French rail workers have staged the country’s largest strike in 12 years, shutting down 90 percent of the metro system and 654 of France’s 700 high-speed trains.
The two-day strike came in response to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to scrap early retirement benefits enjoyed by some categories of public workers with demanding jobs, requiring that they work 40 years instead of the current 37 1/2 years to become eligible for retirement benefits. Workers have threatened more strikes in the coming weeks if their demands go unmet.
The concerted bourgeois attack claims the current early retirement benefit available to some workers is unfair to others. Not surprisingly, no politician or media pundit is calling for extending early retirement to all workers to remedy this “unfairness.”
