Garbage piles up and tarnishes Paris luster
Tons of trash on sidewalks as pension strike continues
Elaine Ganley
PARIS – The City of Light is losing its luster with tons of garbage piling up on Paris sidewalks as sanitation workers were on strike for a ninth day Tuesday. The creeping squalor is the most visible sign of widespread anger over a bill to raise the French retirement age by two years.
The malodorous perfume of rotting food has begun escaping from some rubbish bags and overflowing bins. Neither the Left Bank palace housing the Senate nor, across town, a street steps from the Elysee Palace, where waste from the presidential residence is apparently being stocked, was spared by the strike.
More than 5,600 tons of garbage had piled up by Monday, drawing complaints from some district mayors. Some piles disappeared early
Tuesday with help from a private company, the TV station BFMTV reported.
Other French cities are also having garbage problems, but the mess in Paris, the showcase of France, has quickly become emblematic of strikers’ discontent.
“It’s a bit too much because it was even hard to navigate” some streets, said 24-year-old British visitor Nadiia Turkay. She added that it was “upsetting to be honest” because on “beautiful streets ... you see all the rubbish and everything. The smell.”
Turkay nevertheless sympathized with striking workers and accepted her discomfort as being “for a good cause.”
Even the strikers themselves, who include garbage collectors, street cleaners and underground sewer workers, are concerned about what Paris is becoming in their absence.
“It makes me sick,” said Gursel Durnaz, who has been on a picket line for nine days. “There are bins everywhere, stuff all over. People can’t get past. We’re completely aware.”
But, he added, President Emmanuel Macron has only to withdraw his plan to increase the French retirement age “and Paris will be clean in three days.”
Strikes have intermittently hobbled other sectors including transport, energy and ports, but Macron remains undaunted as his government presses ahead with trying to get the unpopular pension reform bill passed in parliament. The bill would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 for most people and from 57 to 59 for most people in the sanitation sector.
Sanitation workers say two more years is too long for the essential but neglected services they render to all.
“What makes France turn are the invisible jobs . ... We are unfortunately among the invisible people,” said Jamel Ouchen, who sweeps streets in a chic Paris neighborhood.
The stakes will be high Wednesday for both the government and striking workers. Unions are organizing their eighth nationwide protest march since January, and the third in nine days; the action is timed to coincide with a closed-door meeting of seven senators and seven lower-house lawmakers who will try to reach a consensus on the text of the bill. Success would send the legislation back to both houses for voting on Thursday.