By fixing two new appointments with the street, the unions do not intend to slow down and still hope to be able to make the government back down on its reform.
At the end of a sixth meeting with the street on Tuesday, the employee organizations announced at the start of the evening two new days of mobilization, this Saturday March 11 and the “day of the joint committeeplanned for the following week, according to a press release from the Intersyndicale. The objective for the thirteen members of the intersyndicale will, once again, be to bring together as many French people as possible in the hope of seeing the government suspend or even cancel its pension reform project.
However, no quantified target was set by the union executives present, unlike this day of March 7. The goal was to “put France on hold», and to gather in the streets more of the world than on January 31st. That day, 1.27 million French people marched, according to figures from the Interior Ministry. “The bet was successful”, welcomed Marylise Léon, of the CFDT. However, in many sectors, the number of strikers remains in line with previous days. “We knew we wouldn’t block the whole country“, tempers Pascale Coton, vice-president of the CFTC.
This time, the intersyndicale was not content to give new days of mobilization but directly challenged the head of state. At a press conference, she vilified the “silence of the President of the Republic which constitutes a serious democratic problem, and which inevitably leads to a situation which could become explosive.“And to add:”Six huge mobilizations have received no response, this cannot go on any longer (…) In responsibility, the Intersyndicale will send a letter to him (Emmanuel Macron, Editor’s note) asking to be received urgently so that he withdraws his reform.»
A claim that reacted on the side of the Élysée. Tuesday evening, the entourage of the President of the Republic indicates that “the door to the executive has always remained open.” “This is what the President of the Republic notably recalled in his recent expressions on the pension reform, during his trips alongside the French at Rungis or at the Agricultural Show”, we also continue from the same source.
If the dates of mobilization remained unknown, the will of the centrals to continue the fight was not one. The latter want to put in a new effort as the reform arrives in the final parliamentary stretch. Tuesday at the very end of the afternoon, the Senate also began the long-awaited examination of the pivotal article of the pension reform project pushing back the retirement age to 64 years. “We are entering two crucial weeks», Estimates Yvan Ricordeau, national secretary at the CFDT.
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Base pressures
The great mobilizations are therefore not abandoned but they no longer constitute the only weapon which the unions have seized upon. Without calling for a general and renewable strike, the confederal staffs are now willingly letting their activists take part in this process. Several sectoral inter-unions have thus taken the plunge, as among the railway workers, where the CFDT is a stakeholder.
Other federations have even chosen not to wait for the green light from other centers to start their own movement. This is the case of several branches of the CGT such as the ports or the energy, which have called for a renewable strike and actions “punch“. Among them, targeted cuts, blockages or even filtering dams.
The great unknown remains that of the support of public opinion, for the moment largely won over to the unions, but which could quickly turn around. However, several branches have announced that they would not persist in the balance of power if they found themselves lonely. In the rail sector, for example, Unsa has warned that it “will analyze as soon as March 7 and every day the rate of strikers (…) to decide what to do next».
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