At 48 hours from the second day of strikes and demonstrations against the pension reform, the troops are mobilizing for Act II of the mobilization. The SNCF, the RATP, the energy sector should participate, as well as certain town halls. A few days ago, the national secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF), Fabien Roussel, urged the mayors to take part in the strike. A call he reiterated this Sunday, at the microphone of the Grand Rendez-vous d’Europe 1 / CNews / The echoes.
But the leader of the PCF also invited “craftsmen, traders, SMEs who do not find themselves in the reform because they know that it will brutalize their employees and who for whom the cup is full, to close the curtain on the 31st, to put France in strike mode, to shut down the economy”.
“Together, we can be heard”
According to him, the presence of “business leaders, local elected officials, private and public employees…” with “a diversity of opinions” is necessary for mobilization. “If, all together, we say ‘stop, we don’t want this reform’, we can make ourselves heard and make the government back down.”
“When we choose to hold demonstrations during the week, when we call on employees to leave their factories or their companies and to stop working, it is so that the economy does not work for a few hours”, added Fabien Roussel.
The national secretary of the PCF also returned to his call to symbolically close town halls on January 31. “The mayors are fed up: today they are suffering from increases in energy bills, in the price of raw materials and they have less endowments. And this pension reform that falls on them will weigh on municipal employees “, he explained at the microphone of Europe 1 / CNews / The echoes. As for the risk of penalizing users, Fabien Roussel considers that “mayors are those who best defend public services in our country, they are the sentinels of the Republic”.
“Several hundred town halls” will participate in the mobilization day, according to Fabien Roussel
He also believes that “several hundred town halls will symbolically close, allow their agents to demonstrate without loss of pay or place banners. This should question the government on the depth of the anger that exists in the country and which will beyond this pension reform”.
After qualifying the first day of mobilization against the pension reform as a “success”, Fabien Roussel hopes that Tuesday will attract “even more” people because “the government must hear that the French do not want a measure of extension of the retirement age. On January 19, two million people took to the streets to oppose the pension reform, according to union figures.