La vie en France: les grèves

Last Tuesday, November 13, the students at the Université Paul-Valery, Montpellier III voted to officially go on strike in response to some reforms Président Sarkozy is making to the French university system. They held some general assemblies and then barricaded off the entrance gates and all of the building entrances with piles of tables and chairs. They then guard the entrances to ensure that no one gets on campus or into their classrooms. In response to this, as is traditional in strike situations, the president of the university cancelled all classes for a week to ensure that no one got hurt trying to get to class and to make sure that no property was damaged (aside from all the graffiti all over the place inspiring everyone in their strike efforts).

Usually, even when the University goes on strike (which happens about once every two years. If you've never gone on strike for something, you're not actually French. My friend's hostmom said when she was a kid her middle school went on strike. That's right, a bunch of 11-year-olds.), the IEFE, the international student program, still goes on as normal, because we're not actually involved in any of the politics of the strike. But the president decided to go ahead and shut us down too, for security reasons, I believe. Which would mean no class for a week.

So we had no class on Wednesday, which didn't affect me anyway, because I never have class on Wednesdays. But I got an email from one of my teachers saying that the situation had changed somewhat, and they were restarting up classes for us international students. Somewhat disappointed that we didn't get a week-long vacation like the regular French students, we went back to class on Thursday.

Friday morning (at 8.30 in the morning, no less), we got to campus to find out the police had barred it off and weren't letting anyone in. Apparently about 20 students were occupying campus and the president decided enough was enough, so he had the police come in to get them off campus, which is a big deal to everyone on strike, because it's like the police have now invaded their sacred ground. The police have evacuated the 20 students and shut down campus to try and avoid any backlash from other students. They don't want a riot. Normally I guess they just let the students have campus indefinitely (a few years ago they went on strike for most of the semester), but this time they decided they want to try and keep the students from taking over campus again. I'm not sure if this means whether they've dismantled all the barricades or not.

About 20 minutes later the directrice of my program called to make sure that we were okay and not stuck in the middle of anything on campus. She said now we're not sure what's going on with class. Some students may rebel against the police being on campus and things could get pretty serious, so the president may just decide to keep everyone off campus, or they could have us start classes back up this afternoon. We're not really sure what's going to happen. Hopefully not a riot though.

I figure I'll just stay away from campus and see what happens. Apparently these things occasionally get pretty ugly. This strike isn't supposed to last that long, and I don't think the movement is that strong, but the president of the university is taking a pretty strong stance, and Sarkozy has said he's not giving in about his reforms, so we'll just see.

The trains are also on strike, because of retirement reform, which means instead of it's thousands of daily trains, France has only hundreds. This Tuesday all of the civil servants are going to go on strike, which will affect trains, trams, buses, and any other government job, such as public pools, libraries, the post office, etc. Pretty much everything will be shut down. And a bunch of the pre-school teachers are going on strike next Tuesday, too. It's getting kind of crazy over here. Everyone is striking. Maybe I should find something to strike about. Maybe I'll go on strike over the strikes. ;)