It was during the first week of orientation, way back in September, that some intrepid student battled jet lag enough to raise her hand with a question. “What do we do if there’s a strike?” she asked.
The Educo staff looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Well, let's hope that there aren’t any. They’re quite inconvenient.”
“But what if it’s the metro?” the girl persisted. The rest of us started to wake up a little, six-hour time difference be damned.
“You walk,” the president of the program said, giving us an understanding grimace. We stared back at her, agog.
For those who aren’t familiar with the time-tested French tradition of the strike, and maybe imagine, like me, that scene from Newsies where all the paperboys start dancing in the streets and ripping up newspapers, it’s such a common occurrence here that you almost have to wonder how the Parisians get anything done. (And then the subject of the 35-hour work week comes up). I wasn’t quite sure when I’d experience my first strike, but I had no doubt there’d be one. Please: world-wide economic collapse? Widespread French dislike for Sarkozy, who has fared especially badly amidst all the Obamania? Might as well put on your paperboy hat and dancing shoes now and get your strike on.
Of course, you might encounter a little problem: not realizing there’s a strike going on in the first place.
Yesterday afternoon, all the students in my literature class on the Algerian War waited for the teacher to show up for almost half an hour. When she didn’t come, we chalked it up to an emergency or last-minute meeting, and left. I found out today that there was a strike by the professors – but only some professors, and just for that one day, and who’s really paying attention, anyway?
Then today, a friend came into history class and announced, “The SNCF workers are pushing the strike back to Friday night. It was announced in Le Monde.”
My first reaction was confusion – had this strike been common knowledge? (No, she just has a French boyfriend). My second was horror – the SNCF is the public transportation system in France, which includes the train’s grandes lignes out of Paris to places like Toulouse (where I’ll be this weekend with my visiting parents). If the workers’ strike extended to Sunday, my parents and I would be stranded miles and miles from Paris, train tickets useless. That would be one long, costly, and eco-harmful rental car drive back to Paris.
A quick search on the Le Monde website shows that yes, indeed, the SNCF workers are going on strike for 24 hours (luckily, the strike ends before our train back to Paris on Sunday). Yes, the brief article states, the strike was originally planned for Tuesday night but was changed to Friday at 8pm (the reason was apparently not relevant to the article). Yes, of course the strikers have demands to be met, listed below in tersely worded French. No massive headlines, no analysts' opinions needed. Just a simply-worded understanding that you'll be shilling out your taxi money this weekend.
The fact that a grève (“strike”) would be so nonchalantly announced to the press ahead of time, and so calmly distributed to the French public, took me aback at first. But then I did a little Google search with keywords ‘grève, SNCF, 21 novembre’ to try and find out more details. Up popped pages and pages worth of articles. I looked at the dates.
In 2005, 2007, and now this Friday in 2008, the SNCF workers have chosen to strike on the 21st of November. As far as dramatics go, the Parisians seem to aim for quantity over quality. This is the second strike by the SNCF this month, one article told me; I didn’t even notice the last grève, though Le Monde assures me there were, indeed, a few perturbations. Disruptions, sure...but only of a hassled, resigned inconvenience. Not disruptions that led to photos in the paper with screaming mobs or a Gavroche-like street urchin raising his fist to the camera defiantly.
It was about at this point that I shut my computer, sighed, and let my theatrical image of the strike fade away.
(All this strike discussion is made even more ironic, of course, by the fact that I’m seeing De Gaulle en mai on Thursday night, a theatrical production about the famous month of May in ’68 where students and ouvriers put up barricades in the Latin Quarter and demanded reform. Apparently this is the extent of strike-related dramatics I can expect to see in 21st century Paris.)
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