France responds to economic downturn with a general strike

CBC News
January 29, 2009

People everywhere talk about the economic crisis, but the French, in their way, are doing something about it. France has come to a near standstill for a one-day general strike, the CBC’s David Common reports from Paris.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets, protesting that banks, not people, are being bailed out and decrying President Nicolas Sarkozy’s cost-cutting moves as unemployment creeps toward 10 per cent.

“Today is being called Black Thursday here in France, and with good reason,” Common reports. “Here’s just a partial list of the things that are closed or in limited service: the metro, buses, trains, airports, hospitals, schools, government offices, post offices — the list goes on and on.”

Thierry Dedieu, a leader of one of country’s major labour groups, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, put the protesters’ view this way: “We want to show that people are dissatisfied at the moment. We don’t want to have to pay for a crisis that we’re not responsible for.”

Although general strikes are no novelty in France, this one seems to have unnerved Sarkozy, who has been uncharacteristically quiet.

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This article was posted: Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 11:43 am

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