Garbage tarnishes Paris luster as pension strike continues

The City of Light is losing its luster with tons of garbage piling up on Paris sidewalks as sanitation workers were on strike for a ninth day Tuesday. The creeping squalor is the most visible sign of widespread anger over a bill to raise the French retirement age by two years.

The stench of rotting food has begun escaping from some rubbish bags and overflowing bins. Neither the Left Bank palace housing the Senate nor, across town, a street steps from the Elysee Palace, where waste from the presidential residence is apparently being stocked, was spared by the strike.

More than 7,000 tons of garbage had piled up by Tuesday. Some of that was seen being tossed into white trucks from a private company along the protest route ahead of a planned march Wednesday, the third in nine days. Police said the clean-up was for security reasons.

Other French cities are also having garbage problems, but the mess in Paris, the showcase of France, has quickly become emblematic of strikers' discontent.

"It's a bit too much because it was even hard to navigate" some streets, said 24-year-old British visitor Nadiia Turkay after touring the French capital. She added that it was "upsetting, to be honest," because on "beautiful streets ... you see all the rubbish and everything. The smell."

Turkay nevertheless sympathized with striking workers and accepted her discomfort as being "for a good cause."

Even the strikers themselves, who include garbage collectors, street cleaners and underground sewer workers, are concerned about what Paris is becoming in their absence.

"It makes me sick," said Gursel Durnaz, who has been on a picket line for nine days. "There are bins everywhere, stuff all over. People can't get past. We're completely aware."<...