Collapse of Rail, Subway Strike Is a First Success for Sarkozy

President Sarkozy of France is on the verge of a breakthrough in his ambitious plan to wean his country off the restrictive working practices he believes stand in the way of national prosperity.

Yesterday, the strike of rail and subway workers that has crippled France for nine days was clearly crumbling, as workers began returning to work in large numbers and union branches conceded that support for the dispute is collapsing.

"We think a dynamic of return to work has begun," Julie Vion, a spokeswoman for France's state-owned railroad network, SNCF, said.

Union leaders began to concede defeat yesterday. "We have to face reality. Since yesterday's negotiations, things have changed. The strike is no longer the solution. The strike strategy is no longer winning," a leader of the Sud union representing Paris underground railway workers, Philippe Touzet, said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

The collapse of support for the strike by individual rail workers marks the first success in what Mr. Sarkozy considers the key goal of his presidency, the abandonment of expensive entitlements and special conditions for public sector workers, including generous early retirement and pension benefits for half a million rail workers, which he believes make France uncompetitive.

Managers for SNCF announced yesterday that 42 out of 45 rail union committees have voted to abandon the national strike that has frozen the country's economy, and will return to work without delay.

SNCF said 540 out of 700 of their high-speed TGV trains were running normally yesterday. They predicted rail services would continue to improve Friday and would be almost back to normal by Saturday.

Top executives for RATP, the Paris metro subway system, said they expected 70% of trains on most lines, 75% of buses, and 80% of trams to be running as normal Friday.

Rail union leaders conceded that their members "should be heading towards a return to work," but suggested that other forms of industrial action may take the place of strikes.

"According to initial returns from the general assemblies, it should be heading towards a return to work. We're heading towards a suspension" of the strike, a member of the powerful CGT union, Daniel Tourlan, said in Marseilles yesterday.

He threatened other forms of protest rather than the strike, which crippled the nation's centralized transport system. "It's only the form of action that's changing. The determination of the rail workers is intact," he said.

Mr. Sarkozy has kept aloof from the negotiations between rail network managers and the unions and has largely refrained from commenting on the strike, which has proved enormously unpopular with French commuters.

His solitary intervention was to condemn sabotage to the high-speed railroad, urging that the culprits who damaged rails and electrical connections, thereby endangering passenger safety, be punished with "extreme severity."

Instead, the president has left Prime Minister Fillon to front his government's efforts to bring the strike to a swift end while offering the prospect in negotiations of compensation for some of the rail workers' lost privileges.

On the table are salary increases and a top-up scheme for pensions to replace job security and retirement for workers as young as 50, instead of the nationwide standard of 65. Under the proposed reforms, workers would have to work for 40 years to qualify for full pensions, compared with 37.5 years now. Negotiations will resume Monday.

Mr. Fillon praised the "responsible attitude of the principle unions" at a meeting of French mayors yesterday and welcomed the "patience" of the French people. Finance Minister Christine Lagarde puts the cost of the dispute at $594 million a day in lost business.

The collapse of the strike "looks like a victory for the government and a green light for more structural reforms in France," an economist at BNP-Paribas in Paris, Dominique Barbet, told Bloomberg in an e-mail.

However, the new pay and conditions for rail workers proposed by the government may be more than anticipated when they are fully disclosed at the end of negotiations expected to be completed by December 18.

When the rail strike is settled, Mr. Sarkozy must confront widespread opposition to his education reforms, where he has passed laws offering more autonomy to educational institutions to improve tuition standards and increase the amount of private funding in colleges.

The proposals have been welcomed with strikes and protests by France's students, who have historically played an important part in national opposition to government policies.

Forty-four out of France's 82 universities were disrupted by student protests yesterday and seven were shut down. About 2,600 students from the University of the Sorbonne in Paris, the cauldron of student protest since the national strike of workers and students in 1968, and others marched in the streets yesterday.