Posing proudly amid 145 city buses parked pell-mell, their tires slashed, union leader Georges Shahine had Marseilles at his mercy. Yet he presented himself as a freedom fighter.
He and other strikers at the city's money-losing transit authority say they're the last defenders of the French way of life. They believe France is besieged by alien values in which profit is the bottom line, not public service.They're losing the war.
Conservative Premier Alain Juppe succeeded in riding out last month's nationwide walkout by public employees. His urban affairs minister - who is also the mayor here - is mopping up the last pocket of die-hard resisters in Marseilles, a Mediterranean port famous for labor unrest and radical politics.
Riot police Thursday and Friday forced open the city's four occupied bus depots, including one that strikers had defiantly called The Alamo. Bus service in the city of 900,000 was slowly resuming for the first time in a month with the 20 percent of non-striking drivers at the wheels.
"There's no doubt that in the back of their minds the idea is privatization," Shahine said of management's efforts to cut losses in the Marseilles Transit Authority. "And when that happens, forget about serving the public. Only money will count."
Polls show most French are on his side, despite the hardship caused by prolonged, paralyzing walkouts like the one in Marseilles.
Transit workers in France's third-largest city are trying to torpedo attempts to hinge raises and bonuses on merit and hire new employees at lower salaries. Management wants to make the company less dependent on taxpayer subsidies that keep it in business.
For much the same reasons, millions of railroad, postal and other public employees crippled France for 3 1/2 weeks last month, protesting Juppe's belt-tightening measures.
Juppe needs to slash a $64 billion budget deficit for France to join the European Union's single currency, planned for 1999. To do it, he targeted privileges long enjoyed by France's 5 million public workers, such as early retirement, guaranteed annual raises and generous pensions.
To end the strike, he promised to leave rail workers' early-retirement regime untouched for now and to postpone downsizing the money-losing National Railroad Company.
But he stuck to most of his plan, notably a freeze on raises and an unpopular overhaul of the indebted state health care and pension system.