====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
French trade unions have claimed the biggest national demonstration in a decade after more than a million people took to the streets in protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to raise the retirement age to 62. Police estimated that close to 1.2 million people attended rallies across the nation while unions claimed that close to three million joined in the protests. A police spokesman in Paris said that 250 busloads of workers arrived in the capital alone, joining more than 700,000 who marched from Place de La Republique throughout the afternoon. Schools, banks and factories closed and all public transport ground to a standstill with more than half the scheduled flights in and out of Paris grounded for 24 hours until 8pm last night. Bernard Thibault, leader of France's biggest umbrella labour organisation, the CGT, said that if the Government did not listen to the workers' voices, “no form of action would be excluded in future”. The unions' strategically timed show of muscle was designed to coincide with the introduction of the controvsersial pensions bill to the French National Assembly or lower house. Thousands lined the streets, chanting and singing in what to the outsider looked more like a giant party than a political rally. Enormous balloons attached to trucks heralded marchers and their unions and professions while music and loudspeakers demanded that reforms be abandoned. http://www.smh.com.au/world/french-workers-out-in-force-to-protest-against-plans-to-make-them-work-longer-20100908-14zy5.html -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
