PARIS: French train mechanic Jonathan Seigneur says President Emmanuel Macron has it all wrong.Seigneur fixes trains for a modest salary that he accepted in exchange for job security, a tradeoff made by workers across the world’s fifth-biggest economy. And now he is on strike, along with thousands of others at national railway SNCF, to protest Macron’s changes to the rail sector — and protect the French way of life.
Macron, a former investment banker who is currently visiting the U.S., argues that worker protections stifle growth and innovation, and that the French lifestyle is no longer tenable in the 21st century global economy.
“If job security is a privilege then I’d like for all the French to have this privilege,” he said. “Soon it will be a privilege just to have a job. Or to eat at each meal.”
Seigneur is fighting what many French workers see as an encroaching American-style system, where people are laid off without warning and “you take your pickup and the wife and kids, and go somewhere else.”
Seigneur, with the powerful hard-left union CGT, talked to The Associated Press at different protest sites around Paris — starting from a blockade he set up in the Paris suburb of Pantin to try to save a threatened depot.
Later he donned a red union hat and stormed the SNCF freight headquarters in the suburb of Clichy with other union activists. They waved flags as they entered the building and mounted the roof, where they lit flares and sang songs, fists in the air.
Some two-thirds of French high-speed trains were cancelled Tuesday as workers held their 10th day of train strikes so far this month. Unions plan rolling train strikes through the end of June, and other sectors are also holding scattered walkouts as discontent mounts against Macron’s changes to the French economy.
