Word: reformer
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Estimated cost per day to France's rail authority of the transit union's strike over President Nicolas Sarkozy's pension-reform plans...
...past experience is any guide, this reform will likely be watered down once national governments and farming lobbies go to work on it. But for Fischer Boel, at least, the worst excesses of the E.U.'s farm policies have become so indigestible that it is time to take them off the menu...
...conflict is to his wider reformist and presidential regime - leave no doubt the President will eventually wade in with his usual high profile. But some observers believe that inevitability is why Sarkozy has opted for the strategically unexpected furtive approach. "He's made the non-negotiable essentials of this reform clear to everyone, so now he's probably letting unions and government officials lock horns until he sees the opportunity to step in and break the loggerheads with mutually acceptable compromise," says Jacques Mistral, head of economic research for the French Institute on Foreign Relations in Paris...
...unions representing France's five million civil service workers called on teachers, hospital workers, postal employees, and administrative staff to leave their jobs and join nation-wide protests against government plans to slash nearly 23,000 public sector jobs next year. Those walkouts greatly broadened the front opposing government reform initiated Nov. 14 by transport and utility workers, whose ongoing strikes against the tightening of their pension schemes have caused most rail travel throughout France to be canceled, and have brought suburban train, subway, and bus service to a crawl. Tuesday's movement even found echo in the private sector...
...accept Sarkozy's main demand: increasing the number of years public sector employees must work to qualify for full pensions to match the levels in the private sector. State-owned employers would then be allowed to come up with salary or benefit trade-offs that would make that retirement reform acceptable. "That way, Sarkozy applies reform where others failed, and unions and employees feel they've come away better off," Mistral explains...