Salary, retirement, unemployment insurance: new mobilization throughout France

Published on : 10/05/2021 – 07:35

General mobilization. Employees and unemployed are called to strike and demonstrate Tuesday, October 5 throughout France, to demand “urgent answers”, especially on the issue of wages, and put social issues at the heart of the debate, to just over six presidential month.

“We need urgent answers now (…) When there are people in the street, it weighs,” said the secretary general of the CGT, Philippe Martinez, on LCI Monday. Social mobilizations are also necessary “so that social issues (…) are even more present” in the campaign, he pleaded.

Some 200 assembly points are planned throughout France, according to Céline Verzeletti, Confederal Secretary of the CGT. “This is a first indication which is positive for us,” she said.

Thousands of people expected

However, the strike promises to be little followed in transport, the SNCF providing for “normal” traffic for TGVs, and “almost normal” for TER, except in Normandy where it will be “disrupted”.

At RATP, “traffic will be normal” on the “metro, RER (A and B) and tram networks, except for the T3a tram which will be very disturbed”, according to a spokesperson. Bus traffic will be “slightly disrupted”, he added.

In Paris, where negotiations with the prefecture were difficult, the procession will leave from Place de la République at 2 p.m. in the direction of Opera, with a planned dispersion at the corner of rue La Fayette and rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. “Several thousand people are expected,” according to a police source.

The CGT, FO, Solidaires, FSU unions, as well as the youth organizations Fidl, MNL, Unef and UNL, had called for this inter-professional day of strike and demonstration on August 30.

They affirm in a joint text Monday “the urgency to revalorize the grids of classifications of the professional branches, to increase the minimum wage, the index point of the civil service, pensions, social minima and study grants” .

Gathered at the CGT headquarters in Montreuil, five of the nine unions representing the public service focused on the issue of wages during a press conference on Monday. “We can not afford to take another six months to think, there is a salary emergency in the public service and in the world of work,” said Gaëlle Martinez, the general delegate of Solidaires Civil Service.

Against the reform

Inflation (+ 2.1% over one year in September according to a provisional estimate by INSEE on Thursday) and the good results of CAC 40 companies in the first half of the year, higher than those of 2019, have returned to the top of the pile this question, underlines Céline Verzeletti.

The ranks of the demonstrators will be swelled by the opponents of the reform of unemployment insurance, which entered into force on Friday, and which results in reducing the benefits of the “permittent” unemployed, linking short contracts and periods of unemployment.

All unions are expected to file appeals against the reform this week, including the first of them, the CFDT, which has repeatedly denounced the reform but will not join the protesters on Tuesday.

Another point of vigilance, the question of pensions, which continues to hover over the end of Emmanuel Macron’s mandate and will be an essential subject of the presidential campaign.

Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe thus pleaded for pushing back the starting age “to 65, 66 or 67”, in an interview with Challenges published on Thursday.

“On October 5, it is in our interest to give a strong signal because I fear the overbidding during the electoral period”, reacted Friday Yves Veyrier, general secretary of Force Ouvrière.

The question of the health pass will also be one of the watchwords. Even if the CGT did not call to parade alongside opponents to the pass during their Saturday demonstrations, it is hostile to this instrument and to compulsory vaccination, “liberticidal measures which undermine the guarantees and rights of workers, “Céline Verzeletti accused.

With AFP