It’s early morning at the bus depot in Ivry-sur-Seine. With around 150 buses scheduled to depart for the first shift of the day — mostly northward to Paris — things usually move at a breakneck pace. But not today — nor much at all recently. For over forty-three days and counting, workers here have been on strike over the government’s proposed pension reforms, leading to dozens of cancellations and delays every day.

Like others in the Paris metropolitan area, the Ivry depot bears the signs of a long and bitter struggle. Handwritten banners hang from the employee cafeteria reading “Depot on Strike” and “Immediate Withdrawal [of the government’s planned pension reform].” Under the gaze of supervisors and several police officers across the street, about a dozen strikers maintain the picket line, delaying but — in accordance with the law — not physically blocking drivers who start their routes. A stereo blasts contemporary pop and French hip-hop while supporters, many of them students, gather around a brazier to keep warm. According to union officials, between 30 to 40 percent of bus drivers scheduled to work Thursday morning (January 16) are on strike or on sick leave.

“We’re against this reform that’s going to make us lose a lot of money in our retirement,” says Jean, forty, a driver and veteran of six years’ employment at the Paris transit authority, who has been on strike since December 5. Like others, he declined to give his last name for fear of workplace repercussions. “But it’s not just for us, not just for the special pension schemes. We’re fighting for everyone, our kids, everyone.”

Known in French as the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), the Paris transit system is at the heart of France’s historically long strike movement. Along with the national rail network, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF), it’s seen one of the highest rates of walkouts nationwide — sending ripples throughout the rest of the economy and disrupting life as usual in the French capital. Both firms have powerful unions and cultures of workplace militancy, forged by decades of struggles. But their employees also stand to lose a lot from the reforms, which would merge all of France’s forty-two separate pension schemes into a single system.

The government recently announced a concession, scrapping a proposal to hike the earliest possible age at which most workers could retire from sixty-two to sixty-four. A small piece of the much larger reform package, the measure was designed to appease the moderate French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and would only take effect if unions agree to a separate set of cost-saving measures. Workers at Ivry are unimpressed.

“It’s not a concession,” says Jean, who, like many of his striking colleagues, doesn’t belong to a union. “We want the withdrawal of the reform because it’s an unfair reform. It’s going to push us toward a private-funded pension system. We want to keep the system like the one we have today with innovations — but not a private system. We don’t want to end up with an American system where you have to take out a credit card to get health care.”

Public support for the strikes remains impressively high, with a recent poll finding that 60 percent still back the movement. However, in recent days, the pressure to get back to work has intensified. Among others, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and CFDT general secretary Laurent Berger have called on the strikes to end. These admonitions have come with the usual chatter from talking heads about the supposed “privileges” of rail and transit workers. Under current law, they’re allowed to retire earlier than much of the rest of the population.

“It’s really shameless,” Jean says. “People who say that are making more than €10,000 a month. When a minister says that we’re ‘privileged’ with our salaries, we want to say, well, what does that make them then? I think they have more privileges, whether it’s in parliament, government, or high-ranking state officials.”