Posted on 10/22/2010 12:28:55 PM PDT by EBH
PARIS (AP) — The French Senate, pushed into an early vote, approved on Friday a hotly contested bill raising the retirement age to 62, hours after riot police forced the reopening of a strategic refinery to help halt growing fuel shortages amid nationwide strikes and protests.
In tense balloting after 140 hours of debate, the Senate voted 177-153 for the pension reform. The measure is expected to win final formal approval by both houses of parliament next week.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative government, keen to get the measure passed and quell increasingly radicalized protests, cut short the debate and voting process using a special procedure. Critics on the left dubbed the use of Article 44-3 of the Constitution a denial of democracy.
The tough stance by the government extended to strikes as French riot police forced a strategic refinery to reopen Friday, aiming to halt growing fuel shortages that have emptied gas pumps around the country and risked hurting industry.
The Senate debate lasted three weeks before it was short-circuited. Legislators — mostly opposition Socialists — submitted a staggering 1,237 amendments, but Sarkozy's conservative UMP party and its allies have a majority and dismissed nearly all of them.
The text now goes to a committee of seven senators and lower house lawmakers Monday...
Unions oppose a pillar of the reform and have staged months of strikes and protests that have boiled over into radical action and scattered clashes.
Sarkozy had ordered regional authorities to intervene and force open depots, accusing the strikers of holding ordinary people and the French economy "hostage."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Things are about to get very ugly.
wonder how our federal employees will react when they're told they can't collect til age 62 or longer....
how about there is NO pension for anybody to collect until age 62?... private or public?.....I'd go for it.
Coming to America soon but don't worry. Most adults in America who voted in all these benes for themsevles will be dead or retired by that point. Their kids will have to deal with it. Something else the kids can curse the current generation about.
“the reopening of a strategic refinery to help halt growing fuel shortages amid nationwide strikes and protests.”
meanwhile the hippies here refuse to demonstrate for the same thing.
It’s a sad day for a society when the government has to tell it’s citizens to get off their lazy butts and do some work for a change. And the citizens spend more energy protesting an honest day’s work than they would have expended in the work itself.
Tightening the belt never is pleasant especially if your goal is to bankrupt the system.
Oh, the madness of work!
Liberals hate it (see unions, illegals, social engineering, big government).
Benjamin Franklin
French people are just plain lazy.
My grandfather is 90 and he cant stop working. Mostly because he doesn’t want to!
Hell, the French still have their 42 days of paid vacation each year, don’t they?
Private pensions are no ones business by the people involved. Public pensions OTH should be subject to all the rules that the common people are subject too. The public officials should all be on SS, not separate pension funds. You would see some changes made in a hurry if this was the case.
Turn up the violence !!!
Private?
If a company wants to pay retirement to its employees at age 25, what's it to me?
“The protests even forced Lady Gaga to cancel her Paris pop concerts.”
OH NOOOOOOOOOO!
>>French Senate OKs Retirement Reform in Tense Vote<<
Well, that should calm all this down.
/s
;)
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