Strikes, political activism and protests have fueled the power of the French labor movement through time

Just how powerful are France’s labour unions?

Paris, France – A few days into the European football championship, Irish and Swedish fans in green and yellow football shirts stood bewildered amid the crowd at a Parisian train station. They had unexpectedly discovered a French speciality: a railway strike in opposition to a labour law reform, enacted after four months of social unrest, had…