Does love have a scent? In recent days, the city that is the symbol, in any case, has one, and there is nothing romantic about it. While the mobilization against the pension reform continues, garbage bags are piling up on the most prestigious avenues of the capital. The garbage collectors’ strike did not take place only in Paris, but also in Nantes, Le Havre, or even Antibes. Despite this very visible manifestation of the dissatisfaction of the agents, the calls for the rule renewable after March 7, pushed by certain branches of the CGT and the CFDT, do not really work.
In the aftermath of the days of demonstration, membership differs in sectors usually at the forefront of social mobilizations. On the energy side, for example, fuel shipments were blocked in 6 out of 7 refineries on March 14. But this movement is not continuous: the strikers of the TotalEnergie refineries of Feyzin, in the Rhône, and especially that of Gonfreville-l’Orcher, in Normandy – the largest in France – interrupted their movement for some time this weekend. to avoid a production stoppage. If spontaneous actions – power cuts or free electricity – are carried out by electricians and gas operators, the global electricity network has not yet been affected. At SNCF, train traffic is still disrupted, with 3 TGV and Ouigo out of 5, 1 Intercity out of 3, 1 TER out of 2. But at RATP, traffic has returned to almost normal, with 100% operation guaranteed. Roadblocks are no longer legion today, while several had been organized in early March in Rennes or Abbeville. Even in cities where garbage collectors are the most mobilized, such as Paris, garbage is widely collected.
The impact of inflation
Difficult, therefore, to find a sector where France has been truly “put to a stop”, as Philippe Martinez called it. The secretary general of the CGT has already recognized the difficulty of such a degree of mobilization. “France at a standstill, it was an image, he said, interviewed at the microphone of BFMTV on March 7. We know that there are employees for whom to strike for an hour, it’s mid-caddy when they go shopping. Obviously, the figures of the strikers are contrasted.” Despite a strong mobilization in the streets and the opposition of many French people to the pension reform, the inter-union no longer risks blowing on the embers of a general blocking movement. The cost of the strike for potentially striking employees – especially in this period of inflation -, but also of the negotiations that took place upstream in each sector, seem for the moment to have got the better of the union dream of the renewable strike.
In the sector where the movement is most visible – 5,600 tonnes of waste piled up on the ground of the capital on Monday, according to the town hall – the garbage collectors are far from all being on strike. In Paris, the situation is even extremely different from one district to another. Garbage collectors are shared between municipal agents in half of the arrondissements (2nd, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 17th and 20th arrondissements), while the rest of the city is maintained by private companies (Urbaser, Veolia Otalia, Derichebourg and Pizzorno).
A “turn by turn” strike
In the private sector, if the strikers exist, their number is difficult to know. With a few exceptions, it is in any case much smaller than in the public. Even to the point that, according to Le Figaro, the City of Paris would have asked in certain districts to the Derichebourg company to collect the waste accumulated since the beginning of the movement of the municipal agents. For their part, the number of strikers has dropped over the days, from 60% according to the CGT to 35% last week. A decline attributable, according to the garbage collectors interviewed, to the impact of such a movement on their portfolio. “It hurts my heart to see all this waste, but the strike is our only real means of pressure, believes Ludovic Franceschet, garbage collector in Paris and creator of a TikTok account where he tells about his daily work. But when we are alone, as in my case, it is very complicated to do it continuously.” Mobilized for three days, the municipal agent counts. “We lose between 75 and 77 euros every day. So I’m at 225, he calculates. And I’m not going to dig into the strike funds, because some have been arrested longer than me.”
To preserve the savings accumulated by the unions for the long-term strikers, Ludovic chose to strike every other day. His boss, Hicham Alongane, an operational services technician, observed a similar phenomenon among the members of his team, which 25 to 30 people. “No one can really strike every day, so we take turns,” he says.
In Paris, this organization allows employees to make their movement visible. But elsewhere, the economic context weighs on the mobilization. “Inflation partly constrains the strike, believes Baptiste Giraud, lecturer in political science at the University of Aix-Marseille, specializing in the sociology of trade unionism and collective action. Since the beginning of the movement, the unions have also taken good care of the days when they scheduled the demonstrations. Those of February 11 and March 11 also took place on a Saturday, and not during the week: to avoid strikes during the week for most workers, and to dissuade them from giving up the movement to avoid deductions from their wages.
