The last few weeks has been a time of disruption in France; as the trade unions and the government battle about the retirement age.
Currently it is 60 and the government is proposing to increase this to 62 if you have 42 years of payments into a retirement fun. This has not gone down very well with the majority of the population (70% according to the polling organisations). The trade unions have organised day long demonstrations twice a week against this measure and others have taken action to block the refineries and the fuel depots. The result has been petrol stations closed for want of a few litres of diesel or petrol or long lines of cars waiting to fill up at those lucky enough to have fuel. And just to make things a little worse the railway workers have been on strike only providing the minimum of services, as prescribed by law.
Any way last week the government took the initiative and obtained the necessary votes to put the law into force. Needless to say the opposition was not happy but the conjuncture of the law being passed and the school holidays has rather defused the situation and the next few weeks should be a bit calmer and easier to use the car.
It has also exposed an interesting side battle, that of the figures. Each time there is a demonstration two sets of figures for the number of demonstrators are published. One from the trade unions and the other from the police. Normally the police figure is slightly less than one third of the trade union figure. Interestingly they both use the same system for counting, which is to estimate how many people there are in a row passing the counting point and then how many rows have passed.
Another, typical French action has been the “casseurs”. These are groups of usually young people how attach themselves to a demonstration. They have no interest in the topic of the demonstration, but are there to engage in a battle with the police and if possible indulge in a little pillaging of shops, setting cars on fire or just destroying public property. This time the worse outbreak was in Lyon and involved over one hundred casseurs.
