Invited to the microphone of France Inter, Estelle Brachlianoff indicated that the group specializing in the treatment of waste and water kept seniors and that hardship was the main problem.
The CEO of Veolia, a group specializing in waste and water treatment, insisted on Saturday on “the challenge” of taking into account the hardship of the work, implying that there was an effort to do on that side. She was speaking three days before an inter-union mobilization against the government’s pension reform project.
“An employee who goes down into the sewers to clean them with a respirator mask is not considered today as a painful job”, was surprised Estelle Brachlianoff, general manager of Veolia at the microphone of France Inter in the program ” We don’t stop the eco”. At Veolia, “we can see that that’s more the issue, rather than keeping seniors,” added Estelle Brachlianoff, when asked about the disputed pension reform project. In her group, which employs 55,000 people in France, “one is not old when one is 55 or 60 years old”, she said. “At Veolia, we keep seniors”.
“It shows in our age pyramid,” she noted. “But we have a lot of blue collar workers and the main problem is the difficulty,” she said.
Taking into account the arduousness of certain trades among the negotiation avenues
The mobilization of January 31 is supported by the eight main French public and private unions against the government’s project. The deputies must seize Monday in committee of the disputed text. The project provides for a lowering of the legal retirement age from 62 to 64, an acceleration of the extension of the contribution period and the gradual abolition of most of the special schemes still in existence, including those of the RATP and electricity and gas industries.
Among the avenues of negotiation mentioned to try to find a way out of the conflict are the employment of seniors, better consideration of cut-off female careers, of those who started working at age 20 or of the arduousness of certain trades.
A one-stop-shop for wastewater reuse projects
Estelle Brachlianoff also insisted on the need to “accelerate” and “simplify” the administrative procedures for the implementation of wastewater reuse projects, particularly for agriculture, in order to save water resources and to face new scorching summers like that of 2022.
“What I would like is a one-stop shop, to have the same checks, the same authorizations but a single entry point to simplify, go faster and be able to deploy” solutions “everywhere on the territory”, a- she explained.
