HUGE CROWDS JOIN FRENCH STRIKE!

Huge crowds have taken to the streets in France to protest over the handling of the economic crisis, causing disruption to rail and air services.

The head of France's biggest union said a million workers had rallied to demand action to protect jobs and wages.

But despite the show of public support, the strike appeared to be falling short of the paralysis forecast by unions.

Regional trains and those in and around Paris were hit, and a third of flights from Orly airport were cancelled.

Forty per cent of regional services were running, train operator SNCF said, and 60% of high-speed TGV services. Three-quarters of metro trains were running in Paris.

Paris's second airport was heavily hit by the strike, but flights out of the larger Charles de Gaulle hub were experiencing only short delays, AFP news agency said.

Economic woes at heart of strike France takes strike in its stride

Schools, banks, hospitals, post offices and courts were also hit as workers stayed at home. Officials said just over a third of teachers and a quarter of postal and power company workers were on strike.

Overall, some 23% of the country's public sector workers are thought to have joined the action, which was called by eight major French unions.

Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT union, told AFP more than a million workers had taken part in the strike, making it impossible for French President Nicolas Sarkozy to ignore their concerns.

In Paris, police said some 65,000 protesters had joined a march from the Place de la Bastille towards the centre of the city.

Earlier, some 25,000 to 30,000 people rallied in the city of Lyon, according to organisers and police.

In Marseille, organisers and the authorities disagreed, with the former putting the number of demonstrators at 300,000 but the police estimating 20,000 had taken part.

The protests are against the worsening economic climate in France and at what people believe to be the government's poor handling of the crisis.

Opposition Socialist Party leader, Martine Aubry, said people were out in the streets "to express what worries them: the fact that they work and yet cannot make ends meet, retired people who just can't make it [financially], the fear of redundancies, and a president of the Republic and a government that just don't want to change policy".

According to a 25 January poll by CSA-Opinion for Le Parisien, 69% of the French public backs the strike.

"I'm tired and frozen after waiting half-an-hour on the platform," commuter Sandrine Dermont told AFP as she arrived by train in Paris" But I'm prepared to accept that when it's a movement to defend our spending power and jobs. I'll join the street protests during my lunch break," she said.

Last summer, Mr Sarkozy boasted that these days when there is a strike in France, nobody notices, says the BBC's Emma-Jane Kirby in Paris. But this time, our correspondent adds, the strike will hit hard.

Many people are angry French banks were given a multi-billion euro bail-out while floundering industries and businesses were offered far less help.

With unemployment looking likely to hit 10% by next year, the French are now looking for assurances from their president that he will drop his programme of cost cutting reforms and instead turn his attention to relaunching the ailing economy, our correspondent says.

"We want to show how the people are dissatisfied with the situation at the moment," Thierry Dedieu of the CFDT general workers' union told the BBC.

People had the feeling they were paying for a crisis they were not responsible for, he added.

But earlier in the week, French Finance Minister Eric Woerth condemned the strike organisers, accusing them of scare-mongering during a time of economic uncertainty.

"There are other ways to make oneself heard than striking," he said. "Blocking a country, preventing transport from working, bothering people when they are still extraordinarily worried and fearful of the future, is adding fear on top of fear, worry on top of worry."

BBC NEWS REPORT.