Avoid blockages
This strategy has enabled the intersyndicale to gather around it the confederations recording an increase in membership: CDFT and CGT, for example, have claimed a 50% increase compared to last year, at the same period. “Despite this, the most combative organizations find it difficult to spread oil in their toughest mobilizations, observes Stéphane Sirot, historian, specialist in the sociology of strikes, trade unionism and social relations. The CGT, for example , has become a confederation populated by employees mainly from the public service or from formerly nationalized companies, and its action therefore has difficulty in spilling over into the private sector.It remains within the usual scope of classic conflicts, which is not sufficient to cause blockages.
Sectors that are used to participating in tougher movements than simple demonstrations, such as truck drivers or the RATP, are less committed than one might expect. “We had few reports of blockages, confirms Florence Berthelot, general delegate of the National Road Transport Federation. Even if the drivers wanted it, it is very difficult for them to use trucks to block the roads: they belong to the companies, and are therefore difficult to use without the consent of the employer.”
It remains to be seen whether they really want it, when a subject is of particular concern to truck drivers: “end-of-activity leave” (CFA), a system which allows them, subject to seniority conditions, to cease their activity before retirement age. But upstream of the reform, the State has promised to provide 150 million for seven years to this “special regime” for drivers, the practical terms of which must still be negotiated. “The ministry has clearly cleared up the issue before. Truck drivers say to themselves that despite the current reform, they will always have the CFA, and are less inclined to mobilize hard”, analyzes Patrice Clos, secretary general of FO transport.
According to the trade unionist, a similar phenomenon would affect RATP agents. In question: the adoption by the Assembly in mid-February, in parallel with the abolition of the special regimes, of the “grandfather clause”, a provision which allows agents who entered the RATP or the SNCF before adoption of the reform to continue to benefit from their achievements. “All the executives are against the text, but in truth, we don’t feel them much more motivated than that, regrets Patrice Clos. The grandfather clause did a lot of harm.” The movement no longer really seems to take hold at the RATP, where, for the mobilization day of March 15, almost normal traffic is announced – with the notable exception of the RER.
Refusal of the inter-union
A strong feeling of fatigue among employees cannot be ruled out either. If the rejection of the reform is well anchored in public opinion, only 34% of French people questioned thought at the beginning of March, in an Ifop poll for The JDD, that the reform would be withdrawn. “It is up to us to fight the feeling of fatality and to persuade the employees that we will get there thanks to the struggle. But a renewable strike is necessarily more difficult to organize than a demonstration. We must discuss and convince the employees every days, and not just on an ad hoc basis”, observes Eric Sellini, CGT coordinator for the Total group.
The task is all the more difficult as the inter-union is divided on the subject: reacting to the garbage collectors’ strike on the set of BFMTV this March 12, the boss of the CFDT Laurent Berger explained “not to call for this type of ‘stock”. “The CFDT will be concerned that we keep the opinion, he said. […] The CFDT teams who have decided to go (towards renewable strikes), it is their responsibility, these are not the types of action that the CFDT launches.” This reluctance of the inter-union to engage in a movement tougher is reminiscent of the one that had animated the CFDT and the CGT in 2010, in full swing on the pension reform led by the Fillon government. “There had been successive days of action for two or three months , followed by a day of mobilization where some had decided to go on a renewable strike – October 12 in 2010, March 7 today. The latter had frayed over the days, and the reform had passed”, recalls Stéphane Sirot.
In an editorial In The echoes written at the time of the pension reform carried out by the Fillon government in 2010, Jean-Francis Pécresse, wondered “why the unions are afraid of the renewable strike”. The first reason, wrote the journalist: “The risk of failure of this kind of strategy” while “for a renewable strike to be effective, it must be durable”. At the time, it was also a question of the fear of the central trade unions of “losing control of a social movement which they no longer really expect to lead to concessions on the part of the authorities, but which they gain in audience, popularity, legitimacy”. Bis repeat?