(Updates throughout with details)
PARIS, Oct 7 (Reuters) - President Nicolas Sarkozy, facing a further wave of strikes, announced plans on Thursday to adjust a reform of France's pension reform to ease the impact on women who stopped work to raise children.
A day after railway unions called rolling strikes, Sarkozy's office issued a statement saying the change to a pension reform bill currently before parliament would cost 3.4 billion euros, financed by a rise in capital gains tax on property sales.
Critics dimissed the move as a smokescreen.
Unions at the state railways are calling open-ended strikes from Oct. 12, as are unions at Paris's urban transport netwrok and in the energy sector, adding to national strikes and street protests already planned that day.
Sarkozy has vowed not to back down on the essentials of the pension bill, chief among them a gradual increase in the minimum retirement age to 62 from 60 by 2018. The age at which people can retire on a full pension is set to rise to 67 from 65 by 2023.
French Labour Minister Eric Woerth told the Senate, where the bill is being debated, that about 130,000 mothers would benefit from the amendment, which would postpone for five years the entry into force of the change in full pensionable age in the case of women who reared three children.
The pension bill, the flagship reform of Sarkozy's five-year term, seeks to balance the finances of a system where pensioners rely on taxes paid by working people, a regime that that is under increasing strain as the "baby boom" generation born after World War Two retires.
It has already been approved by the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, and started its way through the Senate upper house this week.
Jean-Pierre Bel of the opposition Socialists slammed the measure as disingenuous.
"This announcement has been staged to make it look as though something has changed," Bel said.
"The government is embarrassed and can see that the protest is not waning, so they've decided over breakfast at the Elysee to deploy what to me is more of a smokescreen than any genuine progress on the issues people are protesting about," he said.
In a local but related dispute, dockers at the largest oil terminal in France. Fos-Lavera, kept dozens of tankers waiting offshore in a strike that entered its 11th day, but attempts to start strikes at nearby oil refineries met limited success.
Workers at just one out of four French refineries close to Fos-Lavera voted to strike in response to a call by the CGT union, CGT officials said. (Reporting by Brian Love, Laure Bretton, Muriel Boselli, editing by Mark Trevelyan)