France, a country of generous vacations and frequent strikes, has once again found itself faced with two simultaneous realities, which has caused a weekend of serious inconvenience for tens of thousands of railway users and serious concern for the Government just over five months of the Olympic Games.
The protest by the train conductors has led to the cancellation of half of the long-distance services – the TGV, Ouigo and Intercity – just in critical days, when half the country is on winter school holidays. In Ile-de-France (Paris region) and Occitania they are in the middle of the break, and in several western and central regions the holidays are beginning. Those responsible for the state company, SNCF, acknowledged that 150,000 people with reservations have not been able to travel as it has not been possible to offer them an alternative solution. “We have failed them,” admitted Christophe Fanichet, director of the SNCF passenger service. An effort has been made to maintain trains to the Alps, so as not to ruin the ski resorts.
Without a conductor, a train cannot run, hence the cancellations. The main demand is for salary, an increase of between 150 and 200 euros gross per month. The management sees the demand as incomprehensible because it claims to have increased them by 500 euros in the last two years. Reviewers who begin their careers earn about 1,850 euros gross per month. The oldest ones reach 2,984 euros. But to these amounts we must add bonuses of up to 25% for holidays and night shifts.
Despite the high level of tolerance of the French population in the face of the inconvenience of continuous strikes, this time there is a feeling of fatigue because the situations are repeated. The Republicans (LR, right) have presented an initiative in the National Assembly to prohibit strikes in public services before and after school holidays, as in Italy, given the harm to families.
Insoumise France (LFI, radical left) maintains a radically opposite position. The head of the parliamentary group in the Assembly, Mathilde Panot, even encouraged people to strike before and during the Olympic Games if this had a positive impact on the groups demanding improvements in their sectors.
The scenario of strikes called at the last minute is one of the nightmares of the organizers of the Games and the Government. It is feared that this could happen in the companies that provide service at the two large Parisian airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, in garbage collection or other activities. An attempt has been made to defuse the conflicts, but doubts remain, for example regarding the Paris garbage dumps.
Last week, the newspaper Le Parisien described the new railway strike as “the social test before the Games” and warned of future risks. For the Government, the new crisis occurs shortly after the mobilization of farmers, who blocked highways throughout the country, an unrest that has not completely gone away, despite the concessions achieved, and could be reactivated before the international trade show. Agriculture, which opens next Saturday.
Regarding the Olympic event, the strikes are only one of the factors of concern, in addition to the terrorist threat and the delay in the development of some vital transport infrastructure during the competition days, such as metro line 14.