French Rail Strike Grows; Chirac, Unions Stand Firm

A five-day-old railroad strike worsened throughout France on Tuesday, paralyzing many lines at the height of the Christmas travel season, infuriating tens of thousands of vacationers and setting off a torrent of political recrimination.

The conservative government of Premier Jacques Chirac, smarting from its defeat earlier this month at the hands of protesting students, is obviously determined not to give in to the unions. Leftist opposition leaders are just as determined to blame the labor troubles on the intransigence of the government.

In the first incident involving a show of force between government and workers, police evacuated strikers from the train station at Chambery in the Alps on Tuesday afternoon. Workers, massing on the tracks, had prevented trains from moving through Chambery during the last few days.

Started as Wildcat Action

The troubles throughout France began as a wildcat strike by railroad workers upset over a government economy drive that will keep down wage increases, trim some benefits and eliminate jobs. The main French labor unions then endorsed the strike and demanded that the government-owned French Railways start new contract negotiations at once instead of next month as scheduled. Railroad officials agreed, but these negotiations, which began Monday night, ended in an impasse before dawn Tuesday.

Management offered a small wage increase but refused to discuss until next year working conditions and a proposed promotion system that discounts seniority. After the break-up of the talks, the strike intensified. No new talks have been scheduled.

A subway and suburban rail strike in Paris and a maritime workers’ strike in the ports added to the labor tension during the holidays. But neither of these has spawned the same kind of discomfort and anger as the railroad strike.

A Switch to Buses

Practically all trains from Paris to the north and east have been canceled. In other directions, only about one out of four scheduled trains is running. Some vacationers have been forced to give up their holidays. Some managing to board trains in Paris found the way to ski resorts in the Alps blocked hours later by strikers massing on tracks in towns like Chambery. Many travelers have had to switch to buses to reach the resorts. In Lyon, the French Railways allowed 100 stranded travelers to sleep in two blocked railroad cars of a high-speed train Monday night.

Owners, managers and workers at ski resorts are furious. The French do not spread their vacations out throughout the year but tend to take their holidays at the same time--August, a two-week February winter vacation and the Christmas holidays. As a result, the resorts are dependent on these holidays and cannot make up any lost vacations.

The mood is especially bitter because snow has been falling in the mountains during the Christmas holidays for the first time in three years.

Political attacks and counterattacks have had a bitter edge. Michel Debre, a former conservative premier and a member of Chirac’s Gaullist party, said that “France has become a battlefield” and that the Socialists “were pushing their democratic right of argument to the point of hatred.”

Socialist Pierre Joxe, a former minister of interior, blamed the labor problems on the conservative government’s continual attempts to denigrate public corporations like the railroads.

‘Tactlessness, Verbal Abuse’

“If the government had not been guilty of so much provocation, tactlessness and verbal abuse,” Joxe said, “we would not be where we are.”