The secretary general of the CGT, Sophie Binet, asked Tuesday that a referendum be organized in France on the pension reform, before meeting Emmanuel Macron for the first time at the end of the day. A few hours before her first one-on-one interview with the President of the Republic, Sophie Binet assured France Inter that she was first going to tell him that “he has to come down from his tower. ‘ivory”.
“I hear with interest talk of a referendum and the first subject on which a referendum must be organized is the pension reform, because this reform is still not passing,” she added, assuring that ” would break the deadlock.” She also intends to talk to the president about “union repression”. “It’s going too far, we have reached a milestone in this return to school with a national leader of the CGT who is summoned for the first time before the police station for having organized the mobilization during the pension reform, it is a signal that is given at the highest peak in the state which is extremely bad,” she said.
Several thousand homes without electricity
The boss of the Energy branch of the CGT, Sébastien Ménesplier, is summoned at the beginning of September as a “legal person” to the gendarmerie. According to a leader of the CGT, this follows a power cut on March 8, at the height of the protest, in Annonay (Ardèche), stronghold of the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, and which had deprived several thousand homes of ‘electricity.
After long months of battle against the pension reform, the inter-union announced at the end of last week a call for mobilization on October 13, with in particular the watchword of increasing wages, in a context of high inflation. . The appeal follows in the footsteps of the European Trade Union Confederation, which provides for two mobilization dates, October 13 and December 13. Asked about this mobilization, Sophie Binet explained that the unions wanted to “obtain concrete progress because the situation is bad”.
“We continue to say that the pension reform is unfair”
“We ask that negotiations open in companies as well as in the branches and that they take place regularly, to take inflation into account”, added the general secretary of the CFDT Marylise Léon in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde. . “Our compass is that no collective agreement has minimum wages below the minimum wage. At the end of August, there are around 95, compared to 151 in May, which proves that the Union action makes it possible to change the salary scales. But there are still blockages”, lamented Marylise Léon.
The unions had met one last time before the holidays on June 15, to take stock of an unsuccessful six-month mobilization against the pension reform, which will come into effect on September 1. “We continue to say that the pension reform is unfair,” added Marylise Léon, but “we have no revenge to take on the government”.