The trains could finally run without disruption during the end-of-year celebrations. The CGT-Cheminots and SUD-Rail unions chose, Monday, December 19, not to call the controllers’ strike for the Christmas and New Year weekends, while maintaining their notice in order to give everyone the opportunity to whether or not to join the movement.
“We have decided to leave our union tool available” to allow those who wish to go on strike, confirmed SUD-Rail, while the CGT also intends to give its members the opportunity to “getting involved in the process”.
Compensation and salary increase
The captains, official name of the controllers, gathered outside any trade union framework within the “national collective ASCT” (CNA), have been calling for several weeks for measures to improve their career development and salary increases. SNCF Voyageurs had proposed, following a round table on December 8, to increase the work bonus for controllers by 600 euros per year, part of which would be integrated into the salary in 2024, as well as an additional allowance of 600 euros gross per year. Other specific promotion measures have been put on the table in order to facilitate the career development of skippers.
After wanting to consult its members on Facebook to decide what action to take, the “ASCT national collective” has noted “many frauds and attempts to manipulate the vote” which led him to cancel the ballot and left it to the unions to survey their members.
The CFDT had still not made its position known on Monday, while the UNSA-Ferroviaire lifted its notice on Friday, considering that the proposals of the SNCF management were “of a very good standard”. SUD-Rail, which reports that its consultation “will not have made it possible to achieve a majority position”, all the same invites the management of the SNCF to “raise its proposals to allow the appeasement of the situation”.
No Eurostar on December 26
The situation will be much more tense under the English Channel. Eurostar trains, connecting Paris and Brussels to London, will not run on the English side on December 26. The Franco-British high-speed line will indeed be closed due to a strike called by the transport union RMT.
“We did everything we could to get access to the UK high-speed line on Boxing Day – as we have done on all other RMT strike days this year – and we made it clear to them the impact what it will have for those who have booked their trip »deplored on December 16 the director of operations of Eurostar, Bertrand Gosselin, specifying that no employee of his company will be on strike.
December 26, or Boxing Day, marks the start of sales in the United Kingdom. In a context of inflation which is close to 11% in the country and is cutting into the purchasing power of the British, strike movements are multiplying in many sectors, in particular the railways and health. A strike by employees of Network Rail, the public manager of the rail network, is scheduled from December 24 in the evening to December 27 in the morning at the call of the RMT union.