Strikes disrupted trains, caused airline delays and created transportation havoc across France yesterday as public-sector workers walked off the job over a highly contested plan to reform the pension system.

　　About 40 cities were affected by the strike, which began hours before French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was to personally open a parliamentary debate on the pension plan reform.

　　An average of one in three trains, including high-speed locomotives that link the nation's major cities, was running around France. However, air traffic was spared the massive cancellations caused by previous strikes because the main air traffic controllers' union stayed on the job. Delays were expected, the civil aviation authority said.

　　While approximately 60 percent of subways were running in Paris, bus service was at just 30 percent. In the southern port of Marseille, there were no subways and only scattered tramway service, and only 8 percent of the city's buses rolled out of their depots yesterday morning. In Lyon, France's second-largest city, subway, bus and tramway service was down sharply.

　　Garbage piled up in Marseille and Bordeaux with sanitation workers in their eighth day of a strike in both cities. Marches were planned in Lyon, Marseille and other cities around France.

　　Postal workers also took the day off, like teachers who have sporadically skipped class since April.

　　It was a critical day for the government of the center-right prime minister who has vowed to push through his plan to reform the retirement system insgroupsto keep it afloat. Thousands of amendments have already been filed.

　　The government has promised to deal firmly with teachers who refuse to return to work to administer the crucial baccalaureate exams for final-year high-school students. The exams start tomorrow.

　　The pension reform plan would increase the number of years employees must work to get full benefits. Public sector employees who now work 37.5 years to qualify for full benefits would have to work 40 years, like the private sector, by 2008. The number of years for all workers would be raised to 41 by 2012, and to 42 by 2020.

　　Without the reforms, the government contends there will be a US.4 billion shortfall by 2020.

　　Only two unions have accepted the planned changes.