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Thursday, June 12, 2003
posted by gbarto at 10:55 AM:
78% of French oppose interference with Bac, Unions get message
Will France take a stand for itself now that it's taken a stand for its children?First Written Test in Bac Takes Place Without Problems, says Le Monde. Well, almost. On the positive side, almost all schools started the exams on time with people admitted without problems. Several unions that had announced plans to make how they felt about the government instead arrived with banners reading "Good Luck." At one school, teachers replaced their protest placards with the signs featuring standard exam questions. In Auch, the story is more complicated: The unions sealed off the city and would allow no one in - excepting people with the paperwork to take the Bac. The transportation unions even took a break from their strike to make sure students would be able to get to the exams. Since we are attached to the press, we will focus on the news - the places things didn't go right and what happened:
- At Perpigan (Pyrénées-Orientales) they tried to build rock and tire barriers to disrupt traffic. But they couldn't get enough volunteers and really only blocked one intersection.
- In Toulouse, 400 protesters admitted students to the Bac but wouldn't let the exam monitors in.
- At Mistral d'Avignon (Vaucluse) 200-250 protesters locked the school gates. The police forced them open.
- At Condorcet-Belfort (Territoire-de-Belfort) 40 protesters blocked the school gates, but opened them voluntarily after a few minutes
As should have been obvious, that the destiny of France is in the hands of the French people. They can try to blame unions for everything, but the real problem is their squishiness on whether to root for the unions out of misguided sentimentality or demand that unions be treated like everyone else, facing the same responsability for their actions, the same threat of firing for not doing their jobs, the same legal sanctions for actions injurious to the public interest. This is a decision France has to make and it seems to have made it:
However upset people are about the transportation strikes, they can't bring themselves to oppose them wholeheartedly. They want to root against the authorities, to root for the underdogs, and can't figure out that looking at the scoreboard the government is the underdog and the unions have all the cards, including the keys to the safe and comfortable passing of their lives.
The French have no one but themselves to blame for the nationwide strikes, and that's been proved this morning. Because when the French people managed to get upset enough about something to drop the pieties about the idea of the unions as special, rather than one more corporate interest, they sent a message loud and clear and the unions received it: Don't strike the Bac, said the public, because it will hurt the children, and the unions backed down, not only - I think - because they knew the politics were against them but because they came to understand why the politics were against them.
The question for the future is, can the people of France next say, Don't strike against France's advancement into the 21st century, because it will hurt France?
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