Guadeloupe strike on despite deal

Unions in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe have signed a deal to raise workers' salaries, but have not ended a five-week-long general strike. The agreement will see the wages of the lowest-paid workers supplemented with a 200-euro ($254) monthly payment. But union leaders said the strike would continue until France's government had addressed spiraling prices, which are far higher than on the French mainland. The strike has crippled the island and occasionally erupted into violence. Last week, union leader Jacques Bino was shot dead by rioting youths at a barricade in Guadeloupe's largest city, Pointe-a-Pitre. A similar strike has taken hold on nearby Martinique, where the situation has become calmer after two consecutive nights of riots. Both Guadeloupe and Martinique are full overseas departments of France, but prices on the islands are generally higher while wages are lower than on the mainland, and unemployment stands at 20%. Hundreds of police and gendarmes have been deployed from France to support local security forces and help restore order. Unions and employer groups on Guadeloupe signed an agreement on Thursday to pay a 200-euro monthly supplement to those workers earning less than 1,400 euros ($1,770; £1,250) a month. Other workers will see a wage increase of about 6%, though this will be negotiated separately by each sector, Henry Berthelot, secretary-general of the CFDT union, told the Reuters news agency. The French state will contribute half of the wage increase from 2009 to 2011. However, after the agreement, union leaders quickly turned their attention to other demands, such as the lowering of food and energy prices. "We have a meeting tomorrow afternoon with the prefect (local administrator) to continue the negotiations," the leader of the LKP union, Elie Domota, told the Associated Press. Asked if the general strike would now end, he said: "No." On Friday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted that "not everything has been resolved, but finally progress is being made". "I'll go to the French West Indies in a few weeks' time to scrupulously keep all the commitments I have made," he told the AFP news agency. "When you approach things calmly, when you honestly try to find the right solutions, when the issues are dealt with seriously, then that calms the situation down, of course," he added. The president also said that "the same causes of injustice, of feelings of injustice, exist in Martinique as they existed in Guadeloupe". "So we need to find ways and means of restoring dialogue, reducing tensions, and above all providing concrete answers to the problems our compatriots in the West Indies are experiencing," he said. "It is absolutely not right for prices to be much higher in the West Indies than in metropolitan France," he added.