Paris:- Saturday, 19. October 1996:- When I worked on a small town weekly newspaper, I used to hate writing the past week's news just before the deadline, because for the readers and myself, it was 'old' news. Even though everybody bought the paper anyway; it was still hard to write the stuff.

Last week, on Tuesday, it seemed as if all of Paris' public sector workers were go on a one-day strike, and this was 'news' for Metropole because the strike could have affected public transport in Paris. We put out a 'flash-news' bulletin on Tuesday and another on Thursday morning about it.

By late Thursday, it appeared as if transport in the Ile-de-France was not all that seriously affected. Most métro lines in the city were operating nearly normally, and except for the notorious line 'C' of the RER, all other regional transport was moving passengers. And here is where we and the rest of the Paris press guessed wrong.

Instead of going through the hassle of trying to get to work, many commuters in the suburbs took the day off and regional shopping centres were reported to be crammed to the rafters. Automobile traffic was lighter than on a Sunday on the approach roads to Paris, and except for the area of the demonstration on the right bank, traffic flowed more easily than normal in the city.

My guess is that memories are still vivid from last year, when the 10. October one-day strike came and went - but was followed by a general bottom-up public service-worker series of strikes that quickly escalated into a country-wide transport shutdown - at the end of November and on in to the middle of December - which also caused a serious dent in Christmas shopping plans. With this in mind, a lot of people went shopping on Thursday - just in case?

The Strike Score

TV news seemed to favor reports from Marseille or Bordeaux, and its coverage of Paris was mainly focused on the CFDT leader, Nicole Notat's problems - under her leadership this large centre-left union is tending to agree that changes are necessary and inevitable - but this is considered to be too close to the government's line - and Madame Notat got pushed around a bit and heard the chant, "Notat, Juppé, même combat," and 'All together, without Notat.'

Paris' score for marchers has been estimated at between 40 and 100,000. The Ministry of Public Functions estimated that an average of 35 percent of civil service workers took part in the strike nationally, as against 57 percent a year ago. Police experts set the Paris score at 23,000.

The Marseille police estimated 20,000 - which makes the Paris estimate unlikely - and the organizers there claimed 40,000. Bordeaux had 11,500 according to police, and 25,000 according to the organizers. The total for France is given as 400,000, but I don't know whose figure this is.

The tiny group that got the ball rolling against the 'Plan Juppé' last year, the train workers at the depot of Sottville-lès-Rouen, went out by 88 percent on Thursday, and joined an estimated 10 to 15,000 marchers in the streets of Rouen.

Two of the major union leaders have called for further actions in November, but on two different dates. And that sort of sums up this years' situation: the unions disagree and are reluctant to unite. But remember, this is the top-down view and it may be totally at odds with the view from the bottom - as it was at the beginning of last years' major events.

World Day for Overcoming Extreme Poverty

This is the name that has been given by the United Nations to 17. October - which has been marked in France for the past 10 years as the 'Journée Mondiale du Refus de la Misère.' Organised in France by the 'ATD Quart-Monde,' with a demonstration at the Parvis du Trocadéro, which was to have begun at 14:00.

The cause got swamped by other events and I did not see it mentioned on the evening TV news, nor could I find any mention of it in Friday's newspapers - but I remind readers that I do not watch all TV news, nor read all Paris dailies.

The number of people in extreme povrty and those 'excluded' from French society is estimated at five million persons. This is a disputed figure, and the national statistics unit, the Insee, put out a figure of 1,4 million in 1993. The homeless alone in France are estimated to number between 200 and 600,000 individuals - naturally they are hard to count if they live nowhere. Between December 1995 and March 1996, 'Restos du Coeur' distributed 50 million free meals, and the 'Secours Catholique' numbers the 'situations of poverty' at 1,6 million.