The situation remains stagnant at TotalEnergies. In the absence of obtaining the salary increases it demands, the CGT announced on Thursday the resumption of the strike at the Normandy, Donges, Feyzin, Mède refineries and at the Flandes depot.
United on Wednesday with Force Ouvrière, the social movement launched on September 27 at the initiative of the CGT, the second TotalEnergies union force behind the CFE-CGC, interrupted the distribution of fuel throughout the country. According to figures from the Ministry of Energy Transition, almost a third of the stations are currently experiencing supply difficulties.
What does the CGT require?
Since the beginning of the strike, the demands of the CGT have been clear. The organization demands a 10% increase for TotalEnergies employees: 7% to compensate for inflation and 3% for the group’s exceptional profits, which amounted to 10.6 billion euros in the first half, thanks mainly to the rise of energy prices.
Initially, the demands of the CGT also entailed the “thaw of hiring” in France and “a massive investment plan.” But the confederation had finally said that it was willing to “leave aside for the moment the problem of employment and investment” to start negotiations on the sole question of wages “in order to break the impasse.”
What does TotalEnergies answer?
In a press release published this week, the management of TotalEnergies recalled that the group’s employees had already obtained an average increase of 3.5% for the year 2022, an average profit-sharing premium of 9,018 euros, with a minimum amount of 7,250 euros, a credit note of 150 euros in March for gas and electricity subscription employees subscribed to TotalEnergies and an Energy bonus of 200 euros in July for all employees.
Regarding the next increases, the management referred to the mandatory annual negotiations for the year 2023 which it proposed to bring forward to October (instead of November) subject to the end of the lockdowns.
This Thursday, a few minutes after Bruno Le Maire called on TotalEnergies to accept salary increases, the oil group made an additional gesture by offering a 6% increase for next year. Management also announced the payment of a bonus equivalent to one month’s salary for all its employees worldwide. I am not sure that it will convince the CGT. Because before discussing the salaries for 2023, the union organization wants to now reopen the negotiations for the year 2022 in order to obtain immediate and retroactive increases (and not bonuses).
“We do not negotiate in the media,” commented Eric Sellini, coordinator of the group’s CGT, about the new proposal. “The management continues to despise the organizations and the strikers,” he added, stating that “it will not improve the environmental climate.”
Is the dialogue broken?
Unlike at Esso-ExxonMobil, where the movement continues despite the signing of an agreement between management and the majority unions, negotiations at TotalEnergies are deadlocked. And if the requisition of personnel began at Total this Thursday, limited for the time being only to the Dunkirk site, the executive still wishes to give social dialogue a chance:
“I want them to be able to reach an agreement in the next few hours. (…) I am for social dialogue, for negotiation, never for the blockade,” Emmanuel Macron declared on France 2 on Wednesday. “The government assumes its responsibility. If the social dialogue does not prosper in the next few hours, we are going to requisition”, he warned.
Words that surprised the union representatives. “Either the President of the Republic is very poorly informed, or they have lied to him, and that is serious. There are zero negotiations started, but the President has just announced it. I am falling from my chair!”, he explained. on BFMTV Hakim Bellouz representative of the central trade union FO TotalEnergies.
However, the dialogue seemed to have been renewed on Wednesday when the management had agreed for the first time to receive the CGT when earlier it had demanded the lifting of the blockades as a prerequisite to see the second union in the group.
At the end of this meeting, the management had proposed to the unions the release of fuel deliveries as of this Thursday before opening salary negotiations in the process: “The management has specified what it expects from us. It does not speak more of lifting of the strike but simply a resumption of the deliveries of products, that is to say that it accepts that the refineries remain closed initially, but what it seeks is that the deliveries of the refineries in the internal stocks of the refineries can leave by truck, by truck, by train, that all deliveries resume even before the restart of the facilities”, explained Thierry Defresne, general secretary of the CGT of the European committee TotalEnergies.
However, a few hours later, the strikers refused to resume shipments to warehouses and refineries. Consequently, the management of TotalEnergies declared on Thursday that “the conditions were not met to organize negotiations” on wages “among all the representative organizations.”
Source: BFM TV
