Other Public Workers Join French Strikers

Striking government workers took to the streets en masse Tuesday, joined for a day by hundreds of thousands more public employees trying to force the government to withdraw planned austerity measures.

Leaders of the 19-day-old strike said more than 2 million people took to the streets nationwide, but police estimated 930,000 turned out.

Railroad workers struck Nov. 24, sparking France’s most serious labor conflict in nearly a decade. The strike has paralyzed public transportation, closed schools, slowed other public services and created monstrous traffic snarls around the capital.

On Tuesday, for the sixth day since the strike began, other state workers joined in for one day.

Prime Minister Alain Juppe has said protests involving 2 million people could force him to resign or at least withdraw his plan.

“The movement will toughen,” Marc Blondel, head of the Workers Force union, said in a fog of red smoke from flares fired by 50,000 protesters in Paris. “The street is talking now and it’s up to Juppe to respond.”

Union leaders vowed to continue the crippling strike until Juppe backs down. The premier is trying to slash a budget deficit of $64 billion to get France ready for a common European currency expected by 1999.

Juppe lashed out Tuesday at opposition lawmakers in the National Assembly as they debated a motion to censure him, saying his plan was the victim “of an extraordinary campaign of defamation, disinformation and confusion.”

There were some signs the impasse was easing. Railway workers resumed talks Tuesday evening with a government-appointed mediator, and more postal and utility workers trickled back to their jobs.

Even so, Juppe’s problems multiplied with a new poll giving him an all-time low confidence rating of just 8 percent. Ninety-two percent of 959 respondents to the IFOP-L’Express poll conducted Dec. 8-9 said they had lost faith in the premier.

In Paris, about 50,000 people with drums, trumpets, whistles, red flares and firecrackers marched across the heart of the French capital, angrily denouncing the government’s planned social security cutbacks.

“There is only one objective now: the withdrawal of the Juppe plan,” said Louis Viannet, head of the Communist-led General Labor Confederation.