French taxis rolling again after slowdown strike cripples traffic in France
February 7, 2008
On January 30, for the second time in a week, thousands of French taxi drivers parked their cabs in the Place de la Republique in Paris while others drove at a snail’s pace, clogging highways all over France and wreaking havoc on people’s schedules.
Operation Escargot (Operation Snail) had traffic ground to a halt in parts of Paris, Marseille, Toulouse and Strasbourg as taxi drivers gathered at key points, blocking roads and driving at a crawl to cause maximum disruption.
But a week later, on Feb 6, Alain Estival, president of the taxi union FNAT, has announced the end of the taxi protest, with the French government having pledged not to adopt wholesale the proposals of the Attali report on the deregulation of the taxi profession. Alain Estival made this announcement to journalists after more than two hours of discussions with advisers of Prime Minister of France, Francois Fillon, in Matignon.
“One can say that today, the conflict between the 55,000 taxi drivers and the government is finished”, he added, “The government is ready to listen to us and will do all with us”, he said, specifying that a delegation of taxi drivers would be received Thursday in the Elysee Palace, the headquarters of President Nicolas Sarkozy. In an official statement issued later, Francois Fillon stressed that the goal of the government was “not to deregulate but to better regulate” the taxi situation in France.
A spokesman for the government admitted that the taxi drivers had some legitimate concerns vis-à-vis the Attali report. Sarkozy pledged that the government would work with taxi drivers to ensure that there were no losers in whatever agreement they came up with.
The January 30th strike was in response to a report released by a panel commissioned by President Nicolas Sarkozy to find ways to boost France’s stagnating economy. The Attali Commission’s report was publicly released on January 23, 2008 with hundreds of proposals - one of which urged deregulating the taxi sector. Sarkozy said he supported the idea, agreeing that it is often difficult to get a taxi in Paris and other cities, and that such a move could create thousands of new jobs. Sarkozy said on Jan. 23 that he would follow most of the recommendations in the report to ‘free the forces of growth’.
What the Attali Commission’s report proposes is to liberalize the taxis to put a total of 50,000 to 60,000 cabs on the streets of Paris and its nearest suburbs. A national federation of taxi drivers is up in arms about this, saying that the change would dilute their earning power. So they did what any self-respecting French citizen would do: they went on strike.
The government plans would be a “catastrophe for our profession,” said Alain Estival at the time.
As of today, there are around 45,000 taxis in France, a little fewer than 16,000 of which are in Paris. A quota imposes a maximum number of taxi licenses to be distributed in Paris. This number is supposedly based on the needs of the population of Paris. But everyone knows it can be difficult to find a cab available in Paris—nearly impossible at rush hour or at any time if it is raining. When one does finally show up, cabbies often refuse to take fares that are not going in his direction, or whose journey will take him past his quitting time. Frustrated riders find that it is usually a sellers’ market.
Even the President of France is not immune. “Paris is the only city in the world where you just cannot find a taxi,” Sarkozy was quoted as saying.
There are considerably fewer cabs in Paris today than there were in the 1920s, because of the strict quotas on new licenses the drivers imposed themselves and that they have refused to budge on for years. Currently there are 15,900 taxis in Paris. The number has barely changed since 1937, when they were capped at 14,000.
Today, a taxi driver works an average 70 hours a week and makes around €7.63 per hour. Much of this goes to pay off the exorbitant fees they pay for their license. Licenses are supposed to be issued free, but because of the quota, there is now a 17-year-wait for a free license to drive a taxi in Paris. Otherwise, new drivers must pay a retiring colleague 185,000 Euros [$263,000 dollars] to assume his license. And the price is even higher that Paris in Montpellier, Nice or Marseilles.
“It is a question of making it so that these professions function better and that they meet the needs for the users better”, said Prime Minister Fillon.
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