Quotes of the Day

It's that time again. spring is in the air and France is going out on strike. Last week teachers walked off their jobs for the fourth time this school year to protest a range of proposed reforms, and this week the country will grind to a halt as millions of other public-sector workers demonstrate against planned government pension reforms — measures that a majority of French people say are both inevitable and long overdue. Unions warned such "limited 24-hour strikes may not be enough," but Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin vowed to stand firm. "The street should express itself," he said. "But the street doesn't govern."

The strike season seems like tiresome déjá vu — France is a country where a popular website, www.lesgreves.com, is dedicated to tracking who's walking out when — yet the most important fight this week won't be happening on the streets of Paris. The crucial struggle will be inside the French labor movement itself, as intransigent hard-liners wrestle with more progressive leaders who acknowledge that the pension system must be revamped to ensure its future. "The government proposals make some good sense," says François Chérèque, head of the French Democratic Labor Confederation (CFDT) and the country's most prominent progressive union leader. "If they try to block this proposal altogether, it will be the end of a negotiated approach to reform in France."

"They" in this case means Marc Blondel, Chérèque's opposite number in Force Ouvrière, the famously combative leftist union. A balding, portly man, Blondel is an old-fashioned hard-liner who threatens that this week's walkouts may be followed by a prolonged "interprofessional general strike" that could run until Raffarin modifies his proposals — or drops them altogether. The two proposals Blondel hates most: increasing the number of years public employees must work before they qualify for full pensions, and reducing the size of pensions for those who retire earlier. Instead, Blondel argues that the country's pensions shortfall should be bridged by increasing taxes — above all on income and capital gains by businesses and the rich.

"Our retirement system is being threatened, and the danger grows if we fail to act," Blondel says, urging French employees to send "a signal to the government and its plans of destruction. We must plan not only on mobilizing through demonstration, but also by striking." He's also fond of reminding politicians that the last attempt at pension reform, in 1995, ultimately led to the ouster of Prime Minister Alain Juppé and his conservative majority in Parliament.

Chérèque is urging his 865,000 members to come out in force this week, but he stresses that his intention is to protest the government's refusal to negotiate, not to torpedo its reforms. "We want to be part of an evolutionary process," he says, eschewing the revolutionary rhetoric sometimes heard within France's divided labor movement. Chérèque wants a place at the table, and believes the government wants him there too: Social Affairs Minister François Fillon "is convinced that we need to change the means of dialogue about these issues. Does the government want to do it alone? We think they need us, the reformist unions."

Though other union leaders view the CFDT as overly eager to make concessions, Chérèque says those critics will come round to his view. But for now they're "having trouble giving up" the militant stance that has long dominated the French labor movement. Labor historian René Mouriaux already sees signs of this shift. "Whereas in 1995, the union position was a flat non!, today they are demanding the government consider their amendments and counterproposals," he says. The way this week's strikes unfold, Mouriaux argues, "could be the start of a new era of proactive labor leadership — or the end of unions as a pole of blockage and opposition."

Whether that happens may be determined by the CGT — historically France's most influential union, which under leader Bernard Thibault has broken with decades of Communist Party domination and made modest moves in Chérèque's direction. In 1995, it rejected the planned pension overhaul outright; now it acknowledges that reform is necessary. Though its problems with the government plan run far deeper than the cfdt's, its willingness to negotiate also forced Blondel to the table to avoid isolation, observers say. Given that, Mouriaux notes, the CGT in some ways reflects labor's shift from Blondel toward Chérèque.

While that evolution may prove monumental for French society, it directly involves very few people. French unions represent around 9% of the work force — a fact Chérèque calls the paradox of France's labor scene. "The unions are weak, but our oppositional power is very strong," he says. "In other countries, unions are involved in the dialogue of making labor policy; they never have been in France. It's a problem that politicians of the left and right have never faced properly." In Germany, by contrast, the unions represent around 30% of all workers, are seen as partners (though at times difficult ones) by both government and business, and operate pension programs. As a result, they not only attract and command large numbers of loyal members, but can extract concessions with the mere threat of strikes — meaning the number of days lost to walkouts in Germany is far less than in under-unionized France.

Chérèque is encouraged that Prime Minister Raffarin — who handles domestic affairs while President Jacques Chirac plays diplomat — is confronting the problem. So Chérèque is trying to respond in kind. Without a meeting of the minds on pension reform, "we'll have no movement on this for the next five years," he says.

None of this means Chérèque is willing to play yes-man to the government. He supports the pension reforms, but wants to see the level of pensions for retirees who earned lower salaries increased from the proposed 75% to 80% of France's minimum wage. He also sees successful reform tied to a number of other factors hampering the French job market. He blames the education system for producing graduates "with no qualifications for jobs" who are shunted directly into unemployment; he says there has to be a more rational way to retrain middle-aged workers for existing jobs; and he characterizes France's research policy in job-promoting sectors like biotech and medicine as "catastrophic."

Blondel's idea essentially involves extending rights under the current system and increasing taxes on business and the rich to finance it. Thibault's CGT accepts some government measures, and agrees with many of Chérèque's propositions. Still, Thibault argues all workers must be

allowed the right to retire with full pensions at 60, regardless of years worked, and says payments to retirees must be guaranteed to remain at current levels. "We will not accept a reform that would have socially disastrous consequences," Thibault warns. "When 80% of a text is bad, it must be rewritten."

That Blondel is at the negotiating table, and Thibault shares some of Chérèque's positions, indicates that France's economic and demographic problems are causing a degree of pragmatic evolution inside the labor movement. The question is how much. There's no doubt, however, about the seriousness of the crisis. As the baby-boomer generation approaches retirement, the projected pension shortfall is estimated at €43 billion by 2020 alone. "There's general agreement that measures must be taken to save our pension system, but utter disagreement with the government plan — which it presented as a take-it-or-leave it offer," says Jean-Christophe Le Duigou, a CGT specialist on pensions. "This is a critical time. Intransigence taken by any side carries grave risks for a retirement system we're all trying to save. Yet any union that accepts a plan the public deems a sellout will forever lose its credibility."

Officials on both sides of the barricades seem to realize the dilemma. "This government will be judged on reform of the pension system and the health-care system," Chérèque warns. "If it doesn't pull that off, it will be cooked." But the same is true for the labor movement. Union leaders acknowledge that a repeat of 1995 — national paralysis followed by the fall of the government — would spell defeat. The unions need to make an impressive show of force without striking such a defiant pose that they come off looking irrational. A successful march along that very fine line could signal a new era of collaboration between labor and the government. Should either side fall, it could be back to déjé vu all over again.

• BRUCE CRUMLEY | Paris
• France's unions are divided about how to fight new government plans for pension reform