The lucky "workers" at SNCF are terribly glad that the CarBQ situtaion seems to have died down so that they can get publicity for their strike starting today (amusing machine translation). This is, for those of you who might be interested, the sixth strike this year- or at least the 6th round here, it is possible that some of these were local ones. The strike is because the unions are afraid that SNCF might be privatised and they also think that various SNCF lines could be cut. In other words they are scared of being downsized. Although the French budget is under pressure, as the head of SNCF said, no one has actually made any proposal to do either thing recently, so quite why they want to go on strike now is somewhat of a mystery. My own belief is that they want to get some publicity and remind the government that they are not to be forgotten while the government looks at fixing the suburbs.
However to get an idea of just how broken the state controlled sector is, if you read the bottom of the article you see that it seems that the SNCF strikers will not be paid while they are on strike, except for perhaps a couple of days which will be declared to be holiday instead.
Personally I think the SNCF strikers should be warned that those on strike
get to retire a 65 like everyone else instead of 50-55 usual for SNCF "workers"
if they stay on strike for more than a week they will be considered to have quit the job
Taking a few SNCF managers into the banlieues and actively recruiting would probably make the point even better. Alternatively if the government had any cojones it could simple reduce SNCF's 2006 subsidy by 100 million Euros for each week there is a strike (statistics indicate that the SNCF is subsidized at about €5.2 billion / year although the precise amount is unclear since this particular part of the French budget makes the EU's CAP a model of accounting clarity).