French unions assail beleaguered reform minister
Published: Sep 3, 2010 23:53 Updated: Sep 3, 2010 23:53
PARIS: France's trade union bosses said on Friday that the country's labor minister, increasingly plagued by an influence-peddling scandal, was no longer fit to defend a controversial reform of France's pension system.
Raising the pressure ahead of nationwide strikes next week, Francois Chereque, head of the powerful CFDT union, said Labour Minister Eric Woerth should no longer serve as lead minister on the biggest reform of President Nicolas Sarkozy's 5-year term.
"It's no longer possible to work with Eric Woerth," Chereque told Europe 1 radio. "The Eric Woerth problem is beginning to overshadow the real problem, the reform."
Woerth has been dogged for months by revelations from a family feud surrounding the fortune of France's richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt and funding of the political party of President Sarkozy.
Woerth, who recently stepped down as treasurer of the UMP party, on Thursday publicly acknowledged having intervened to help Bettencourt's wealth manager receive France's prestigious Legion d'Honneur medal.
He brushed off Friday's attacks, telling a business congress near Paris he was "120 percent" mobilized on the pension reform, where his role is chiefly to shepherd draft legislation through parliament before the end of October.
"I am obviously totally focused on the pension reform and have been since last April, and there's no reason why that should change," the minister said.
Sarkozy has an eye on elections in the first half of 2012 and is expected to reshuffle his team in late October.
As France prepares for strikes and nationwide protests over government plans to raise the retirement age to 62 from 60, Woerth has come under intensifying pressure from opposition politicians and now the trade unions.
Opposition Socialist party members renewed their attacks on Friday, days before Woerth has to head up defense of the pension reform bill in parliament.
"Eric Woerth's position is no longer tenable," said Francois Hollande, a member of parliament who formerly headed his party.
"It's impossible to defend his own case and the reform (of the pension system).
The leaders of France's two most powerful unions, the CGT and CFDT, had until recent days given the Bettencourt scandal and Woerth's related travails a wide berth, but the tone has shifted dramatically.
Chereque of the CFDT union joined forces with CGT labor union leader Bernard Thibault to challenge Woerth's capacity to represent the government on pension reform, in a newspaper interview published on Friday.
Unions convening the Sept. 7 strike - which they say will disrupt everything from public transport and schools to telecommunications - say a government offer to relax rules on people who perform arduous labor, hold multiple pensions or started work young is not enough.
