The suggestion risks sparking controversy.
The centrist group in the Senate proposed a text on Wednesday aimed at regulating the right to strike in transport during specific periods such as school holidays, a way according to it to “protect the French” in the face of “repeated hostage-taking”.
While a strong mobilization of SNCF controllers is announced for the weekend, with many trains canceled, the parliamentarians of the centrist Union, allied in the senatorial majority to the Republicans, quickly reacted by tabling a bill to defend “freedom of movement”.
“We are not prohibiting trade unionists from striking, we are trying to protect the French against excessive and repeated hostage-taking,” the president of the centrists, Hervé Marseille, was indignant to AFP, saying he “expects similar movements on the sidelines of the Olympic Games.
The text plans to grant the government an annual capital of 60 days of strike ban for “staff of public transport services”.
The executive could distribute this capital by decree as it wishes within a limit of fifteen days per ban period, although a “prior negotiation” must be held.
Registration in the Senate “as soon as possible”
The proposed law, based on the system in place in Italy, clearly targets school holiday periods, often targeted by unions to launch their strike notices.
“The people who take the train are not just wealthy people who go skiing, they are people who are returning home, students, children of separated parents.
This is repeated and becomes unbearable,” adds Hervé Marseille, who promises to submit his text to the Senate “as soon as possible” and refutes any desire to “call into question the constitutionally guaranteed right to strike.”
#PRESS RELEASE
🔴 The president of the UC group @HerveMarseille has tabled a bill aimed at reconciling the continuity of the public #transport service with the exercise of the right to #strike.
Freedom of movement is also a right!
Read the press release ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/TJuyChkPpQ
— Centrist Senators (@UC_Senat) February 14, 2024
This announcement comes after the declarations of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, the latter having deplored on Wednesday "a form of habit, with all the holidays which arrive, to have the announcement of a strike movement" of the railway workers.
“The French know that the strike is a right”, but “also that working is a duty”, said the head of government.
The senatorial right had already adopted a text in 2020 aimed at “ensuring the effectiveness of the right to transport” by guaranteeing a minimum service in the event of a strike.
But he had not prospered in Parliament.
Questioned on the question on Wednesday, the president of the Macronist senators François Patriat acknowledged that he would be open to “all developments” which would make it possible to regulate “these untimely, redundant and renewed strikes”.