Strike action over Macron’s pensions plan brings major disruption to France
www.theguardian.com
Hundreds of thousands across transport, school and energy sectors rally against government scheme to raise retirement age to 64

Don't mind the :LIB: link, just one million people came out in Paris today, "hundreds of thousands" my arsecheecks.

It's been a wild couple of days in France, firefighters on strike burning tyres to trigger smoke alarms, electricians turning electric counters back to zero and then resealing them (allegedly cutting power to rich knobheads in the meantime), all ports being closed, and all that was just wildcat action in anticipation of the general stikes for today.

This is all to stop the government from raising the retirement age to 64, from where it is now, 62. Some union heads have murmured that in fact, they want it lowered to 60, as retribution.

Obviously the government has a huge hole in the budget because they want an overinflated army and they think this is a good way to pay for it. I don't even want to start pointing out how dumb of a move this is (the marginal productivity of a 62 year old will not be enough to pay for the fucking army's oil changes)

Honestly these are the biggest strikes that have happened in "the West" within my recollection.

edit: the small conservative Alsacian village I visited recently had their sole Burger King go on strike today so that's how "general" these general strikes are

edit2: oh yeah, some of the strikers were blasting the internationale, which is pretty common for this kind of stuff in France, but still, we love it folks, we love it

    • Monsieur_bleu [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      That trot party, MAS, split from the Left Block, apparently because the left block isn’t sectarian enough. And over the weekend, the main face of MAS spent a whole afternoon accusing CGTP of supporting the governments decision to declare minimum services for the education sector which is a straight up lie, it also refused to participate as a united front in a negotiation roundtable with the other unions against the government.

      it's so much fucking worse than that, it was born out of the corpse of the 2011 15 October protest/movements, after the Left Block successfully coopted the movement and left the occupy kids who staid overnight to rot with no logistics support whatsoever because they had the gall to self organize (you know, the thing literal tens of thousands of flyer and posters called for) instead of just rolling over and letting the enlightened vanguard speak for them after a good nights sleep at home between protest photo ops, The left block factions turned on themselves for control over the movement assemblies/brand (Because at that point they had successfully hollowed it out from any meaningful organizing/community outreach) and MAS was the winning left block faction that splintered from the party while the party proper went on to launch a rebranded "movement" called "QSLT - Que se lixe a troika" (Screw the (IMF)Troika) which was somehow even more performative and useless, but this time they learned their lesson and assembly participation was invitation only.

      The winning faction tried to keep control of the hollowed out 15O brand but eventually rebranded as MAS in 2013, incidentally they've also been aligned with some of the chuddiest, climate/covid denying, terf "leftists" like running Joana amaral dias as a candidate and being super friendly with "baroness" Raquel Varela.