Sarkozy wanted to break a philosophy, not a union

Sarkozy 1, French rail workers 0.
Maybe it’s still only the first round, but French President Nicolas Sarkozy came close to knocking out the striking rail workers union when they suspended their walkout in the face of his intransigence, unlike his predecessor, the weak-in-the-knees effete milquetoast, Jacques Chirac, who caved in to a similar strike in 1995 faster than you could say “sacre bleu!”
The strike lasted nine days and cost France an estimated four billion Euro and interrupted the lives of the few people in that country who actually go to work, but it also showed Sarkozy was not going to give in to unreasonable demands from people who were upset they had to work 35 hours a week, get five weeks vacation and can retire at 50. He learned from a master.
In 1981, some 12,500 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in the United States made the big mistake of walking off their jobs in a demand for higher pay and better working conditions, because they were the only ones in their profession working a 40-hour week in a job that ranks high in killer stress. President Ronald Reagan gave them 48 hours to return to work because they were crippling air traffic.
They didn’t come back – ever. Reagan fired them, breaking the back not only of PATCO, but a labour union movement that had striven for a century to protect workers genuine interests. Unions are necessary to protect workers from being exploited by avaricious bosses, which is just about all of them, including governments who hold down public workers with low pay but keep them chained with the security of their jobs. Some strikes are warranted, but you can’t strike if you’re a cop or a firefighter or an air traffic controller – or in public transport, like the French rail workers, because society depends on them. The workers hoped the nation would grind to a halt without them, although it’s hard to tell when the French are on strike because they do so little work anyway. Sarkozy wanted to bust that kind of thinking, a platform that got him elected and had the support of nearly 60 percent of citizens.
Keep in mind the French like their laissez-faire way of life and generally don’t take kindly to anyone who wants to interrupt their afternoon naps, which are usually taken at work while the Latvians are outworking them, and the rest of Europe is passing them by in a globalised world where a lot of people like to work for a living. What did the rail workers want? They are not exactly in the heavy-lifting business and undermined not only France’s economy, but the legitimate concerns of unions which have workers with real worries. There are good reasons to strike but they didn’t have any. This is when unions go too far.
The strikers played into the hands of Sarkozy, who was counting on public support and growing anger to turn not against him but the workers, the same way Americans turned on multi-millionaire baseball players who didn’t want to carry their own bags. If the rail workers were exploited factory workers being treated like slaves, they would have gotten public support.
Sarkozy was gambling because, in the past, French strikers have won when the government lost its nerve and buckled because people couldn’t get to work. But Sarkozy is in the driver’s seat of this railroad now and doesn’t want to get derailed in his real mission: to end the laziness that pervades French society. He doesn’t want to bust the rail workers union, but the attitude that less is more in France, the way former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did in cutting unions down to size there in the 1980s.
If the rail workers don’t like driving trains for a living, let them try shoveling coal and see how that works out. Some 5.2 million French civil service workers briefly joined the strike, but hustled back to their jobs while they still had them because Sarkozy has his eye on reducing their numbers too. You have a better chance of keeping your job if you show up once in a while.
Sarkozy took on powerful left-wing unions that humbled Chirac, who was humiliated in his attempt to reform the workers pension system. The rail workers said they were satisfied negotiations began on the government’s plans to annul some pension privileges, but Sarkozy said he “will not give in and will not back down.”
They’d better listen, because the problem for the unions is that Sarkozy isn’t Chirac. He’s Reagan.