The French Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, announced yesterday before Parliament that she was activating the legal procedure to force the reopening of the fuel tanks of the American group Esso-ExxonMobil and that its exhausted gas stations can be supplied. The measure implies forcing essential employees for the task to work, something that is only done in the face of a national emergency.
Borne has been forced to take this drastic step in the face of the continuation of a strike at the refineries that has been going on for three weeks and is causing an increasingly difficult situation for millions of citizens.
State intervention does not extend, for the moment, to the facilities and personnel of the French group TotalEnergie, also on strike, although Borne threatened to do so if necessary.
The labor conflict is due to the demand for a salary increase of up to 10% to compensate for inflation and to revert to the employees part of the extraordinary benefits of the oil companies this year.
Although some of the unions are more flexible and willing to compromise, others remain hard-line, most notably the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the once all-powerful union under the communist orbit. The CGT is not today what it used to be, but its affiliates, sometimes in key positions in the companies, have the capacity to impose a strike and block the negotiations. A senior union representative, Emmanuel Lépine, told France Info radio that if the government intends to force strikers into work at other companies, “I can guarantee it will be war.”
The so-called “requisition” of personnel is not an easy or immediate measure to apply. It is perhaps easier for fuel depots, as you only need to open the tap and let the trucks load the product, but it is more complex in the case of resuming work in refineries. There is always the possibility that the government’s coercive measure will be overturned by the courts, as happened in 2010, under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, in another refinery strike.
The CGT, which has suffered a bloodletting of affiliates, takes advantage of the opportunity to raise its head and show that it still has strength. Like the other unions, the CGT, led by Philippe Martinez, of a Spanish family, was totally out of the game during the yellow vests revolt, a spontaneous, grassroots protest movement that was born outside traditional structures.
