December promises to be agitated at the SNCF as the annual salary negotiations begin. A strike by controllers which forced the company to cancel 60% of its TGV and Intercités from Friday to Sunday. A movement that could continue until Christmas.
The first weekend of December is going to be very complicated for travellers. The controllers launched a strike movement from Friday 4 to Sunday 6 December, with a gradual resumption of traffic on Monday 10 December with 3 trains out of 4 to all TGV axes.
TGV traffic will be strongly impacted with 1 train out of 2 on the TGV Nord, 1 out of 3 on the TGV Est, 1 out of 4 on the TGV Atlantique, 1 out of 3 on the TGV Sud-Est, 1 out of 4 on Ouigo and 1 Intercity on 2
There will be no night trains during the weekend.
Internationally, the company expects normal traffic for Eurostar and Thalys, 1 in 3 TGVs to Switzerland, 1 in 2 to Germany, 1 in 3 to Italy and no traffic to Spain.
At the initiative of SUD-Rail, Unsa and the CFDT, which followed a collective of controllers created at the start of the school year, the weekend strike relates to wage demands, the progress of careers and, overall, a greater recognition of the specificities of the function by the management of SNCF Voyageurs.
The almost 10,000 SNCF on-board supervisors – the controllers – of whom nearly 3,000 work on the TGV and Intercités, have an essential function in terms of traffic and passenger safety, and the trains cannot leave without them. “In the journey of the traveler, the skipper is the only railway worker he meets. We find ourselves at the end of the funnel of all the problems“, explained to AFP Rénald Szpitalnik, elected SUD-Rail and controller on the TGV Paris-Milan. “The captains are the big forgotten of the equation while they are the showcase job of the SNCF!“
The captains have already filed strike notices for the Christmas and New Year’s Day weekends.
The management of SNCF Voyageurs regrets in a press release a maintained movement “while concrete and important measures have been proposed to the trade union organizations following several weeks of negotiations“.
This strike comes on the eve of the start of the mandatory annual negotiations (NAO), which must begin on Wednesday, December 7 at the level of the SNCF group. The CGT, SUD-Rail and CFDT called for a “unitary strike” that day.
With AFP
