France Transit Strike Continues Into Next Week

French unions announced Friday the open-end strike they called Wednesday will spill over into next week, as President Nicolas Sarkozy looked to try to solve the crisis and planned talks with concerned companies.

Unions at RATP, the company that manages the Paris metro, prolonged the strike until Monday morning, and a similar result is likely to come out from meetings held during the day at SNCF, the government-owned company that manages the railway network.

Unions rejected calls by Labor Minister Xavier Bertrand to go back to work before negotiations start, prompting Sarkozy - who has remained on the sidelines since the start of the conflict - to plan meetings for Friday afternoon at 1500 GMT.

You may be under the impression that France is a hotbed of union activity, where the French are always sympathetic to the cause of organized labour. Be surprised then, that less than eight per cent of the workforce is unionized — less than in Canada, and about half what it is in the United States. But the unions have historically held great power.

 
Whatever is won (or lost) by unions negotiating for a particular set of workers is applied to the entire workforce. So if you are a non-unionized maker of car parts and the union representing your competitors negotiates a raise for its members, you get that raise too.