The anger of seasonal ski resort workers is mounting a notch, as they face the closure of ski lifts due to restrictions taken in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
Faced with the economic consequences that this closure has for many employees in sectors whose model is based on the exploitation of snow in the mountains, they took action on Monday morning.
More than a hundred seasonal workers have installed a filter dam on the A43 at the access to the Fréjus tunnel, in Savoie, to request the opening of the ski lifts and more aid for a mountain economy. stopped.
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To avoid a "social disaster", Pierre Didio, the departmental secretary of the FO union, which organized the blockage, asks the government to ensure that "people can go skiing" and to increase aid for seasonal workers.
Review the criteria for awarding short-time working for this sector
"We will ask to be received" by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, adds Eric Becker, federal secretary of transport and ski lifts at Force Ouvrière, who calls for "that we take care of all those who go beyond the criteria attribution ”of partial unemployment, which only benefits those who have been hired.
A hundred thousand seasonal workers in the hotel and catering industry and mountain businesses are concerned, according to the union, and, without aid, "some have nothing left to live on, and that is unacceptable", adds Eric Becker.
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Under heavy snow, dozens of demonstrators from different stations in the Alps blocked the Maurienne motorway for several tens of minutes leading to the tunnel that connects France and Italy in the town of Modane.
They transformed their operation into filter dams at the request of the gendarmerie.
"The season is dead"
Elodie Canale-Parola, 41, came from Alpe d'Huez so that the mountain world “is considered”.
Manager of ten ski rental shops in this large Isère resort, she only opened one to rent snowshoes and cross-country skis, and was only able to hire sixteen seasonal workers out of the fifty or so employees usually employed. every year.
She assures us “not to have the right to the solidarity fund” because she has just created her company by buying back the business funds and assures living today of the RSA.
"There is great distress among seasonal workers," she testifies.
Like many demonstrators, Marc Laroche is wearing a jacket with the logo of his station, Val-Cenis in this case, not very far from there.
This ski lift operator does not believe in reopening.
"The season is dead", but the action of the day "shows that we are there".
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The Prime Minister, Jean Castex, must receive at the end of the day the actors of the mountain world, who are waiting for new announcements to support a sector which is undergoing an almost total shutdown of its activity.
