It’s starting to get messy. Here, a big social unrest and a strike that spreads oil, there sometimes very annoying operating incidents for users … A few months after the effective start of the first transport networks resulting from the opening up to competition in the Island -de-France, the hiccups multiply on this market which opens. The process will last almost twenty years. It began this year with the Optile bus networks in the greater Parisian suburbs, it will continue with the RATP buses (2025), the SNCF suburban trains (from 2023 to 2033), the trams (2030), and will end by metro and RER in 2040.
The first big pitfall is this strike which began in the bus networks of the operator Transdev (a subsidiary of the Caisse des Dépôts) in Seine-et-Marne, which has spread to around ten depots and has just entered in its sixth week. Ile-de-France Mobilités (IDFM), the organizing authority for transport in the capital region, chaired by Valérie Pécresse (Libres!), Deemed the situation sufficiently encysted to decide to appoint a mediator, Monday, October 11, during his board of directors. The former president of RATP and La Poste Jean-Paul Bailly will lead “A mission to bring together points of view” between the strikers and the management of Transdev, in order to find an agreement where the company has not succeeded.
Mr. Bailly will also have to propose “Recommendations for taking social issues into account in future calls for tenders”, explains IDFM. Because social conflict is directly the result of the switch to a competitive system. It all started with lot 18, a bus network in the Melun and Fontainebleau region. Transdev was already the operator there within the framework of the Optile system before the competition (the contracts were awarded by mutual agreement). Following the call for tenders, Transdev succeeded itself, but with a new organization of work, resulting from a basic agreement negotiated with the central unions of Transdev but which made employees jump. in the field.
Suddenly degraded working conditions
“We tasted it all August, says Wynnessa Merabet, SOUTH union representative at the Melun depot. For drivers, the hourly amplitude has been reduced from 7:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. or 12 p.m., with time paid differently depending on whether it is considered actual work or not. But, in the event of a traffic jam or delay, you end up driving a bus and being paid 50% because you are outside your effective working range. And that’s without counting the end of holiday vouchers and meal bonuses. “
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