The SNCF lacks drivers but ensures that it is a temporary phenomenon

Effects of the pandemic, delays in training, hiring difficulties… The SNCF must withdraw some trains due to lack of drivers, but the problem must be temporary and the public group will not be short of staff, according to the management.

“It is a temporary, controlled and very limited phenomenon,” says a spokesperson for SNCF Voyageurs. The company has eliminated 4% of RER C trains in the Paris region, for example.

Il manque actuellement “une cinquantaine de nouveaux conducteurs” en Ile-de-France (sur 2650) et “moins d’une centaine” dans les TER (sur 5500), soit “environ 1% des effectifs de conducteurs au plan national”, according to him. The TGVs are safe.

disturbed formations

Main cause: Covid-19 has greatly disrupted driver training cycles, which last between 12 and 18 months. SNCF Voyageurs has thus trained 800 in 2019, 550 in 2020 and 550 in 2021, with the aim of reaching 1,200 applicants this year.

Of the 1,100 external hires of drivers planned for 2022, 450 have been made this summer, according to the spokesman.

Across the SNCF group, management has “around 5,000 permanent contracts to be hired throughout France by 2022,” explains Catherine Woronoff, director of recruitment policy.

Railway work attracts less

This figure corresponds more or less, according to her, to the number of exits planned for this year, retirements or resignations.

Half of the recruitment goes to SNCF Voyageurs, namely the 1,100 drivers, but also train maintenance and preparation positions, controllers and station agents, and the other half to SNCF Réseau with signalmen, maintenance agents, electricians, civil engineering specialists and others, explains the manager.

“We also place a high value on learning with around 5,000 work-study contracts each year,” adds Ms. Woronoff.

SNCF had met half of its hiring target for the year this summer. “We are in line with our trajectory, we are confident, but we continue to work hard”, says Catherine Woronoff, acknowledging that “hiring, like everywhere in France, is difficult”.

Electricians, for example, “are very hard to find,” he says. And the often staggered schedules of rail workers are “less appealing,” she modestly adds. The disappearance of the status of railway worker for new hires, in any case, “is not at all a brake,” says Woronoff, which the unions question.