How can they avoid the trap set by the government? After their first individual meetings with France's transport minister Elisabeth Borne on March 1st, the four main unions representing workers at France's public train operator SNCF - CGT cheminots, CFDT cheminots, Unsa ferroviaire and Sud-Rail – all made the same observation: that the negotiations with the government about the future of the SNCF and more broadly of the rail industry are a facade. “We were not at all reassured,' said Laurent Brun, the secretary general of the CGT cheminots, after his meeting with the minister. He said his union would take part in subsequent meetings with “few illusions”.
Everything that the rail workers' unions feared is in danger of coming to pass: the government is launching a high-speed reform of the SNCF. After the announcements made by prime minister Édouard Philippe on February 26th, the government is following the same procedure that it used for its reform of employment law last year. This entails holding short meetings with the different parties involved where no one has the same information, gatherings devoid of any real purpose or content but which are there simply to give the illusion of a negotiation, with the government hurdling over all the usual steps of democratic debate, with no desire to listen to staff, rail users, local councillors or even MPs, and a process that will end with the issuing of decrees. All of which will wrapped up within barely two months.
During the next meeting at the Ministry of Transport on Wednesday March 7th - the only one with all trade unions present and which is just intended to fix the timetable for future encounters – the CGT union intends to present its proposals for the future of the SNCF. But it does not harbour too many hopes, given that the script seems to have been written in advance. “None of the proposals that we put forward were included in the Spinetta report,” said a spokesman for the CGT cheminots, referring to the report by former Air France boss Jean-Cyril Spinetta that was commissioned by the government in 2017 and presented to the prime minister Édouard Philippe in February.
The government seems to want to boil the whole future of rail transport down to the issue of the employment status of rail worker and their supposed “exorbitant privileges”. Which means leaving it to the country's regional authorities to decide on the future of smaller lines in their areas and how they organise railway development, and also means kicking into the long grass the issue of SNCF's massive debts and the future organisation of the national railway network.
“The status of rail workers is a false problem. Highlighting this issue is to point the finger at rail workers in order to avoid a real debate on public service railway and its continuing local presence,” says Éric Meyer, secretary of the Sud-Rail union. Laurent Berger, secretary general of the CFDT union, says: “After years of underinvestment, the company's difficulties cannot be reduced to that of the rail workers' employment status.” And Philippe Martinez, secretary-general of the CGT, says: “It's not the rail workers who are responsible for the SNCF's debt, the delays, the accidents.”
Even the commissioners on the Spinetta report team did not seem convinced of the urgent need to attack the rail workers' employment status last year. In the letter last October from Édouard Philippe to Jean-Cyril Spinetta outlining the team's terms of reference, the key issues it outlined were the SNCF's ability to adapt to opening the railways up to competition, the company's debts and its financial sustainability. The status of the rail workers was never mentioned.
“For the commissioners it wasn't a priority,” says a senior figure in the SNCF who is close to the Spinetta report team. “There were the issues of debt and competition. And as for the issue of workplace agreements, the transfer of employees to possible operators using regional networks, workplace mobility and the flexibility of staff in the company were much more important issues for the SNCF than the status.” It is also these issues that the SNCF president, Guillaume Pepy, wants to tackle in his new plans for the company. This is likely to involve the questioning of what is known as the “sector dictionary” which sets out in detail the definition and responsibilities of all the different grades and jobs at the company. This tome, however, relates to an internal company agreement and not to the rail workers' statutory employment status.
However, according to Mediapart's information, in the course of discussions with transport minister Elisabeth Borne's private office the rail workers' status became the priority issue that had to emerge from the Spinetta report. On several occasions her office insisted on this point to its authors. They were being urged to respond to the broad policy outlines fixed by President Emmanuel Macron on July 1st, 2017, even those that he had never spoken of these particular reforms during his election campaign. Mediapart asked Elisabeth Borne's office what made them insist that the report focussed on changes to rail workers' employment status but there was no response.
“All the while we're talking about the [employment] status we're not talking about the rest,” says Bérenger Cernon, a driver on line D of the RER Paris region railway network and secretary-general of the CGT cheminots' Paris-Gare de Lyon branch. “The French would be against if it they understood the destruction of the public service that is taking shape, the abandoning of all rail policy and regional cohesion.” Bruno Poncet, a member of the federal office of the Sud-Rail union, says: “The government understood very well that it had to focus everything on the status of the rail workers.” Meanwhile a source close to the rail company told Mediapart: “The Élysée knows that public opinion is going to be decisive when it comes to the SNCF. They will decide it. To avoid reviving the strikes of 1995 it has to get [opinion] on its side. And the sole way for the government to get the public on its side is [the rail workers'] status.”
A fight to win over public opinion
Emmanuel Macron did not wait for the debate to start before launching his line of attack and setting off the media battle. “I can't have farmers on the one hand who don't have any pension and on the other a rail workers' status and not change it,” the president said during his visit to the Salon de l'Agriculture farm show in Paris on February 24th. The media machine immediately kicked into gear. All the authorised “experts”, who had been much less vocal on the issue of social equality when the wealth tax was abolished, were as one: in the name of equality the rail workers had to have the same level of lack of security as workers in the private sector.
