A nationwide strike in France on Tuesday caused widespread disruptions in citizen traffic services and cancellations and delays of up to two hours at Paris's two airports.

According to official figures, some 30 percent of railway staff and teachers, 23 percent of electricity workers and between 15 and 30 percent of post office staff, as well as some hospital staff and government office workers joined the one-day strike.

Some 880,000 people according to organizers, 340,000 according to the police, marched Tuesday in the planned 150 demonstrations in France.

Paris was served with only a third of suburban train services. Passengers were also to dealing with cancellations of bus and subway system, while around half of regional and TGV inter-city fast trains ran on schedule, according to the state-owned SNCF rail company.

People living in other cities such as Marseille and Bordeaux were less lucky, for most public transport there was out of service.

France's civil aviation authority predicted 175 short and medium-haul flights would be cancelled from Paris Orly airport in south Paris and 212 from Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport in north Paris.

The strike was called by five of the country's biggest trade unions to protest Dominique de Villepin's central-right government labor policies and to push for pay rises in public sectors.

French Socialist, Green, Communist and Communist Revolutionary League parties backed the strike by publishing a statement saying that action was necessary "to break with the reactionary and ultra-liberal (economic) logic of the government."

The strike came in the wake of Corsica crisis over the planned privatization of a state-owned National Corsica Mediterranean Company (SNCM), which ensures ferries between Corsica and north Africa and ports on the Mediterranean coast.

Regarding the strike, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin responsed quickly. "I'm listening to the messages that the French send to us. We'd like to answer to their worries and aspirations", he said before the French parliament on Tuesday.

(Xinhua News Agency October 5, 2005)