By IRNA,
Paris : Hundreds of thousands of French teachers and civil servants staged a one-day strike throughout the country Thursday to protest government plans to cut jobs in the public sector.
While the unions and the government differed sharply over the numbers taking part, many thousands of teachers, students, parents and civil servants stayed off the job.
For example, union leaders said that at least 60 percent of the 740,000 teachers in France were on strike; the government said the figure was 34.4 percent, while 24.8 percent of 2.5 million state employees were on strike.
In Paris, organizers said 50,000 people had demonstrated, while the police said the figure was closer to 18,000. There were also large demonstrations in Marseille, Toulouse and Strasbourg.
It was another test of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s resolve in his efforts to cut down the large civil service to reduce budget deficits and create more competition in the economy.
There will be more strikes to come, including one on May 22 called by the powerful transport unions, which will probably halt train, airline and subway service across the country.
Sarkozy has said that he will stand firm in his plans to cut 22,900 civil-service jobs this year, including more than 11,000 in education, and an additional 35,000 next year.
The government says it intends to accomplish the cuts by replacing only half of those who retire.
But the unions see a direct threat to their influence, and students are worried about having fewer teachers and less opportunity for good jobs.
With Sarkozy at historical lows in opinion polls, union leaders clearly feel they have a chance to force him to retreat. But the same polls also show that the French generally support Sarkozy’s restructuring plans, if not the president himself.
As much as 55 percent of the state budget goes to pay for civil servants and state pensions.
Sarkozy and his prime minister, Francois Fillon, say they intend to have a balanced budget by 2012.
Fillon was encouraged Thursday by reports that economic growth was up in the first quarter, and that the French economy was likely to grow between 1.7 percent and 2 percent this year.
Thursday evening, Sarkozy told journalists that French citizens have “the right to strike,” but also “the right to work.”
He defended his restructuring plans and said: “Every time we change something in our country, actions undertaken to better answer the expectations of the French for their schools raise worries, even dissatisfaction, and these worries sometimes, like today, express themselves through strikes.”
Sarkozy also said the government would draft legislation to ensure that schoolchildren are watched over by municipal employees in future strikes, so their parents can go to work, although the unions say that the plan undermines the right to strike. The bill would require a 48- hour warning of a coming strike.
The education minister, Xavier Darcos, said the protests, however large, would not change policy and did not answer the problems of French education today, which was expensive and overstaffed, with falling class sizes.
“We need to sit around a table and talk about education,” he said, not indulge in old rituals like “these big protests that don’t permit us to touch on the heart of things.”
He asked, “In all of this, will we have talked about the students, about the future of schooling in France, will we have asked ourselves why education in France, which is more expensive than all the others, is one of the most inefficient? No.”
Patrick Gonthier, leader of the education section of the UNSA civil servants’ union, told France Info radio that “the job cuts will cause dysfunction in the public service – there will be fewer subjects offered and larger classes.”
Florian Lecoultre, head of the National Lycee Union, called for a moratorium on job cuts in education.
“These job cuts crystallize the dissatisfaction today,” he wrote in the Thursday edition of Le Monde, “because they represent a short-sighted policy turning its back on all true educational ambition.”
Olivier Besancenot, 34, considered a rising star on the far left, having run for president last year from the Revolutionary Communist League, told students in Paris that instead of cutting educational positions, “we should cut back on fiscal gifts and subsidies for big companies, and we don’t need to be sending more troops to Afghanistan.”