Tour de chauffe ahead of January 31: the wages of the energy sector are mobilized jeudi in the power plants, the raffineries, the ports and the docks against the reform of the portraits, with the actions “Robin des Bois” menées in parallel of the strike.
The movement is partly extended this Friday to the call of the CGT Federation of Mines and Energy, on renewable strike since January 19 and which had called for 48 hours of mobilization.
Scheduled to also last two days at the refineries, however, it was suspended on Thursday night at the TotalEnergies sites, Benjamin Tange, central delegate of the CGT, told AFP.
The objective: to preserve and prepare the ground for the national strike on Tuesday. At the call of all the unions, it will affect all sectors: schools, civil servants, transport, services… One of them, the UNSA, has identified more than 200 meeting places, as many as for the day of the 19th.
Actions called “Robin Hood”
Parallel to the strike, the energy agents carried out a series of actions called “Robin Hood”, according to the CGT, to “intensify the balance of power” in the fight against the pension reform.
From Lille to Marseille and everywhere in France, they have “put free electricity or gas” in schools, HLMs and hospitals, given reduced rates to small businesses and restored power to users who had been deprived of it.
The CGT National Federation of Ports and Docks also reported in a press release a “strong mobilization of workers in almost all French ports, often with 100% of the strikers and the ports completely stopped.”
EDF said it had lost up to 1,700 MW of power at its hydro park, the equivalent of more than one nuclear reactor, before returning to normal in the afternoon. The company did not want to communicate figures on the scope of the mobilization.
Fuel shipments stuck at refineries
The manager of RTE’s high and very high voltage lines confirmed to AFP that “this afternoon there were outages, but without affecting the security of the electricity supply.”
Emmanuel Macron’s reform, which is opposed by all the unions and which will reach Parliament on Monday, would lead to the abolition of special regimes in EDF or Engie (ex-GDF Suez).
At the refineries, where a major wage strike had already taken place in October that had caused gasoline shortages throughout the country, fuel shipments to depots were blocked, with the usual slogan: “nothing goes in, nothing comes out.” .
This was particularly the case at the biorefinery of La Mède (Bouches-du-Rhône), which went from 60% to almost 100% of strikers, or that of Donges (Loire-Atlantique), with “50 to 70%” of Strikers They were still almost 80% at the Normandy refinery on Thursday afternoon, and 30% at the Grandpuits site (Seine-et-Marne), which is nevertheless undergoing conversion and no longer sends fuel.
Source: BFM TV
