French unions up stakes in new pension protest call

PARIS (Reuters) - France's labour unions called on Friday for another wave of protests and strikes in October, raising the stakes in a showdown with President Nicolas Sarkozy's government over unpopular pension reforms.

Minutes after French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said there was no question of a government climbdown, union leaders meeting in Paris called another protest for Saturday, October 2, and a follow-up day of strikes and protests on Tuesday, October 12.

Clearly heartened by large street protests for the second time in a month on Thursday, unions issued a statement saying: "Our organisations warn the government of the consequences that ignoring this profound expression of anger could incur."

The response to the prime minister, said CGT union leader Bernard Thibault, was a "firm and defiant, 'No.'"

Unions are on a war footing in other parts of Europe as governments slash spending to dig their way out of debts run up during the global recession of 2008-09, the worst since World War Two.

Unions in Spain have called for the first general strike in eight years for September 29, when the Brussels-based European Trade Union Confederation, an umbrella body, says it expects 100,000 to join a union rally against hardship and joblessness.

Shortly before the French unions threw down the gauntlet, Fillon ruled out any retreat on the pension reform, which is making its way through parliament and would raise the retirement age to 62 from 60 in 2018.

"Government in France also means knowing how to say 'No'. We will not withdraw this reform because it's necessary and reasonable," Fillon told members of Sarkozy's UMP party at a conference in the southwestern city of Biarritz.

The Thursday protests put around three million people on the streets according to unions, about one million according to police. Work stoppages disrupted schooling, forced cancellations of up to 50 percent of flights at major airports and also halved many of France's rail services.

Sarkozy has made the pension reform a centrepiece of his legacy. He is widely expected to seek re-election in 2012. To back down would leave his reform in tatters.

Opinion polls suggest a majority of French people support the strike and believe the reform bill is unjust even if many believe a rise in pension age looks increasingly inevitable.

Analysts have so far argued that the unions are likely to fail in their quest, because of that sense of inevitability and the belief that a climbdown could destroy Sarkozy.

Some of the smaller French unions have argued in vain for rolling strikes to ramp up the pressure but the big unions have so far resisted, prompting some commentators to say that their leaders are not willing to push things to the brink.

(Additional reporting by Emmanuel Jarry in Biarritz and John Irish in Paris; Writing by Brian Love; Editing by Michael Roddy)