FRANCE: France slowed dramatically yesterday as most of the public sector - nearly a third of salaried employees - observed a one-day strike to warn Prime Minister Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin that they will wreak havoc if their job security or retirement plans are threatened.
Air travel was most affected, with 3,800 of 4,300 international flights cancelled due to the participation of Air France employees and air traffic controllers, who claim the European Union's "single sky" policy will endanger air safety.
Trade unions at the state-owned railway, SNCF, initiated the strike, yet rail traffic was almost normal and the chairman of the SNCF, Mr Louis Gallois, praised his employees' "spirit of responsibility". Public transport nearly stopped in major cities, including Bordeaux, Marseille and Lyon. Paris fared better, with one in two metro trains running.
Union leaders had predicted that up to 100,000 government employees would march in the main national demonstration from the Place Denfert-Rochereau in the south of Paris to Sèvres-Babylone, near the Prime Minister's office. Despite fine weather, only 30,000 turned out, according to the police, up to 80,000 according to the communist union CGT.
The mood of the march was expressed by a young man with a placard saying "I'm looking for the big social movement". The leader of Force ouvrière union, Mr Marc Blondel, has spoken of his dream of repeating the strikes that paralysed France in December 1995, but so far that looks unlikely.
An incident in the Paris demonstration yesterday seemed to consummate the divorce between the "institutional left" - the socialist party - and the "social left" - unions, associations and small, extreme left anti-globalisation groups. When three former socialist cabinet ministers tried to join the front of the march, they were booed by demonstrators. Mr Daniel Vaillant, the last socialist interior minister, and Ms Ségolène Royal, the partner of the socialist party leader Mr Francois Hollande and a former junior education minister, left immediately. But Ms Elisabeth Guigou, who was social affairs minister, stayed to talk to journalists. She had to be taken into a building to protect her from angry railway workers.
The 1995 strike was sparked by the former Prime Minster Mr Alain Juppé's attempt to increase the number of years worked by railway workers. But the concerns expressed by demonstrators yesterday are far more disparate. Air France staff oppose the privatisation of their profitable airline. Gas and electricity workers are furious that France accepted the EU's decision to open the energy market by 2007. France Télécom employees are worried that their heavily indebted company will be broken up, with resulting job losses.
Relations between the government, business management and trade unions traditionally worsen under right-wing governments, but despite yesterday's strike, Mr Raffarin's government has so far been an exception. "The 'Raffarin method', this combination of dialogue and a firm hand, seems to be working in social policy," the left-wing newspaper Le Monde said. In an unprecedented move, the government decimated a lorry drivers' strike by deploying 43 companies of gendarmes and CRS riot police across France over the past two days.
Mr Raffarin says he will resist attempts to sow division between private sector workers and more privileged government employees. Though social unrest cannot be ruled out in the meantime, the biggest test will come next spring, when plans for reforming the pension system take shape. "We are the only country in Europe which has not reformed its pension system," the leader of the centre-right UDF group in the National Assembly, Mr Hervé Morin, said. "There is no reason why a construction worker, who has a shorter life expectancy, should have to work more years that an electricity company or railway employee," he said.