In sub -ffectives, drivers are refused rest days due to service. In order to get around this constraint, some practice the “à la carte strike”. An increasing practice, which begins to worry.
by Sophie Fay
The worried practice and brushes on “Radio Ballast”, the nickname from word of mouth to the SNCF: more and more train drivers use “à la carte strikes” to obtain days of leave which are refused to them because of the sub-efficients, in order to protect their personal life in professions where one is mobilized every day of the year, weekends, school holidays and holidays included. This phenomenon is difficult to quantify but it exists, admit unions and HRD, without however communicating figures. In addition to others – resignations and difficulties in recruiting sharpeners, for example – it is snowball and can lead, in the tense regions, to trains deletions.
This “à la carte strike” is a product derived from the 2007 law on the minimum service in public services, an emblematic text of the Sarkozy quinquennium. It requires unions to apply for immediate consultation (DCI), which opens a period of a fortnight before the filing of a notice and the strike. This theoretically leaves time for the SNCF management to organize a minimum service. Each agent who wishes to strike must then make an individual declaration of intent – “D2i” in the house jargon – 48 hours before his service.
The unions have found a flaw to circumvent these prerequisites and be able to mobilize quickly: “dormant notice”, namely notice without end date which allow agents to go on strike at any time, with a simple “D2i “. “There are four at the national level,” confirms the Human Resources Department of the SNCF. The first, deposited by Sud-Rail, dates from 2018, at the time of the reform of the SNCF, transformed into a public limited company. The other three, issued by Sud-Rail, the CGT and the UNSA together, and the CFDT, date back to December 4, 2019, when the pension reform was challenged. FO also has a notice that runs until 2050 on the North TGV axis. 2> “An argument to underline the fed up”
It has thus become common than a train driver who is refused one day off for reasons of service bypass this refusal by depositing a “D2i”. He frees himself by getting on strike. Of course, it is not paid, but according to a testimony, some agents are ready to punctually lose 80 to 200 euros to be able to spend a Saturday, a family Sunday, or make a bridge. Because because of the sub -ffectives, “the twelve weekends minimum rest per year promised to drivers would have become twelve maximum weekends”, assures Frédéric Meyer, Federal Secretary Traction of the Unsa-Ferrovia.
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