Notices of opportunistic strikes are increasing. We are almost getting used to seeing them timed for long weekends, holidays or now the Olympics. It comes from a rational calculation. In ordinary times, no one in the State or in its satellites likes the exasperation of French people deprived of their leisure time and/or the joy of being together with family. During the Olympic period, the stakes being what they are, the organizers are obviously terrified at the idea of an additional factor of chaos coming into the middle of the celebration. The perspective is therefore that of a public community negotiating with the sword in its loins. Tactically speaking, it’s fair game.
Is this acceptable though? No. But not because these strikes affect our private lives and not our professional lives. The country’s economy and finances are not so flourishing that we can consider work, production and trade secondary. The problem comes rather from the fact that, more ostensibly than ever, it is the user who we aim to annoy as much as possible – decency dictates not to write “take hostage” at this moment –, while things are not known to work that way at all.
It must be understood that the right to strike in public services is fundamentally based on a concern for balance. The cessation of work – which comes from a pure constitutional right since 1946 – must be able to take place and it can really take place, in all professions where it is not prohibited (the army, the judiciary, etc.). In law, the organization of a minimum service cannot result in imposing normal or quasi-normal operation. Everything is based on an imperative to reconcile the protest interests of employees and the necessary continuity of public service. We even try to go far in this quest for a fair proportion.
A question of civilization
The obligation imposed on each striker to declare themselves forty-eight hours in advance in transport, for example, aims to ensure that the residual service is organized with regard to the numbers actually available – that is to say the real mobilization – and that it is therefore not undersized as a precaution (it is complicated to run a train set). But, so that this constraint is not excessive, it is prohibited to impose it on agents whose tasks are not essential. For this reason, it will weigh on drivers or switchers, but not on tellers. In short, we seek to only minimally infringe on the rights of all.
It’s about civilization. But the burden and responsibility must still be effectively shared. In other words: let the imbalance not come back through the window where we have done everything to eject it through the door. But this is what is happening en masse since strikes are calculated to cause users the greatest trouble and/or worry: they are – we are – considered a negligible quantity; instrumentalized as a lever implemented for private, sectoral, selfish ends. There was a time when certain trade unionists claimed to strike in public services through a sort of general proxy of the world of work, in defense of the common good, because they could carry the sword effectively where others could not, especially in private companies. It was quite cynical, but it at least had the merit of revealing a touch of guilty conscience, a vague need to justify oneself. We’re not even there anymore. Indifference has imposed itself as an absolute, as a sort of inverted moral rule, where everyone has the right, whatever the cost (to others), to favor their own interest.
I am not sure that it is absolutely reactionary to recall that Article 4 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen sees freedom as consisting in doing everything which does not harm others, and not to do to others what harms them as much as possible when it suits me.
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