President Sarkozy faces the first obstacle in his reform march — a one-day national strike by the public sector unions that have toppled one Prime Minister and scared off another.

Leading the troops against “Super-Sarko” is a former railway worker whose mop top and boyish looks belie his battle-hardened past. “We’re going to have some sport on Thursday and not just at the rugby cup,” joked Bernard Thibault, 48, head of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), France’s oldest and most powerful union. “The workers are very motivated,” he told The Times in advance of strikes by railway, bus, power, gas and other state workers in protest against Mr Sarkozy’s pension plans.

Mr Thibault, a Communist, made his name in 1995 when, as chief of the CGT rail branch, he halted President Chirac’s first government in its tracks. Alain Juppé, the Prime Minister, abandoned pension reform amid general strikes and protests. He never recovered and was ejected from office in elections two years later. Mr Thibault aims to do the same for Mr Sarkozy’s promised “rupture” with France’s comfortable work and welfare habits.

“This is 2007, so it’s difficult to say that history will repeat itself but there is a lot of anger and readiness for industrial action,” he said. “We are not aiming to produce the same kind of strikes as before, but if the Government digs in its heels it’s possible that we end up with the same paralysis.”

The son of a Paris woodcutter is more of a moderniser than he admits publicly, but he sticks to the old lines of class war to reassure a militant minority that he is no softy, with the CGT the most intransigent of France’s five main union groups. He also knows that the fate of Mr Sarkozy’s radical remedies for France’s ills will be shaped by this battle to scrap the generous retirement system enjoyed by state transport and power workers.

Times have changed since Mr Juppé’s attempt to dismantle the so-called special regime pensions, which allow workers to retire at an average age of 56. Mr Sarkozy won office on his promise to “let France work more to earn more” and polls show that more than 60 per cent of voters want him to scrap the regimes.

Mr Thibault conceded that France voted for la rupture but said that Mr Sarkozy tricked voters with false promises of prosperity. The planned reforms of retirement rules, pensions, working hours, labour contracts and unemployment benefit would impoverish workers, he said. “No one contests the election of the President, but that doesn’t mean that he has carte blanche to put into force everything he wants. There is a lot of discontent building and people count on the unions.”

The CGT was ready to give ground on the regimes but in return for a maximum retirement age for all state employees. The Government aims to push the age up to about 65.

Mr Thibault criticised Mr Sarkozy’s campaign to charm the unions and said that, unlike the leaders of the other four main unions, he had refused to accept invitations for lunch with the President. “It’s all about image. There’s no real negotiation,” he said. “The Government stages a lot of photo-ops with the union bosses but they only want to talk about decisions they have already taken.” He added: “Mr Sarkozy asked me why I never smiled when I come out of meetings with him. I didn’t reply, but he must have figured out that I know a thing or two about image as well.”

Although they have great influence, French unions are more fragmented and have far lower membership than those in most other countries. Their power comes from France’s traditional sympathy for strikers, the clout that the unions wield through mandatory works councils, and their role in co-administering the national unemployment benefit system.

Under Mr Thibault, the CGT has accepted the principle of negotiation rather than automatic conflict, although he felt that more still needed to be done. “People tell us that they want us to be a bit more pragmatic. We have a tendency to be absolute.”

He warned Mr Sarkozy not to make the mistake of Dominique de Villepin, the previous Prime Minister, who forced through pension reforms but then had to surrender to protests and strikes over a youth employment scheme.

“Governments relax when they manage to get their way on five or six reforms and don’t realise that the seventh will be the one that sets off the explosion,” he said.

Force majeure

— With 700,000 members, the CGT is the biggest union in France
— However, only 8 per cent of the working population belongs to a union
— This compares with nearly 30 per cent in Britain and more than 70 per cent in Scandinavia
— The CGT opposes plans by President Sarkozy to eliminate privileges enjoyed by just 6 per cent of pensioners
— The special pensions were introduced after the Second World War for jobs considered particularly arduous
— They allow workers to retire after 37 years rather than 40 for others

Source: Times archives

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