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Rail strikes called on Christmas and New Year weekends in France
Ticket inspectors plan to strike to call for improved pay and career progression
Rail strikes are set to take place on the weekend of both Christmas and New Year as the SUD-Rail union maintains its strike notice for those dates.
The strike concerns ticket inspectors (contrôleurs), who are protesting against their current pay and career progression.
SUD-Rail has announced in a statement that no majority decision had been reached on the subject of a potential strike and so it plans to leave the “union tool” up to its members and maintain its strike notice without formally calling for a strike.
The CGT union has done the same for members wishing to participate in a strike. The CFDT union, meanwhile, has not made its position known with regards to a potential strike and Unsa-Ferroviaire has lifted its strike notice, having judged SNCF’s proposals to be “of a very good level”.
SNCF has proposed a bonus of €600 to recognise ticket inspectors’ specific responsibilities, in addition to a general salary increase, accelerated pay progression and improved consideration of worker health issues.
The unions are calling on SNCF to “increase its offer to calm the situation”.
The plan to strike was initially born from a Facebook group with 3,500 ticket inspector members.
“It should be the same on Christmas and New Year weekends,” even if unions could not gain a clear vision of how many workers would participate, a member of the ticket inspector collective told BFMTV.
“This movement, which has been started by our collective, did not and does not aim to annoy people but to make ourselves heard by our management, and unfortunately its response is so far below our expectations that we are forced to come to this extreme measure, and we are very sad about that.”
It is not yet clear how much the strikes will impact services if they take place, as the number of people taking part is not clear.
Ticket inspectors carried out a strike in early December which resulted in 60% of TGV services being cancelled.
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