French railway workers fight Macron’s privatisation plans

This 26 February 2018 video about France is called ‘Arrogant and vindictive’ Macron under fire as rail workers threaten national strike.

By Ben Chacko:

Thursday, March 1, 2018

French ministers try to stave off rail strikes with investment promises

Unions gearing up for a month of action over Macron‘s attack on industry standards

FRENCH Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne tried to stave off looming rail strikes today with an offer to invest €10 million (£8.9m) a day in the network if workers swallow attacks on their pay and conditions.

“Nobody has anything to gain from a protracted strike”, she pleaded a day after four unions — CGT, Sud, Unsa and CFDT —

So, apparently even for the ‘moderate’ CFDT, founded as a Roman Catholic trade union federation and often acting as ‘yellow unionists‘, the Macron government’s plans go too far.

met to discuss joint strike action. They have warned of rolling strikes from March 12.

CGT secretary-general Laurent Brun says: “There is no doubt that it will take a month-long strike to get the government to back down. We will rise to the challenge.”

Plans unveiled by President Emmanuel Macron on Monday would end jobs for life on state railway SNCF, end pay rises based on seniority and reduce the value of pensions by making staff work longer before claiming them and removing various benefits.

He has indicated he will force the reforms through by decree, since they are unlikely to win parliamentary approval — a draconian tactic he used last autumn to ram through attacks on trade union rights.

Unions say Mr Macron is softening up the railway for privatisation, which he denies, but SNCF chief Guillaume Pepy admitted that the package was a bid to prepare for competition with the private sector.

Resisting the changes would be “an amazing leap backwards” when rival firms win the right to compete against it from next year, as they will, due to France’s requirement to introduce competition to the rail network under the EU Fourth Railway Package.

A report on the future of French rail delivered by former Air France CEO Jean-Cyril Spinetta on February 15 urged forcing a “new social contract” on rail workers while imposing large-scale redundancies as the public service is transformed into a “competitive business” tendering against others to win rail contracts, as happens in Britain.

Ministers say the current system is too expensive, though rail privatisation in Britain has actually increased public subsidies.

Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire says the government may write off SNCF debts “once we have transformed the status of railway workers.”

British government accused of covering up the ‘murky’ world of privatised rail. Train divers’ union Aslef criticised the Department for Transport for failing to reveal figures on the cost of subsidies to private rail operators: here.

Britain: ELEVEN MPs are calling for rail privateer Arriva to be stripped of its franchise to operate Northern Rail services, which they describe as being “in crisis”: here.

We can all see that rail privatisation hasn’t worked. Aslef’s annual assembly of delegates begins in Liverpool today. The union’s leader MICK WHELAN says that the decision by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling last week shows the case for bringing all of Britain’s railways back into public ownership — permanently — is now unanswerable: here.

Shut up about a ‘social Europe’. It was one of the Juncker Commission’s promises: the European Union would have a social pillar and as a result, everything would be different. If you follow the news, you’ll know that this isn’t what happened. The EU finds it tremendous that French President Emmanuel Macron is pushing the liberalisation of his country’s railways, with the workers as its first victims. Their terms of employment are to be ‘reformed’, for which read demolished. At almost the same moment, the national public broadcaster NOS reports that call centres in, amongst other places, Lisbon, are holding down costs by exploiting young Dutch people. A truly social EU would take some sort of action against this, but in Brussels all is quiet: here.