Emmanuel Macron is “exceeded”. Once again, you might say. After his bouts of temper on the slowness of the vaccination against the Covid, on the shortages of gasoline or on the solitary outings of ministers deemed too ambitious, it is the strike at the SNCF, on the way to spoil the Christmas holidays of some 200,000 French people, who paid the price for presidential anger. Inadmissible, said the Head of State, during the Council of Ministers on Thursday, December 22. This time, the government was not the direct target of the lightning of “Jupiter”, but the unions and the softness of the SNCF took for their rank. “We have a company that is used to tolerating the strike”he thundered.
To avoid, in the future, the blocking of trains during the holiday season, the executive phosphorus. Extending the time required to file a strike notice is, among other things, a track under study. It would require a bill that would amend the Minimum Service Act 2007. “We see that an essential public service like the train is being hit almost overnight and has a harsh, unnecessarily and unfair impact on the lives of many of our fellow citizens. It invites us to think about the framework to ensure continuity of access to public services in all circumstances.explained the spokesperson for the government, Olivier Véran, at the end of the Council of Ministers, regretting “that the social dialogue is sometimes misguided” to serve as“standard for individual struggles”.
Such a device, which would significantly restrict the ability to strike, cannot however be put in place in the short term. It is also unlikely that the government will embark on such a project, capable of making the unions jump, before completing the thorny pension reform, which will be presented on January 10, 2023.
In the immediate future, what to do, apart from sharing the rage of users? Ordering requisitions would be illegal, warned the Minister of Transport, Clément Beaune. And “it is not the government which negotiates with the strikers, it does not don’t reverse everything. It is the SNCF, which is a public company, which is responsible for negotiating with the unions “, recalled Olivier Véran.
“Uberization of social dialogue”
Back from an international tour that took him from the Blues locker room in Qatar to the shores of the Dead Sea, in Jordan, for a conference on the stabilization of Iraq, passing by the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, for the Christmas of the troops, the Head of State is all the more annoyed that he thought he was going to have a smooth end to the year. Wasn’t the presentation of the pension reform postponed from December 15, 2022 to January 10, 2023 in the hope of a more peaceful consultation with the trade unions and the opposition? Las, it was counting without the risk of“uberisation of social dialogue” observed by Clément Beaune.
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