Staple Goods Run Short as Truckers Boost Strike

From gasoline to fresh fish, yogurt and cauliflower, staples were starting to run short across France as striking truckers on Wednesday widened a blockade of roads and highways with their rigs to push for better pay and working conditions.

The strike, in its third full day, began to pinch painfully at the arteries of Europe’s increasingly integrated economy, which depends more than ever on deliveries by big trucks. About a third of France’s service stations have run dry, and employees in at least two Renault auto-making plants were laid off because parts couldn’t be delivered in time to assembly lines.

The British, Spanish, Germans and officials of the European Union have demanded that France act swiftly to end the strike. In Paris, unions and owners, brought together by the government of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, began talking again for the first time since the truckers laid siege to the roads Sunday night.

Both sides, which met late into the night, appeared upbeat. “The whole tone is now rather positive,” said Joel Le Coq of the truckers’ French Labor Confederation.

However, a violent clash outside Marseilles earlier in the day highlighted the great risks of letting the conflict run too long. In the industrial city of Vitrolles just north of the Mediterranean port, a score of hooded people armed with baseball bats and iron bars charged one roadblock about 4 a.m., evidently to allow a convoy of 12 refrigerated trucks to leave a local depot. Three strikers were beaten and one taken to the hospital with serious head injuries. Six suspects in the assault were detained.

Jospin, sympathetic to the truckers but conscious of the damage that would be done to the slowly reviving French economy by a lengthy strike, said Tuesday that he will impose a solution if labor and management cannot come to an agreement. A similar strike by truckers in November last year dragged on for 12 days, sapped the authority of Jospin’s predecessor, snarled traffic on roadways that constitute some of Western Europe’s major thoroughfares and infuriated France’s neighbors, especially Britain.

Neil Kinnock, the European Union official in charge of transportation, has threatened legal action against France this time unless it takes swift measures to ensure the free circulation of goods and people, to which it is committed under European treaties.

“This time, the Europeans are fed up with yet another French strike and want action,” a European Commission official in Brussels said.

The truckers are breaking the law by leaving their vehicles on the roads, but Jospin’s government, faced with its first major labor dispute since taking office in June, has avoided confrontation so far except for sending police to keep border crossings into Germany and Spain open.

The 300,000 drivers are widely seen in France as victims of exploitation, and their demands--an immediate raise to the equivalent of $1,660 a month from about $1,280, and a 200-hour limit on their monthly work time--are supported by many. Jospin has accused employers of bringing on the strike by not keeping promises they made to end last year’s walkout, and his transportation minister, Communist Jean-Claude Gayssot, has visited the barricades.

By Wednesday evening, the drivers’ action had spread to more than 170 choke points throughout France. In most places, strikers allowed private motorists to pass their parked tractor-trailers, but in at least 26 spots, they were letting no one through, authorities said.

In Caen, near the English Channel, more than 300 tractor-trailers were immobilized on the roads, including 30 belonging to foreign drivers trapped by the strike.

The most affected regions were Normandy in the north, the Marseilles area in the south, and the Rhone Valley, France’s major north-south corridor. In Paris, spared on the first days of the blockade, truckers obstructed the highway ringing the city during the afternoon, causing tie-ups for more than an hour before police cleared away the rigs.

Around France, people worried about a long strike were snapping up olive oil, cheese and other foodstuffs and trying to fill their cars’ tanks. Gasoline sales had been restricted in more than half the regions of the country, and in some cities, such as Nantes in the west, most service stations had run dry.

In eastern France, fresh foods such as oranges, cauliflower, lettuce, yogurt, beef and pork sausage were running short because there had been no recent deliveries. Lettuce was becoming so rare in the Strasbourg area that the wholesale price had tripled since the weekend.

The truckers’ barriers meant that fish catches went unbought in Boulogne-sur-Mer and other seaports, while hoarders were emptying the shelves of stores in Lyons and other areas of milk, sugar and other staples.

According to officials in Spain, one of the major suppliers of fresh produce to the rest of Europe, the French strike had delayed, trapped or forced to detour a total of 8,000 Spanish trucks. The country’s farmers, who estimate their loss at $170 million a week, have threatened to demand a national boycott of French goods.

In England, trucks were lined up by the hundreds on the coast of Kent on Wednesday, waiting for a place on ferries rerouted to Belgium from French ports.

French trucking company owners worry about being priced out of a market that is to be deregulated and opened to European-wide competition in June. But representatives of the Union of Transport Federations, the major employers association that walked out of an earlier round of talks Friday, have said they also want an agreement. According to some French media, the owners agreed Wednesday for the first time to one of the drivers’ key demands, a guaranteed monthly salary.