Aug
21
You gotta hand it to the French. Their labor campaigns have to be the most unusual in the world. Earlier this year, I looked at a case where contestant on a French reality TV show won a court case to get the same entitlements as employees with overtime payments and other benefits. I also did another blog entry on how French workers had started kidnapping bosses to get better entitlements.
Now they've done it again with reports that striking French truck drivers are threatening to pour toxic fuel additive into the Seine if they don't get better redundancy payouts. Maybe it's just a sign of the times. Workers have now taken the environment hostage.
Blackmail? Kidnapping? Court battles? That's just French for industrial action.
There were actually a lot of implications of that story – environmental, social, tactical, issues of class. I’m an American living in Paris and I wrote an analysis about the incident here: http://snipurl.com/seinestrike . Thankfully they didn’t follow through with their threat!