More than 7,000 tonnes of foul-smelling rubbish and waste continued to pile up in Paris, blocking doorways and pavements, as refuse collectors extended their nine-day strike for at least another five days in protest at Emmanuel Macron’s plan to increase the retirement age, reports The Guardian.
With bin lorries grounded at depots and at least three waste incinerators in the Paris area at a standstill, the national government and the capital’s socialist-run city hall were engaged in a bitter standoff over rotting debris in the city.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, instructed the Paris police chief to make city hall force bin collectors to break their strike and go back to work. But the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said that while the city was working on its own solutions for urgent cases, it supported the strikes against pension changes.
The deputy mayor in charge of waste, Colombe Brossel, said any demand to force strikers back to work would be “an attack on the constitutional right to strike”.
Rubbish collectors and drivers opposed their retirement age being raised from 57 to 59, the CGT union said.
Macron’s proposals to raise the general retirement age from 62 to 64, and increase the number of years of work required to claim a full pension, have resulted in two months of protests and cross-sector strikes. The government hopes parliament can vote on the proposals on Thursday.
Rubbish has piled up in about half of Paris’s arrondissements since 6 March, as municipal teams went on strike but some private contractors continued to work. Bins were also overflowing in Antibes on the Mediterranean coast, where warm spring weather caused pungent smells, and in other cities including Rennes and Le Havre.
In the 14th arrondissement in southern Paris, Caroline Chesnay stood in her furniture shop looking at the pavement outside, which was almost totally blocked by a towering pile of bin bags spewing pizza boxes, banana skins, drink cartons and food waste. “Soon it’s going to look like the leaning tower of Pisa – by Saturday customers won’t actually be able to open the door,” she said. “It’s a nightmare. I’m afraid there will be rats soon. First we had Covid, now the plague. I’m losing income. I just want this to be cleared straight away. It’s a fire risk. Soon it will be spreading right across the street, blocking cars.”