Noga Arikha is a historian of ideas, philosopher and essayist based in Paris.
PARIS — Paris is a famously walkable city. But as we head into the third week of a mass strike — this one called by unions representing transport and national rail employees in response to the government’s plan to reform the pension system — the resulting absence of public transport, save for jam-packed buses and harshly reduced rush-hour service on some metro and RER lines, is forcing Parisians to walk more than we ever have.
By now, everyone is feeling the pinch. Strike fatigue is setting in. Business goes on as usual, as much as possible, but tempers are getting shorter on the roads and in the few available trains and buses.
Traffic jams are explosive, car horns overlapping with ubiquitous and useless emergency sirens.
Commuting times stretch into hours. People arrive at work exhausted, and often wonder, come evening, how long it will take them to get home, especially if they live in the suburbs. Those planning to visit their families for Christmas have no idea whether the trains they need to take will run. Small businesses and shops are suffering. It is hard to visit a hospitalized parent.
Everything in the city feels half-suspended — a parenthesis opened without any sense of when it might be closed. People have sore feet. The strike has become a marathon everyone is forced to run.
The unions have not realized that different epochs require different policies.
The latest stand-off between government and unions is familiar to the French, who are protective of their social welfare privileges, preferring the status quo and distrusting novelty. These privileges were inherited from a time when politics still had something to do with social justice, and when the state could afford to be generous. But its coffers are emptying, and there are many who believe the strikers, who are refusing to accept the government’s project to replace the current 42 different pension schemes with a single point-based plan, are behaving like spoiled children.
The unions have not realized that different epochs require different policies. And now we are all hostage to these potent unions, even though they represent a mere 2.6 percent of French employees.
One woman, queuing behind me at the post office, said with a smile that there is “no choice” but to watch this familiar stand-off between government and unions, and accept this disruption to ordinary life. “This strike is absurd,” she added. “Times have changed since those of our grandparents, the demographics are different, people now live into their 80s, retiring is not the same thing as it was back then.”
The train, metro and bus drivers embody an age-old “corporatism,” as a commuter told me in a packed metro car: They represent the interests of their own group. They are striking for themselves, exercising their rights with no regard for the impact on the rest of the country. Their sole focus is maintaining their social privileges, which include retirement at 50, something that was established in the days when trains were coal-powered. They are blind to the fact that reforms are sorely needed.
Protesters demonstrate against proposed pension reforms in Paris on December 17, 2019 | Kiran Ridley/Getty Images
But, of course, the manner of reform matters, and so far, governmental proposals are not convincing the hard-headed unions.
The strikers’ greatest fear is that, by standardizing the reform system as the government plans to do, doing away with special pension regimes such as that of the public transport drivers, they will lose out economically while working for two years longer than is currently the case.
Many within the beleaguered public sector — hospital doctors and nurses, school and university teachers, national media employees, firemen, airport workers — have allied themselves to the current protests and joined the demonstrators.
The strike, ultimately, is also a show of force against a widely disliked president who is seen as caring only for the rich — and so, for some of its participants, it is on a continuum with the peoples’ revolts that are rattling far less stable countries across the world.
The protesters see the government’s proposed pension reform as belonging to the neoliberal model of profit-driven economics that has engulfed the world and that the French rightly perceive as menacing the welfare state. They believe that they will be the poorer for it, even as the rich get richer.
There are many reasons to support the strikers, and indeed many Parisians do. There is a sense of solidarity rather more than of anger in the streets — as long as you’re not stuck in traffic gridlock, or trying to grab that last Vélib’ bicycle. People are interacting and smiling more; we’re all in this together. For now, most onlookers are simply making do with the disturbance. Everyone appears to agree that the right of citizens to protest and negotiate legislation is at the heart of democracy. A society that cherishes this right is fundamentally healthy.
The likelihood that people will lose patience with the workers’ cause increases as the holidays approach, and unions say they will continue to strike.
And yet, it’s clear that exasperation is mounting. The radically uncompromising stance of the unions, which are confronting the government rather than engaging in negotiations, could soon spark a broader backlash. The likelihood that people will lose patience with the workers’ cause increases as the holidays approach, and unions say they will continue to strike — disrupted lives and bludgeoned economy be damned.
For now, the Ville de Paris has earmarked €2.5 million for small businesses, artisans and restaurants — which have lost between 30 percent and 50 percent of their income — and urged residents to shop and eat out in their neighborhoods in order to sustain the economy at a local level. There are 62,000 such small businesses in Paris alone, and this is in large part what makes this city so liveable, lovable and walkable.
Meanwhile, we tread our daily miles, hoping for a pragmatic compromise and a return to normality.