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Strikes Urged In France Over Plan to Abolish Holiday
The International Herald Tribune
France
April 23, 2005
In a law passed last year, the administration of President Jacques Chirac changed Pentecost - which falls on May 16 this year - into a normal working day to produce €2 billion, or $2.6 billion, for a National Solidarity Fund.
But the longstanding plan to drop the holiday is proving unpopular, and trade unions have said they will strike that day, a move that would highlight discontent with the government less than two weeks before the French referendum on the proposed European Union constitution, which is set for May 29.
A survey on Friday by the CSA polling company for the Parisien newspaper showed that 66 percent of people opposed the plan to drop the holiday.
But the cash-poor administration has refused to cancel the plan, saying that France needs a "day of solidarity" to generate more tax revenue for health care.
The issue was highlighted when hospitals failed to cope with a heat wave in August 2003 that killed at least 10,000 people, many of them elderly.
Expressing the government's position on the issue, the state secretary for the elderly, Catherine Vautrin, told Le Parisien, "We must be clear: There will be no softening for 2005."
Pentecost has long been one of 11 annual bank holidays in France. In theory, businesses and public-sector services should remain open that day, but there were growing signs that many workers would fail to turn up.
"Employees do not accept having to work an extra day," said Jean-Claude Mailly of the Force Ouvrière union, which has called for strikes and work stoppages that day. "Care for the elderly is a real problem, no one can deny it. But the government's method for tackling it is not acceptable."
Other unions are also calling for stoppages, and the French Confederation of Christian Workers has filed suit in a Paris court, charging that the abolition of the holiday is illegal.
The government's refusal to back down has angered union leaders, who were already annoyed at the administration's moves to modify France's 35-hour workweek legislation and to push ahead with a privatization program.
Many polls suggest that those opposed to the EU constitution, which the government supports, are in the majority, and some in the government fear the dispute over the holiday could further raise that number in the weeks before the referendum.
Those fears were underscored when the state-owned SNCF rail company, whose union is traditionally very active, ruled that Pentecost would remain a holiday for its 160,000 employees.
The announcement, which was a reversal of an earlier decision, was made after two railroad unions threatened to go on strike on May 16, and followed a plea from the office of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to the SNCF president, Louis Gallois, Europe 1 radio said.
Instead of working the extra day, SNCF staff will add one to two minutes to their work rosters for the rest of the year in order to make their contribution to the solidarity fund, the company said.
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