On said the unions in bad shape. Yet it is they who hold the upper hand in mid-October with the dispute in the refineries, which presents a paradoxical aspect: the number of sites concerned by the strike has decreased since the signing, at ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies, of majority agreements involving CFDT and CFE-CGC. The conflict, however, threatens to spill over because the CGT, FO and the FSU call, Tuesday, October 18, for a day of interprofessional strike for the defense of wages and the right to strike.
The moment is interesting because it dramatically signals the return to a kind of French normality after the state parenthesis in which the country has lived since March 2020. For more than two years, the Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, seemed to make rain or shine by skillfully playing on the windfall of subsidies that the “whatever the cost” policy authorized him to commit. It began by massively supporting companies and employees immobilized by the Covid-19 epidemic by committing 170 billion euros in public aid.
Then, when, at the end of the pandemic, fueled by the war in Ukraine, strong tensions appeared on energy prices, it set up a tariff shield of up to 47 billion euros to limit the impact of these increases on the portfolio of the French. His obsession was to avoid, in full recovery of inflation, the return to the indexation of wages on prices, which had contributed to the loss of competitiveness of French industry during the decades 1970 and 1980.
Crisis climate at TotalEnergies
Anxious to pursue a tax policy favorable to supply, Bruno Le Maire also encouraged TotalEnergies to grant a rebate on the price of fuel to defuse the debate around the taxation of superprofits. All these dikes were shattered during a conflict that summarizes the contradictions of French economic policy: with a public debt that exceeds 111% of national wealth and interest rates that are rising again, the French state cannot do everything. To secure its own financing, it must quickly give back the hand to companies, which have become accustomed to holding out the begging bowl at the slightest firedamp but remain annoyingly tense on their pile of gold when the economic situation serves them.
Negotiations at TotalEnergies took place in the open in a climate of crisis which could have been avoided if the company had been more attentive to its employees and aware of the political impact of the amount of the oil rent which generated $10.6 billion in first-half profits.
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