Chris Farrell arrives as a medical clown in Oyonnax

France Press agency

Pensions: In Paris, litter boxes are piling up and controversy is swelling

A table on the verandah to take advantage of the mild weather.. in front of a row of rubbish bins on the sidewalk. In Paris, the pile-up of rubbish continues to rise, as does the tone between government and city hall, on the eighth day of the garbage collectors’ strike against pension reform. A week into the renewed strike, which began on March 7, Rue Montorgueil is not ‘at a standstill’, far from it: at lunchtime, this pedestrianized commercial thoroughfare in the heart of Paris bustles with locals and tourists alike. But here and there, piles of trash and unassembled bins come up to remind passersby of the current social movement. “Do you realize, if pests got into your pastry, what would you do?” adds the employee. “It’s disgusting, there are mice everywhere,” says Aphaia Samios, sitting with her mother near an imposing garbage heap. This Sentiers resident says she has “saw people who can no longer go home” because of piles of rubbish. “What’s starting to bother me is the smell,” said her mother, Ann Di Pico. On Monday, 5,600 tons of waste remained uncollected, according to the town hall, a volume that is increasing every day. The situation varies according to the sectors, the most affected are the ten areas that are guaranteed to be collected by the agents of the municipality hall. But even in those run by private providers, collection has been disrupted since the three incineration plants in Ivry-sur-Seine, in Issy-les-Moulineaux and Saint-Ouen are blocked. In Ise, from 6:00 in the morning, under drizzling rain and in the midst of waste, a hundred demonstrators laid the flag of FO and CGT in front of the site, burning 1,600 tons of waste in normal times. per day. As a result, the collected waste is redirected to about fifteen outside locations, according to AFP, the urban household waste agency, Sectum. – “I will live poorly,” – the strikers remain determined to continue their work until at least Wednesday, the day of examination of the text in a joint commission. “When you’re behind the trash can breathing sloppy stuff, you have a lot of occupational diseases, cancers. The work is hard.” Muriel Jaeremink, a petite woman of 56, 20 of whom works as a garbage collector, recounts falls from truck belts, frequent sweeper tendinitis or, like her, drivers of small machines “with rotten pendants.” The CGT states that garbage collectors and drivers can currently claim retirement at 57 without gratuity, which age has been pushed back to 59 if the reform is adopted. And for the sake of the revaluation index, too, the garbage collectors are mobilized. Their career development is negotiated directly with the City Council. “They found the money to send us to the front line during Covid, which they told us today in Hildago that ‘they don’t have any money’,” comments Nabil Latre eche. – Agents’ request? In the city council “in solidarity with the social movement”. This was not a completely surprising position because the Paris mayor encouraged the agents to go on strike “, addressed to France Inter, the Minister of Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, citing the agents’ requests among the measures that could be taken. The opposition calls for LR Rachida Dati to “create a minimum service for garbage collection” and, in the near future, “to advocate merger companies.” Asked by AFP on Monday, Anne Hidalgo reiterated her “full and complete support for this social movement”. She indicated that other cities were affected by the garbage collectors’ strike, citing Le Havre, the city of Edouard Philippe … the former prime minister of Emmanuel Macron. al-pyv/bfa/mpm