While the trucks came to restock at the Total Loire-Atlantique refinery, it was in turn paralyzed by a strike.
By Charles Guyard
© DAMIEN MEYER / AFP
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Juntil now, everything was working at full speed, but since this Wednesday morning “no longer a single drop of fuel leaves here by pipeline, wagon, boat or truck”, decreed Fabien Privé Saint-Lanne, the CGT delegate of the Donges refinery, thus becoming the sixth in France to have shut off the valves. After taking part at the start of the movement at the end of September with three consecutive days of strike, the site near Saint-Nazaire then broke away from it by resuming shipments. But the desire to requisition the staff, expressed on Tuesday by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, marked the immediate return to the battle, mainly motivated by a sharing of wealth considered unfair by the trade unions.
In a multinational beating profit records, the payment of 2.6 billion euros in dividends to shareholders, announced at the end of September, went particularly badly with employees who “no, do not earn 5,000 euros per month”, assures again M. Privé Saint-Lanne. “I am surprised that we are asking about the remuneration of workers and not that of the CEO of Total, which has increased by 52% this year and granted himself 90,000 shares. I don’t know his working conditions, but I know those of the people I represent: they have a life expectancy seven years lower than the national average, because they constantly breathe chemicals or work at night. »
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Limited risk of shortage in the immediate future
Voted 80% by the morning teams then 75% by those in the afternoon, the strike is therefore set out again in Donges. Until when ? A general meeting scheduled for Thursday at 1:30 p.m. will decide on the follow-up, and in particular on a possible hardening which could take the form of a total shutdown of the refinery. A heavy hypothesis which would seriously compromise the “return to normal in the course of the coming week”, mentioned yesterday by Emmanuel Macron on France 2. And for good reason: knowing that it takes a good ten days to relaunch a stopped site , the ballet of tanker trucks would not be about to resume here. Should we suddenly fear a shortage in Pays de la Loire, a region rather spared until now thanks, precisely, to the maintenance of activity at Total in Donges? In the immediate future, this scenario seems excluded, because here, in addition to Total, another depot also handles shipments. This is the French company Donges-Metz (SFDM), a structure which includes, in particular, four storage areas in France (Loire-Atlantique, Essonne, Marne and Meurthe-et-Moselle), and which is majority-owned by the state.
Since Wednesday morning, its parking lot has not been empty in front of the eight supply lines. “Today there are a lot of people,” notes Stéphane in front of the long line of trucks. Usually, we have three quarters of an hour of waiting, here it’s more like an hour and a half. As they can no longer load elsewhere, they all come to where there is product! This is the case of Marie (assumed name) who landed at the SFDM after seeing the gates close in front of her at Total, a few kilometers away. “I arrived there at 5 a.m. and we were told that they were on strike, so I came here”, testifies the young woman before leaving to deliver her precious cargo in Mayenne. It now remains to know the extent of the available reserves. “Maybe we’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll be told that there’s nothing left, we’ll see”, evokes, laconic Jean-Louis, another driver. It must be said that the dozens of trucks that followed yesterday all made two to three rotations during the day, carrying, each time, nearly 40,000 liters of fuel throughout the West.