The tension rose a notch this weekend in France, in the street as in political expressions, as the examination, Monday March 20, of the motions of censure tabled in the National Assembly against the government approaches. after its use of Article 49.3 of the Constitution to have the pension reform adopted without a vote.
The coming week will be marked in particular by a ninth day of strikes and demonstrations at the call of the inter-union, scheduled for Thursday, and by the continuation of the movement in the refineries. Transport, exams, garbage cans… Update on the disruptions to be expected.
In the sky, flight cancellations are expected on Monday: the General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC) has asked airlines to cancel 30% of their flights at Paris-Orly and 20% at Marseille-Provence (South- East), due to the air traffic controllers' strike.
The SNCF provides for disrupted traffic with four out of five TGVs and two thirds of the TERs maintained, while the renewable strike against the pension reform will enter its fourteenth day. SNCF Voyageurs also plans to provide 60% of its Intercités connections, but no night trains will run. On the Ile-de-France rail network, traffic will also be slowed down, in particular on line D of the RER and R of the Transilien with only 40% of trains maintained. On the other hand, the service will be normal or almost on the RER A, lines H, K, T4, T11 and T13.
On the RATP side, traffic is announced without major disruption. On the other hand, Parisians should expect "a black day" in the metro next Thursday, according to FO-RATP, the leading union among drivers.
Public transport will also be very disrupted in the Lille metropolis.
Monday will mark the first day of the 2023 baccalaureate specialty tests for nearly 540,000 high school students, against a backdrop of strike threats from supervisors.
"In the event that the government has not withdrawn its pension reform project, [the unions] call on all colleagues to decide on the continuation of the action and to continue the mobilization during the specialty tests, including by the surveillance strike where possible", several organizations announced before the weekend, including the SNES-FSU (first union in high school), SUD-Education, FNEC-FP FO or even CGT-Educ' stock.
The Ministry of Education has promised to mobilize additional supervisors to "allow the tests to take place in the best conditions", which will take place from Monday to Wednesday. In the event of a delay due to a transport strike, the test time will be adjusted so that the candidate can work for the planned duration.
The announcement on Saturday by the CGT of the shutdown of the largest refinery in France, the TotalEnergies site in Gonfreville-L'Orcher (Seine-Maritime), marks a hardening in the conflict against the pension reform. This production shutdown will take several days and should not cause immediate fuel shortages at filling stations.
There are six conventional refineries in France (and one biorefinery). One is shut down for technical reasons (TotalEnergies in Donges) and two are at reduced flow (TotalEnergies in Feyzin, near Lyon; Esso-ExxonMobil in Fos-sur-Mer).
The PetroIneos refinery in Lavéra (Bouches-du-Rhône) could be shut down Monday afternoon "at the latest" according to the CGT. That of Esso-ExxonMobil in Port-Jérôme-sur-Seine (Seine-Maritime) should interrupt production on Monday or Tuesday, due to a lack of crude oil to be refined, due to a strike at the oil depot in Le Havre (Seine-Maritime) .
After organizing the blocking of the sites, the strikers of the three waste incinerators produced by Paris set up "filtering dams" this weekend to let garbage collection trucks pass. It is a "security decision to limit the risk of an epidemic", explained Fatiha Lahrech, CGT union representative at the Issy-les-Moulineaux (Hauts-de-Seine) site.
At a general meeting on Friday, the strikers "continued the action until Tuesday inclusive, with filtering of the trucks" in Issy-les-Moulineaux on Saturday and Sunday, then in Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis) on Monday and Tuesday.
