Tourists wishing to avoid the gloom of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain with an Easter break in Paris were left disappointed yesterday.
A week-long strike by museum workers shut down the Louvre and Orsay museums, as well as the Arc de Triomphe and parts of the Chateau de Versailles. There is
a strong chance that the action will continue throughout this weekend.
Union leaders seemed to be unhappy at the state of talks they held with the Ministry of Culture yesterday.
The past week has shown that only a handful of picketers is enough to shut down a tourist attraction. The strike is over the implementation of a 35-hour working week, but unions are demanding the problem of staff shortages is addressed first. Twenty per cent of rooms in the Louvre are shut at any one time because of a lack of guards.
Disruption on the railways continues after two weeks of strikes, and this week mid-wives and local transport-workers have also downed tools in search of better pay and conditions.
The mass lay-offs at Marks & Spencer and Danone, the French food giant, have added to the gloom, along with a decline in predicted financial growth for this year from 3 per cent to 2.6 per cent. "France has the blues again," Alain Duhamel, the political commentator, said yesterday.
- INDEPENDENT
