This is not the revolution that all his adversaries dreamed of, nor even the end of a cycle. But the results of the professional elections for the territorial public service, which fell on the evening of Thursday, December 8, confirm the decline in influence of the Force Ouvrière union within the city of Marseille and especially in the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis ( AMP), two of its historic strongholds.
While the campaign was marked by several cases involving current or past executives of the union, FO nevertheless managed to keep its position as the first territorial union. In the metropolis, where it is the most heckled, it retains this place only for a breath. About thirty votes separated him, at the time of the last counts Thursday around midnight, from the FSU, his main rival, out of a total of nearly 4,000 voters. With this result, the two organizations each obtain five seats on the territorial social committee (CST). With 19.42%, the UNSA, which is progressing compared to 2018, takes three seats, while the CGT (11.16%), stable, only takes one.
In the city of Marseille, where the ballot took place for the first time by electronic voting for eight days, FO saw its result fall by almost 2% but retained a fairly wide margin over its pursuers. He comes first with 41.72% of the votes in the Territorial Social Committee. The CGT takes second place to the CFTC-CFE-CGC alliance (18.13% against 17.52%) which has held it since 2018.
FO “is doing pretty well”
But the decline of Force Ouvrière en voix has important consequences since it deprives the union of its absolute majority within the CST. Out of fifteen seats, FO now only holds seven, compared to eight previously. It is therefore potentially possible for the municipality to have decisions validated without the agreement of a union which, until then, knew how to assert its essential position. “Given the pots and pans that we dragged during the campaign, the coalition of other unions against us and what we were promised after the election of a new municipal team, we are doing quite well”relativizes Patrick Rué, the secretary general Force Ouvrière-Territorials.
For the historic boss of FO in Marseille, the decline of his organization is due to “two reasons” : “a poor score among category A civil servants and electronic voting which has bothered a lot of field agents and favored executives”. M. Rué sees the difference in the participation rates of the two categories as proof of this: 71.8% among A against 48.30% among C categories.
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