The Facebook page of the National Collective ASCT – for “commercial train service agent”, or “controller” in everyday language – shows three little monkeys: the deaf, the dumb and the blind. But the legend specifies that thanks to social networks and the mobilization of the group, all that is over. The controllers decided to make themselves heard. The management of the SNCF and the travelers will experience it from Friday 2 to Sunday 4 December. They go on strike and the movement will be very followed: 80%, according to the unions. However, for safety reasons, a train cannot run without a captain.
Major disruptions are therefore announced on the TGV and Intercités: 60% of the trains will be canceled. Only one in four trains will run on the Atlantic axis and the Ouigo, one in three on the TGV Est and Sud-Est lines, one in two on the TGV Nord and the Intercités. There will be no night trains during the weekend.
We must also expect disruptions in the TER, because the movement does not only affect national lines but a whole profession. There will also be less frequency on foreign lines: no traffic to Spain, one in three trains to Italy, one in two to Germany.
An “independent and very upbeat” collective
While everyone was preparing for the December 7 strike announced by the CGT, SUD-Rail and CFDT unions, on the first day of the annual wage negotiations, the revolt of the controllers took the direction by surprise. She was however predictable. Train captains have been talking to each other for several weeks on a Telegram loop – 670 members – and on their Facebook page, a group of 2,922 members, reserved “only to ASCT” and premiered on September 27. There are 3,000 controllers for the TGV and Intercités and 10,000 in total, if we count their colleagues on the regional trains.
The collective wants to be “apolitical and non-unionized”and say “to work for the recognition of [son] job “. It is specified in the rules defined by the administrators of the Facebook page that “the ASCTs don’t give a damn about trade union squabbles”. The movement was born from the field, like the “yellow vests”. “This collective is independent and very upbeat”, observes Olivier Armand, of the UNSA-Ferroviaire. The unions saw it emerge in the fall before the professional elections, but could not recover it.
The collective still had to accept the help of representative trade union organizations to engage in dialogue with management and launch the famous social alarm procedure, which, since the Sarkozy law on minimum service, must open a dialogue before the strike. . This request for immediate consultation was submitted at the end of October by SUD-Rail, the UNSA and the CFDT. The CGT has kept its distance, even if the CGT controllers are in the collective. This undoubtedly cost him votes in the last elections, where his score rose to 32.44%, against 34% in 2018, while SUD-Rail gained 1.5 points to 18.67%, to become number one. on the southeast axis of the TGV. This is where the collective was born.
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