France’s Macron to hold meeting on pensions as strike bites

Paris, Dec 8 (AFP/APP): French President Emmanuel Macron will on Sunday meet ministers involved in his radical pension reform which has prompted a nationwide strike and brought key transport services to a standstill. Transport in Paris remained paralysed Sunday, with only the two driverless lines of the Metro in operation while national rail operator SNCF warned just one in six high-speed trains would be running. The strikes, which began on Thursday over the plans for a single points-based pension scheme, recall the winter of 1995, when three weeks of huge stoppages forced a social policy U-turn by the then-government. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe insisted his government would not abandon the plan. “If we do not make a far-reaching, serious and progressive reform today, someone else will make a really brutal one tomorrow,” Philippe was quoted as saying by Le Journal du Dimanche. But the leader of the hardline CGT union, Philippe Martinez, told the paper “We will keep up until the withdrawal” of the reform plan. The prime minister is due to unveil full details of the reform to merge the 42 existing pension plans, which could spark more union anger. “We can provide extremely positive answers for many people … Continue reading France’s Macron to hold meeting on pensions as strike bites