No turkey, but at least one strike

Today, I'm very excited to report, I had my first French strike. This was a good kind of strike as it did not involve the disruption of the transportation services, but instead the disruption of primary school classes, which I thus did not need to attend.

But my pleasure at this particular grève does not really come from missing work, which I actually quite enjoy and don't, anyways, have very much of.  Instead, it derives from the satisfaction of how routine and almost unconfrontational the strike was.  First, it's only going to be one day long.  There's quite a bit of this in France - the trains, the buses, the schools, will stop for a day, just to keep the government on its toes.  The whole thing is thus quite a bit more relaxing than a strike back home - there's no worrying about how much longer things will go on until the garbage gets picked up - you just have to wait out the day and things will go back to normal.  Second, the strike is optional.  Only about 30% of primary school teachers went on strike today.  Small French children still went to school.  Similarly, during recent SNCF strikes, between half and a third of all trains continued to run.  It all seems very reasonable.

I'm sure that I'm looking at French labour dynamics through rose-tinted glasses.  Longer, or even indefinite strikes probably do happen, which means that additional one-day strikes over political, as opposed to contractual matters, must get really annoying.  But today's strike, and the run-up to it, still had undeniable charm.  For the last week and a half, there's been a sign-up list on Ecole Rex's staffroom white-board.  For a long time, only one teacher was signed up.  Lunchtime conversation often followed the template "So are you striking?" "No, I have too much to do with my class."  Other teachers seemed to be waiting to hear from the school's director whether or not their joining the strike would be inconvenient.  And last week, special forms appeared, which teachers intending to strike had to fill out and submit to the Inspection (their employer) 48 hours before walking off the job.  Only last night did I get an email suggesting that, since there might not be any classes to teach, I shouldn't worry about showing up to work.

It all seems very satisfyingly French.