and spectacles and replied curtly to journalists. In French culture, workers are sympathique; the patrons are greedy and bad. See Zola for further examples.

French authorities have ample legal ammunition to fight the an nual hijacking of the country, if they dared. The 1957 Treaty of European Union, and Article 5 of the French constitution, guarantee freedom of movement. Article L7 of the highway code says anyone obstructing public passage will be fined between 1,000 and 30,000 francs (£115 to £3,450) and imprisoned for between three months and two years.

For impeding the freedom of others to work, Article 431-2 of the penal code prescribes three years' imprisonment and a 300,000 franc fine. The violation of these laws was blatant, yet not a single striker has been prosecuted. These rules are not enforced, any more than the labour laws which ought to provide decent working conditions for lorry-drivers.

In one of the more surreal moments of the week, the Prime Minister promised a law to make em ployers observe existing laws. France is the most centralised and bureaucratic of EU nations, and yet the state is strangely absent.

The right to strike - also enshrined in the constitution - is sacrosanct. Individual rights take priority over the common good. Every Frenchman feels justified in pursuing his "rights", which goes a long way to explaining why he is so tolerant of others doing the same.

The trucking imbroglio is a sor ry precedent for the country which will press for a "social Eur ope" at the Luxembourg summit on employment on November 21st. How dare France preach to its neighbours about social justice when its social conflicts reach such proportions, the other 14 EU members may well ask. And what will happen after July 1st, 1998, when the entire European trucking industry will be open for competition?

Whatever settlement is reached will become irrelevant next summer. Nothing will prevent a Spanish driver not bound by French rules from loading wine in Bordeaux and delivering it to Paris.

In other European countries, industrial disputes are settled peaceably between employers and wor kers. Strikes are almost unheardof in Germany. France, where industrial action creates the greatest havoc, has the lowest union membership rate in the EU, only 9.1 per cent, less than a third of the German rate.

The CFDT, the largest of four unions speaking for truckers, counts only 15,000 of France's 220,000 lorry-drivers among its members. A vein of anarchy runs through the strike; on the roadblocks, strikers burned the first agreement reached on their behalf and admitted they were taking orders from no one.

Despite the French government's inability to grapple with these crises, the centuries-old tradition of state intervention prevails. The lorry-drivers' strike is a private dispute between private parties, yet they all "turned to the state like the sunflower to the sun," the newspaper Liberation noted.

It is often said that France, with its all-powerful executive branch, is a monarchical system. A great rift still divides French society from its rulers; it would never oc cur to the average Frenchman to seek help from or complain to his parliamentary deputy. Instead, resentment at perceived injustice builds and, from time to time, French people feel they must go on to the streets.

A left-wing government is no guarantee against social unrest, as the Popular Front learned in 1936. Nine thousand workplaces were occupied by striking workers then, from aircraft factories to department stores. They were rewarded with the 40-hour working week and, for the first time ever, paid annual vacations.

Sixty-one years later, the same dynamic is at work. Now that the lorry-drivers have achieved some of their goals, Mr Jospin will do well to brace himself for the knock-on effect. Airline personnel, taxi-drivers, street sweepers, armies of dissatisfied, individualistic, revolutionary French employees, are sure to follow.