Roadblocks sprang up like mushrooms across France on Sunday as truckers went on a nationwide strike to stop road haulage after rejecting a tentative wage agreement reached with a minor employers' group.
The protesters swung into action even before the 10 p.m. (2 p.m. MST) deadline, blocking trucks at fuel depots, border crossings to Spain and Germany, the ferry terminal to Britain at Calais and on the main north-south A6 motorway.Motorists were being let through.
The main road haulers' group UFT rejected a 5 percent wage hike the smaller UNOSTRA employers' group had accepted. Most of the trade unions who had agreed to the deal on Sunday morning after all-night talks denounced it hours later after consulting their members.
An isolated conciliatory voice, the CFDT trade union, urged truckers to keep protests on a small scale. It asked them to put off the strike deadline by 10 days to give the UFT time to think further.
Communist Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot, trying to head off the first major labour crisis since the Socialist-led government came to power in June, leaned on UFT to reconsider.
He said the law allowed him to extend the wage deal by decree to the whole trucking sector - if unions endorsed it.
Truckers blockading a fuel depot at Bassens near Bordeaux burned copies of the accord in an indication of the angry and hardline mood in the rank and file.
The strikers stopped trucks north and south of Lyon on the A6 motorway, at the Rhine bridge border post in Strasbourg, near Rouen, Rennes, Lille and other locations. They used trucks, blocks of concrete and harrows borrowed from farmers to block the Calais Channel ferry terminal.
Some 100 riot police cleared the road at the Biriatou border post with Spain in the Basque region. There was no violence.
Fuel depots supplying major cities like Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen and La Rochelle were gradually blocked over the weekend.
"If we have to paralyse the country . . . to have the bosses keep their word, then we'll shut up things as long as it takes," said CFDT union leader Eric Forissier at an A6 motorway roadblock.
The roadblock, thrown up five hours before the deadline, trapped dozens of foreign trucks whose drivers had hoped to escape to Germany before the strike set in. Heavy traffic at the end of the mid-term holiday was snarled and a seven-km-long (4.5 mile) traffic jam rapidly built up.
Truckers aim to block all road haulage, with fuel depots, petrol stations and major border crossings the main targets in a repeat of a 12-day strike a year ago which caused fuel shortages throughout the country and cost millions of dollars of losses to hauliers, farmers and car industries across Europe.