Posted on September 23, 2010 by Fiona Hilliard

Protest fever has well and truly hit Europe.  Yesterday we reported on Spanish workers’ plans for an all-out strike next week, but today it’s the turn of workers in France.

French unions are grounding planes and trains and encouraging millions of people to take to the streets today to protest about Nicolas Sarkozy’s pension reforms.

The French civil aviation authority has asked airlines to half services to Paris’s Orly airport and cut flights to Charles de Gaulle by 40%.

Today’s work stoppages are a follow-up to the strike a few weeks’ ago, when transport services were disrupted and between 1.1 and 2.7 million demonstrators took to the streets of French cities, union leaders will be urging even more people to go on strike and join demonstrations over plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

In a rallying cry to workers, Francois Chereque, head of the CFDT union told French radio: “The government is doubting itself…so we must turn out in big numbers.”

Acknowledging the compromises that the government had made since the previous day of action, he said; “Although it was telling us before the first protests that nothing could be changed, it started to move after [September] 7th.”

The new reform has already been passed by the lower house of parliament but is due to be debated by the upper house, the Senate, next month.  Unions believe there is still sufficient time to force the government into backing down.

Already, the labour minister Eric Woerth has said that some changes may be likely in certain areas, but the crux of the problem, the plan to raise the legal age of retirement to 62 by 2018 and the full pension retirement age from 65 to 67 will remain in place no matter what.

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