Emmanuel Macron is hoping to win where others failed by reducing railway workers’ benefits, part of a plan to reshape the economy and society.
PARIS — The soaring 19th century train stations that grace French cities are an iconic image of the nation. Even France’s vaunted high-speed TGV is more than a train; it is a symbol of French planning and ambition, a riposte to an American vision of individualism embodied in the automobile.
But if France’s young president, Emmanuel Macron, has made one thing clear, it is that he is not afraid to shake up France and take on its venerable institutions.
Now it is the railways’ turn.
Mr. Macron says he wants to erase the railway workers’ special status, which gives them more generous benefits than almost any other workers, including a guarantee of early retirement.
In doing so, he has set himself a new and formidable challenge in his expanding campaign to reshape France’s society and economy, which started last year with a law that made it easier for private companies to hire and fire workers, a near revolution for France.
But the railway workers are a public-sector work force, one of the most powerful in the country, with a chokehold on as many as 5 million riders daily. When they go on strike, the whole country feels it.
Most of the rail unions have already pledged to join a strike by public sector employees planned for Thursday to resist Mr. Macron’s proposals, which could be pushed through the parliament using a special procedure that avoids debate on the specifics.
The rail workers then plan a weeks of strikes starting in April that will be staged on a rolling basis — a two-day strike every three days.
Mr. Macron said in a recent exchange with a rail worker that he would not “break everything” but that “the world is not way it was before” and that the state-owned rail company, SNCF, and its employees “had to adapt,” like other French workers.
French rail workers’ current, ample benefits — including in some cases, the option of retiring at 52 — date to the first half of the 20th century, when many railway jobs involved hard, physical labor such as shoveling coal and clearing the rails of snow.
What Mr. Macron proposes in the name of containing costs and improving service is forcing one of the country’s last, but still powerful state-owned industries to treat its workers more like private-sector employees.
Others have tried to do so before, and failed spectacularly.
The last time a politician tried to make wholesale changes in the rail workers benefits was in 1995, when a center-right government under then-Prime Minister Alain Juppé sought cost savings. In response the rail unions went on strike and, after three weeks, Mr. Juppé had to withdraw his proposals.
Today, with Mr. Macron having already reduced private workers’ benefits, it may be more difficult for the railway employees to find sympathy from their fellow workers.
It is also not clear that the planned strikes will help the railworkers’ cause since many riders already feel frustrated by interruptions in service caused by breakdowns.
Mr. Macron has pledged to follow the railway plan with an overhaul of the unemployment system later in the year. Next year he intends to take on the French pension system.
His practical reason for making the rail reforms now is a European Union requirement that all members open their national train systems to competition by 2019.
Mr. Macron has seized on the deadline to push for a broader overhaul that, for new hires, would end advantages such as guaranteed jobs, automatic pay raises and generous social security benefits.
Other benefits, such as deeply discounted trips for workers and their families, could remain in place.
The railway unions are staunchly opposed to the Macron plan. Philippe Martinez, the head of the C. G. T. union, the largest among rail workers, bristled at what he perceived as critical comments from the government about the railworkers’ benefits and the description of them as employees with special “privileges.”
“Is it a privilege to work night shifts and weekends?” Mr. Martinez asked rhetorically.
The government is intent on “picking a fight” he said last week after meeting with Prime Minister Édouard Philippe.
Unions also argue that erasing the special status for new employees will end the payments that fund all railway workers’ retirement plans.
Their fear, as well as that of many on the left, is that the government’s next step will be to privatize the system, much as Britain has done with largely negative consequences: higher prices, frequent delays and periodic train cancellations.
Mr. Philippe, the prime minister, said the government has no intention of privatizing the rail system. But he and others say that the state-owned rail company must be updated if it is to hold its own with the coming competition from private companies.
For Mr. Macron changing the employment terms for railway workers appears to be part of a larger crusade to push French workers into the 21st century.
“There is a symbolic dimension to the reforms and an economic dimension,” said Yves Crozet, an economics professor at the University of Lyons, who has studied transportation systems.
The symbolic, he said, has much to do with Mr. Macron’s ambition to remake the French labor market and show that he can do what previous politicians have been unable to: break the grip of the unions, which for decades have stymied efforts to control costs and reduce jobs.
“Mr. Macron wins if he resists the strikes,” Mr. Crozet said.
The economic dimension has to do with the far more challenging project of reducing the cost to the government of public transportation, while maintaining its quality.
Although the French train system remains in the top tier of European railways, its rating has dropped to number seven, just behind Germany, according to the most recent Boston Consulting Group report that evaluates and compares European railways.
The French rail system is both heavily subsidized and deeply in debt, to the tune of 55 billion euros, or about $68 billion. About two-thirds of the debt is attributable to the construction of the high-speed lines or TGV, which were extremely expensive to build, and have drained money from more prosaic commuter lines.
The situation is particularly bad for those living in the greater Paris suburbs and surrounding areas, known as the Ile de France, who use trains to get to work
“We know there needs to be more investment in the Ile de France,” said Joel Hazan, a partner in the Paris office of the Boston Consulting Group and one of the authors of the report. He added that there needs to be more investment overall.
Yet it is far from clear that changing rail workers’ benefits will make much difference in the near-term, analysts say.
This year, for the first time in years, the government-run rail company turned a profit, suggesting that efforts to tighten operations even without getting rid of the workers special benefits were having some impact.
