AFP – People demonstrate in Paris against President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to raise the age of retirement
PARIS (AFP) – French workers in several sectors were to vote Wednesday on whether to strike for a second day after more than a million people marched in the biggest protest yet against pensions reform.
The SNCF national rail company, which ran just one in three trains on Tuesday, said services would likely be as badly disrupted on Wednesday, indicating that workers were expected to renew their strike.
Strikers in the RATP Paris transport network had already voted on Tuesday to renew their action.
"This is not a last stand," said the president of the CFTC union, Jacques Voisin after Tuesday's marches.
"The movement is taking things up a notch."
The nationwide protests were the biggest since the anti-reform battle began earlier this year, unions and police said, estimating the number of demonstrators at 3.5 million and 1.23 million respectively.
That made the street protests the biggest in strike-prone France since 1995, when a month of stoppages crippled the country and forced the right-wing government at the time to drop its own pensions reform.
The strike and marches were against President Nicolas Sarkozy's pensions reform, key elements of which had already passed into law just a day earlier.
And in what some commentators saw as a significant development, students and school pupils joined the movement for the first time.
"Sarko, you're screwed, the young are on the streets," chanted students as they marched beside trade unionists and their supporters on the fourth major nationwide demonstration against pension reform in just over a month.
Travellers faced major delays, with up to half the flights to and from Paris Orly airport and one in three at the capital's Charles de Gaulle-Roissy and the smaller Paris Beauvais cancelled.
Coppied by http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101013/bs_afp/francestrikepoliticspensions
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