Angry French rail workers storm headquarters of ruling party

PARIS, May 4 (Xinhua) -- French workers who opposed President Emmanuel Macron's reform of rail sector stormed offices of the ruling party "Republic on the Move" (LREM) on Friday in a further move to force the government to reconsider the reform, Le Parisien newspaper reported.

Chanting "it's going to explode" or "rail workers angry, we're not going to let ourselves go," about 100 workers entered the headquarters of Macron's party in Paris earlier on Friday "in a purely symbolic action to challenge LREM officials on rail reform," one of the protesters told the newspaper.

"We decided to show our dissatisfaction to the representatives of the president's majority who do not absolutely listen to rail workers," Patrick Belhadj, Secretary General of the CGT-Cheminots in East-Paris was quoted as saying.

Protesters, mostly from the CGT and SUD-rail unions later left the site in calm, and some of them had been briefly detained by police, the report added.

The country's labor unions started on April 3 a series of month-rolling nationwide rail strikes with a wave of two successive days out of every five days.

They planned 36 days of action for April-June period, a move that may paralyze the eurozone's second power and one of the world's top tourism destinations.

They seek to make French president reconsider his reform of the railway sector that targets to liberalize rail passenger services and impose new rules of recruitment for "a more efficient and unified" rail operator.

Besides, it proposed to scrap preferential terms of rail workers, including retirement on full pension at 52 years old, a decade earlier than other French employees.

Despite the public discontent, lawmakers, on April 17, approved the reform. Enditem