19. "A strike is almost like a nuclear weapon," said Jan Kaeraa Rasmussen of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions. "We need it to show that we are powerful, but we don't want to use it." A few days earlier, Christian Mahieux, an official with a French labor union, was helping to lead a protest march of rail workers down a Paris boulevard. "The right to strike is one of the fundamental rights we have," Mahieux said. "It's a form of resistance by citizens to show our dissenting opinion." And so these two union members from different corners of the European Union summed up their philosophies: To the Danes, the strike is a weapon of last resort; in France, it is a means of ___________. ¨ç survival ¨è disavowal ¨é expression ¨ê conference |