Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France, has continued to advocate for pension overhaul reform amid overwhelming public opposition and nationwide frenzy. Comprised mostly of young and college-aged French people, mobs of protestors have taken to the streets in every corner of France, as the concomitant effects of numerous union strikes are beginning to mound up, sometimes quite literally.
Union workers, who are usually able to retire and collect a pension at age 60, are now being forced to wait another two years, as French parliament plans to pass an act that extends the retirement age. Two more years of federal income tax from each worker, along with the money saved from deferring subsidized pensions, will win the French government a little more spending cash.
Unions continue to strike, as garbage lines the streets and oil refineries are forced to halt production, making it virtually impossible to fill an automobile's gas tank, even if it is a Peugeot.
The editorial board thinks that the French government, though well within its right to gain money as it sees fit, is falling backwards into an easy method that may turn to be a bad call.
From over here across the pond, it looks like a pseudo pump priming initiative that pacifies the French upper class by avoiding the topic of taxes. The government is well equipped to handle the situation by other means, including feeding the hungry state with a progressive income tax.
It seems unfair that the working class should have to toil for two more years, receiving no more benefit for the bodily wear.
We think that the strikes represent an admirable cause for which the French people should be proud. Many of the nation's youth are protesting for their parents' honor, as college-aged adults have elder parents closer to the retirement age. Showing passive resistance to unfairness and active participation against stubborn governmental policy is an exciting undertaking; it seems that many have forgotten the power of such an act.
Though founded on resistance to a government's oppression, the United States would probably never participate in a similar protest. Indeed, there are transit strikes for which you might mark your bi-annual calendar, and the "blue flu" will go around every so often, when police call in sick on the same day.
But a collective nationwide resistance seems far beyond the means of a country of the United States' size. The southern states can barely get along with their northern neighbors, let alone form a uniform ideology with which they would march together.
But France is only roughly the size of Alaska; proximity and nationalism seem to be what keeps this party so tightly knit. It would be a stretch to expect the U.S. to consider such a consolidation.
Still, our hats are off to them, and we hope that the country's people can get what they want or reach a viable compromise with the French government.
So to the French, from The Spectrum: Bonne chance, et vive la revolution.
