Barthélémy Philippe with AFP // Photo credits: Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP 2:14 p.m., February 13, 2024, modified at 7:18 p.m., February 13, 2024
The controllers want to be heard: the CGT and Sud Rail have filed a strike notice from Thursday to next Monday. A hard blow for vacationers since it is a cross-country weekend for travelers from zone C and zone A. This concerns more than a million people. The SNCF must unveil its traffic plan tomorrow morning.
The CGT and Sud-Rail are calling for a strike for the weekend of February 17-18, in the middle of the school holidays in zone C (Ile-de-France) and at the start of those in zone A (Bordeaux, Lyon, Grenoble…). For the moment, Unsa has not filed a notice and CFDT-Cheminots has lifted its notice. According to union sources, 60 to 95% of controllers declared themselves strikers. The unions criticize management for not having heard their two demands. The first demand being for the early departure of retired controllers to compensate for the arduousness of the profession, the second being for the increase in their work bonus.
“Management does not make a counter-proposal”
“The management refuses to put forward any figures and refuses to even consider the idea of increasing the work bonus. The demand is several hundred euros per month. The management is not making a counter-proposal” , reports Stéphane Boulade, at the microphone of Europe 1. To try to avoid the movement, management had nevertheless decided to pay an additional bonus of 400 euros in March for railway workers, revalued the residence allowance for employees living where the real estate market is in tension, agreed to 3,000 additional promotions, decided to create 1,100 additional jobs, including 200 controllers, said Jean-Pierre Farandou.
“It’s complicated to say yes to everything, because it’s also the boss’s role to say what is possible and what is not,” added Jean-Pierre Farandou. He particularly insisted on the need for “social coherence” between the different professions within the group, believing that “it is not because we have the capacity to annoy the French that we should obtain more”. As a disrupted weekend approaches in the stations, “I really regret that the SNCF cannot be completely there”, he said, promising that “all cities will be served”. “If today I manage to convince a controller not to strike, that’s 500 more French people who can go on vacation,” he explained. The SNCF must communicate its traffic plan on Wednesday morning.