There were also, conveniently, some opinion polls which backed the government's plans, with questions no more neutral and scientific than the ones from pollsters Odoxa such as, for example: “Do you think that this status, which is a privilege and no longer has a place today, should be removed?”
“Rail workers have never been subjected to such public condemnation. But these are working people who make the economy tick, who pay their taxes,” says a spokesman for CGT cheminots. Bruno Poncet from Sud-Rail, aware of the need to dispel of some of the lurid fantasies about rail workers' status, says: “We have to make people understand, to explain. We have a real fight to carry out in relation to public opinion.”
At the SNCF the rail workers' status is known formally as RH001. Linked to a decree published in 1950 it defines workers' starting terms, pay, career progression, paid holidays (28 days a year plus 22 days extra for drivers and conductors linked to working hours), the ability to change jobs, health insurance and pensions. Some 90% of the SNCF's 150,000 employees have this status.
Contrary to what is often stated, rail workers do not get a coal bonus. According to Mediapart's information the pay scale ranges from 1,219 euros gross a month for the first level of workers up to 4,584 euros gross a month for managers near the end of their careers. There are also bonuses for having to work away and working certain hours. This pay scale does not include the salaries of the top SNCF executives. Before she became the current defence minister Florence Parly was director general at the SNCF and earned 365,961 euros for the last eight months of 2016, or 45,745 euros a month (see Mediapart's story on this here.)
According to the SNCF more than six in ten workers earn less than 3,000 euros a month. However, the Spinetta report considers that salary costs are too high, taking account of the “automatic increases in salaries”. According to the SNCF its salary costs rise by 2.4% a year, compared with 2% for transport companies and 1.5% for large companies.
But part of this “salary inflation” is linked to the lengthening of workers' careers following pension reforms in recent years. Officially the retirement age has not changed. Train drivers can retire at 52 and others at 57. But the terns of their departure have changed since the reforms of 2008. The length of time one must contribute to the pension system to get a full pension has gone up from 37.5 years to 41.5 years and the level of contributions is going up too, from 8.52% of pay in 2017 to 10.95% between now and 2026. In order to get a full pension workers are retiring later and later. And as they are near the end of their careers their pay is higher. This situation will not be changed by a reform of the rail workers' status, as the SNCF's pension regime is not affected by the current government plans. These pensions are likely to be discussed in a wider plan to reform pensions currently being led by the high commissioner for pensions Jean-Paul Delevoye.
Among the “exorbitant privileges” attacked by the government is the rail workers' security of employment, which is often held up as the source of all the inflexibility within the company. For years, too, the official public audit body the Cour des Comptes has criticised the travel “facilities” afforded SNCF staff, in other words the free or reduced-price tickets for rail workers and their families on those trains where reservations are not essential – meaning not on high-speed TGV trains.
But could putting rail workers on the same status as other workers help tackle SNCF's problems, as the government insists? “Changing the rail workers' status would allow you to save at best 100 million to 150 million euros over a period of ten years. That doesn't match the scale of the company's financial issues and of rail transport in France,” says a source close to the SNCF and the Spinetta report. But the government will not drop the issue. “The taboos and privileges are issues that we must dare to accept being put on the table,” says Christophe Castaner, the minister in charge of government relations with the French Parliament.
After its changes to general employment law in 2017, ending the rail workers' special status would certainly represent a famous political victory for the government. It could portray itself as the government that dared to make changes, to effect a reform that, according to finance minister Bruno Le Maire, has been waiting to be carried out “for 30 years”. To achieve this end the government seems willing to go far, perhaps even as far as a public trial of strength. Listening to ministers' declarations that seem to exclude the chances of a “long strike”, some SNCF unions wonder if the government is not hoping to push the unions into a mistake and produce exactly that kind of showdown, in the hope of driving a wedge between rail workers and public opinion for good.
Even the attitude of SNCF president Guillaume Pepy seems dubious as far as the unions are concerned. The company's boss has lost a lot of supporters since the major rail accident at Brétigny, south of Paris, in July 2013: many employees criticise him for not having resigned after what was the biggest rail accident that the SNCF had known in decades. But more recently the gap between him and the workforce has been growing visibly. Seeing the SNCF boss fall in line completely with the government's comments has astonished workers and unions.
“He is being provocative,” says Bruno Poncet of Sud-Rail. A SNCF executive gave Mediapart a cynical assessment of the situation. “He's changed a lot. His years with Martine Aubry [editor's note, Pepy was Aubry's chief of staff when she was minister of transport under socialist president François Mitterrand from 1991 to 1993] are now long gone. He knows that he's at the end of the course as president of the SNCF. He would have liked to have gone to Air France but he didn't get the job. Leaving at the end of a tough dispute will allow him to leave the company with his head held high, as the president who didn't yield to the unions,” says the executive.
The rail unions are now looking at the various options and deciding how best to free themselves from the trap that is being laid for them. On Thursday March 1st the four unions representing SNCF workers triggered the first step in the process allowing them to call a rail strike, which is currently planned for March 22nd. The joint union body has given itself until March 15th to decide on a strike movement, in light of the outcome of the consultation with the government and content of the plan to authorise decrees to carry out the reforms. The initial objective is to maintain unity between the different unions at all costs. “Because this time it's the survival of the company that is at stake,” says Bruno Poncet.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter