AF will be on strike on 9-12 september.
SNCF will be on strike on 12 september.

Holidays are over. Back to normal.

Thanks for the heads up. Good thing we won't need the train that day.

That's why we fly United instead of AF from SFO.

Stu Dudley

This is worth reading: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36387492

It should also be noted that France has the lowest number of unionized workers in the world in the "developed" countries -- just 8%.

Therefore many strikes are announced all though the year, but most of them are completely unnoticed (except by the media) because they have absolutely no impact.

Frankly, I generally pay no attention to strike announcements here anymore, but please, I hope that the rest of you do because it makes transportation and other things so much nicer when a lot of people refrain from activities because they are afraid of strikes.

Afraid of strikes??? Yep - I'm afraid if my flight on AF for Sep 9 could not depart SFO until sometime after Sept 13. I was "stuck" in Paris for 2 additional nights in about 2013 when AF went on strike. Fortunately for us, we're headed to Italy on Sept 11 next week instead of our "usual" trip to France in September.

Stu Dudley

Well last 2 strikes that pi... me off Er affected me were when the AFflght captains decided they needed more money.
They cancelled several planes and I was left to wait 4 hours when I had woken up at 4 30. If swearing could kill I would have been a lass murderer.
Second time was when flight captain of Luft decided they needed more money. So I ended up travel 6-8 hours by train to reach Muenchen. I have no more love for German captains than French ones.
SNCF strikes tend to be smoother now.

I've survived strikes that cut back service for RER and then SNCF trains. But no fun. Sure, it is an "adventure", another "challenge". But if I want extra stress I can get it back home.

Other countries to avoid because they have more strikes than France according to the Nationmaster statistical site: Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Spain, Norway, South Korea, Ireland, Australia, Italy.

France is in 10th place. The United States is in 11th place.

I can't even remember the last US airline strike. We had a local Safeway strike about 20 years ago, and I saw a few guys at a local construction site with signs about some "unfair" labor practices. Does Nationmaster include this local construction & local Safeway strike in it's tally - with equal weight as a national airline strike???

I understand Luftansa has more airline strikes than AF. We got caught in a Luftansa strike about 15 years ago and had to depart Geneva 1 day early to catch our United flight from Frankfurt to SFO.

I read someplace that France had 16 air traffic controller's strikes last year. We've experienced many of those - but we've always been lucky & caught the only flight to CDG to BOD while others were sleeping in CDG waiting for any flight available. I even reserved a rental car & made a hotel reservation for someplace halfway between CDG & BOD in case the flight we had boarding passes for was cancelled.

Stu Dudley

We've also experienced an ATM money strike in about 2000, and a gas strike in 2001 that impacted us while we were in France. There was some kind of strike near Aubenas last year that shut down the N102 we were driving on so we had to get off the N102 & take smaller roads.

I don't think I've experienced any strikes in the US that has affected me. There was an air traffic controller's strike in the Reagan years - & he fired all the controllers.

Stu Dudley

Yikes! Thank goodness we will miss the strike by a couple of days.

Thank you for the heads up.

The Nationmaster site apparently counts the number of man hours lost from strikes in the various countries. Obviously, most people don't care about coal mines being on strike for years and things like that. Only the concerned employees do.

France has a "minimum service" law that prevents things like transportation strikes being 100%.

The worst strike I ever experience in France was the transportation strike in 1995. Frankly I ended up enjoying it very much, but then again I didn't have to worry about picking up kids from school of things like that. It became so extreme that army vehicles were requisitioned to transport people to and from the suburbs, and all of the bâteaux-mouches, vedettes parisiennes and others carried people up and down the Seine free of charge, probably inspiring the Batobus in later years. Office hours were at will, so I would arrive around 6:30 a.m. with a colleague who had a car who lived nearby. Sometimes we would leave together and pick up hitchhikers anywhere along the route to move them along. It was a fantastic period for meeting people. Other times I would take a boat from Beaugrenelle to Châtelet and walk home almost to Porte de la Chapelle, or sometimes just take the RER D from Châtelet to Gare du Nord and walk from there, because strangely enough, the SNCF was almost not on strike.

I hoped that it would happen again some day because I liked having my ordinary schedule perturbed and I also discovered all sorts of streets in Paris that I would never have seen otherwise. But no, 1995 was the very last hard strike for transportation in Paris -- 22 years ago -- and yet people still worry about it.

Every day is precious when one is on vacation, kerouac.

And the unexpected can lead to something marvelous.

Yea - like spending the night in an airport 6,000 miles from home.

Stu Dudley

I did that in Bombay with my mother. She told me in the middle of the night "If you can avoid going to the restroom, please don't go. I think the women have been playing basketball with sanitary napkins." It was one of the highlights of the trip.