Dockers to strike Le Havre January 4, Marseilles January 11

FRENCH dockers are planning two strikes at Le Havre on Thursday January 4 and at Marseilles on Thursday January 11 in their continuing resistance to the privatisation of container terminals nationwide
Dockers have already refused night work and overtime. The Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) union said its members will stage 24-hour walkouts because the government did not create thousands of waterfront jobs it allegedly promised to do.
The government vowed to create 30,000 new jobs when it unveiled plans in 2008 to transfer container terminal operations from port authorities to private stevedores reported Newark`s Journal of Commerce. Dockers staged three months of rolling strikes in 2008 but called them off after the National Assembly approved the reforms.
The CGT union said the government is spending billions bailing out banks and subsidising car sales but not on creating new port jobs. The government says it wants to transfer 2,000 crane operators and maintenance workers to private operators to boost competitiveness and container traffic to 10 million TEU in 2015 from 3.6 million in 2007.
The five other publicly owned ports affected are Dunkirk, Rouen, Nantes-Saint Nazaire, Bordeaux and La Rochelle