Union sabotage

last updated 8 January 2015

Paris

French trade union activists sabotaged power lines this week to protest government plans to privatize the utilities. The resulting power outages caused mayhem in Paris, as trains and subways ground to a halt and half a million passengers were stranded for hours. The communist-backed CGT, the main union for utility workers, threatened more outages, saying the government was trying to rush through laws that would change Electricité de France and Gaz de France from state agencies into private companies. But union spokesman Frédéric Imbrecht said the outages would be “targeted,” not general. “We aren’t desperadoes,” he said. “We aren’t going to plunge Paris into darkness.”