Touching the electrical network is no. The government raised the tone, Tuesday, January 24, against the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), which threatens to cut the current or to intervene on the meters to lower the bills of certain customers, within the framework of the reform of the pensions, strongly contested by the union.
The Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, encouraged people to file a complaint against the power cuts that the CGT is threatening to implement to obtain the withdrawal of the pension reform. “It’s not legal”said the minister on RMC, warning of the risk of ” to break “ certain industrial installations if the electricity is cut off. “We can be against a bill, we can demonstrate, we can talk about it strongly on television sets, but intimidation is unacceptable”she repeated.
Limited voluntary cuts have already taken place in the past week. The Renaissance MP for Lot Huguette Tiegna thus announced that her office, in the center of Figeac, had been deprived of electricity on Thursday during the demonstration against the pension reform.
“The cut occurred from 2 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., only in the street where there is my permanence, the sub-prefecture, shops, including a pharmacy and a bakery. It was the permanence that was targeted, the CGT had announced that they were going to carry out actions “she told Agence France-Presse. “It could have endangered human lives, people on respirators, for example”. She said she wanted to file a complaint, just like Enedis, which confirmed the cut.
“It is not up to the CGT to lay down the law”
On Thursday, two other voluntary and limited cuts had been identified by Enedis, affecting in particular a thousand customers in an industrial zone in Massy (Essonne) and buildings of the prefecture, the departmental council, the regional council, the town hall and the academic inspection in Chaumont (Haute-Marne).
“It is not up to the CGT to lay down the law” more “to parliamentarians”hammered, for his part, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, on Tuesday on Europe 1, after the CGT-Energie raised the possibility, in Marseille, of carrying out a “manipulation on the meter” so that bakers can benefit from significant reductions on their bill.
“We have the technical capacity to do so, without endangering either property or people”told AFP its secretary general, Renaud Henry, without giving more details on how to proceed, which would however “completely illegal”. The Mayor judged such measures “unacceptable”.
First union in the electrical and gas industries branch (IEG), whose special pension scheme would be abolished, the CGT Mines-Energie warned Monday that it would not forbid anything “until withdrawal” of the project.