I confess: I can’t explain the Second Amendment to my French friends and colleagues. They understand the words –A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed– and what it means for gun ownership. But they tease or sermonize me when a troubled youth goes on a rampage at school or the Vice-President shoots his host in the face.

But I can’t understand how, in France, the right to strike towers above all others.
rerstation Monday night, around 7:40 pm, a commuter train conductor at the Maisons-Lafitte station got out of his train; a false alarm had sounded, and the alarm needed to be reset. A group of six hoodlums, reportedly drunk, abused and beat up the conductor.
Of course, this is terrible and wrong. The authorities are investigating, and with video surveillance at the station we can hope the hoodlums will be apprehended.
But the next morning –not at the break of dawn, but after the morning commute– rail workers at the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris stopped work in protest. All commuter traffic from this station (as well as two branches of the RER commuter train that do not pass through the station) and all traffic to and from Normandy ceased. The French railways physically closed the St Lazare station (the photo includes a blister-like entry by architect Jean-Marie Charpentier).
garestlazare
About 450 000 people use the St Lazare station every day. Hundreds of thousands more take the RER commuter train. Leaving these travelers and commuters in the lurch –the railroads did cobble together some alternative routings– seems wildly disproportionate to any grievance rail workers could have.
I’d have more sympathy for the strikers if they had given advance notice of their work stoppage, or if they expressed a fraction of their concern when a rail passenger is assaulted in a station, or if they had printed leaflets or posted to web site the reasons for their stoppage and a reasoned list of demands.
Regrettably, the stoppage was just an enhancement of a low-level grievance that has been going on for about a month.
By the end of the day, an arrangement was worked out with the rail workers, and the St Lazare station reopened.
But no one, in any forum, seems to have questioned the workers’ right to act as they did, or the equity of such action.