PARIS-Drivers on two Paris metro lines voted on Monday to extend a walkout until the end of the week as France grappled with a fifth day of strikes, a sign transport workers will keep up a fight against President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to streamline pensions.
The week ahead will test Macron’s mettle and his ability to deliver the social and economic change he says is necessary for France to compete with powers like China and the United States.
The public sector strike has hit the transport sector the hardest. In Paris, train, bus and metro services faced severe disruption and monster tail backs clogged the roads as commuters took to their cars.
After months of consultations, Macron’s pension tsar Jean-Paul Delevoye is scheduled to meet union leaders later on Monday before presenting his reform proposals to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.
“We will see if he has not just listened, but heard,” Philippe Martinez, leader of the CGT union, France’s largest in the public sector, told France Info radio. “They have to pull the reform.”
That appears unlikely. Philippe told the weekly Journal du Dimanche that he was determined to see through the overhaul of what is one of the most generous pension systems among developed industrialised nations. The unions have called for mass protests on Tuesday and the government will be watching closely to see if more than the 800,000 who marched through French cities on Thursday turn out.
Macron wants to replace the convoluted system comprised of more than 40 separate pension plans, each with varying benefits, with a single, points-based system under which for each euro contributed, every pensioner has equal rights.