Bubulle's weblog

So, our country is again in one of its recurrent strike madness. Yesterday (Wednesday), unions of the public transportation companies (mostly SNCF for trains all over the country, RATP for Paris and suburbs metros/bus system and maybe a few transport companies in other cities) called for an unlimited strike.

The point is protesting against the project of harmonizing the retirement systems of these companies with the system used in private companies (AND many public ones such as Onera who I work for).

The French retirement financing system is facing the challenge of all participative systems (where the current workers pay for the current retired people, contrary to cpitalization systems where one spares one's own retirement money during one's work life....I hope this is clear with my broken English). As there are less and less workers and more and more retired peoplen the load on workers is becoming harder and harder while the retirement 'salaries' (what's the word for 'pension'?) can only be lower.

As a consequence, in the standard retirment system in France, ppl now have to work for 42 years to get a full pension when they retire (theoretically we can at 60....but practically, this happens at 65). In the same time, workers at SNCF, RATP and a few others still have a special retirement system with only 37 years to work and the possibility to retire when reaching 55 for some of them (good ol' days of steam trains justify the work being "hard").

All attempts to change this have failed up to now because of the power of unions at SNCF/RATP/others and the power they have to screw out the entire country. Attempts in 1999 lead to huge strike with, at that time, a strong support by the general public (who feared for their own retirement system.....the strike also being a good way to protest against the general policitcs of the government at that time...as usual).

Things changed now and the majority of ppl no longer support so-called privileged people to try hanging to their special retirement system....but of course, unions still have to show their power and, anyway, very few strikers may break things a lot.....and here we are with huge strikes.

Yesterday, I managed to do it well with a good train coverage on my line (1 all-stops train per 30minutes) and running at both ends (good for health!).

Today was a little bit jerkier with the scheduled train being cancelled and the next one 30 minutes later...and well packed..:-)

Hopefully, for tomorrow, the situation should improve as negotiations between government and unions are planned (they were already but I guess that unions had to show their strength....and check whether the average people support them like it happened in 1999....which is actually a complete failure as the general feeling over French population is "enough!").

That's good as I'm not completely sure I can sustain running 12km every day.:)