It is a social movement that does not pass muster with public opinion. For several days, the announcement of a strike by SNCF controllers has aroused strong opposition. According to an Elabe poll carried out for BFMTV and published this Wednesday February 14, only 9% of French people support the movement, and more than one in two French people are categorically opposed to it.
Unsurprisingly, the government’s reaction follows the contours of public opinion. Thus, like the majority of French people, the new Minister of Transport Patrice Vergriete insists that he does not understand this movement. “I am quite surprised by this strike because management has proposed bonuses and salary increases which would still be desirable to many of our fellow citizens,” he told Franceinfo this Wednesday.
And Clément Beaune’s successor recalled that “the mobilized category” obtained “salary increases of 17% in two years”. That’s the equivalent of 500 euros more per month. This, without counting the bonuses of 400 euros promised to controllers in December and March by the management of the railway company.
Feeling out of step with the farmers’ movement
In the same vein, the Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu believes that it “is neither worthy nor responsible” to prevent “hundreds of thousands of French people from going on vacation and meeting up again”. And to conclude: “The question is not the right to strike, but to know to what extent it is not abused.”
So many things that go wrong in the middle of a busy holiday weekend. “A form of habit, notes Gabriel Attal, every vacation period that arrives, to have the announcement of a strike movement”. And the Prime Minister himself asserted: “The French know that the strike is a right”, but “also that working is a duty.” Traveling this Thursday morning in Marne, Gabriel Attal notably encouraged the legislative power to take up the debate on the right to strike.
This Thursday, the Prime Minister’s call finds an echo on the right, where the time has come for collective indignation in the face of a movement which takes the “French hostage”. The formula which infuriates the left is signed by Eric Ciotti and repeated. By the President of the Senate Gérard Larcher in particular, who deplores that the strike, supposed “to be the ultimate weapon” has become “an instrument of negotiation”. Faced with this “permanent escalation”, the LR deputy for Alpes-Maritimes thus undertakes to table “a legislative text”.
At the National Rally, several voices were raised to denounce these challenges. At the microphone of France Info, the vice-president of the RN and deputy for the North Sébastien Chenu declared that he was not in favor of banning the right to strike in our country”, assuring that he “will never blame people who get up early to try to defend their purchasing power.
Towards a restriction of the right to strike
At the Luxembourg Palace, Republican and centrist senators seem to be rallying around an evolution of the right to strike, guaranteed by the Constitution. Through a bill tabled by the head of the Union of Independent Democrats (UDI) Hervé Marseille. The text provides, among other things, to grant the government an annual capital of 60 days of strike ban, distributed by decree within a limit of fifteen days per ban period. Text that Gérard Larcher wishes to have included as quickly as possible on the agenda of the upper house.
However, this is not the senators’ first attempt. In recent years, several legislative proposals have been tabled with a view to toughening the 2007 law on minimum service in transport, but none have had a favorable outcome. Two months after an episode of strike in the middle of the Christmas weekend which left 200,000 travelers stranded, LR senator from Bouches-du-Rhône Stéphane Le Rudulier notably proposed banning the exercise of the right to strike in the SNCF, the RATP and on planes “the day before, the day after and the same day of a public holiday, as well as the first two and last two days of each school holiday period”.
An initiative “balanced between two fundamental freedoms, that of striking and that of moving”, which aimed above all to respond to a “legitimate and understandable exasperation of the French”, he argued on Tuesday. As the Olympic Games approach, Stéphane Rudulier fears this year, more than ever, “blackmail from the unions” which would reflect a “catastrophic” image of France.