The RATP unions want to take advantage of the final of the Football Champions League, at the Stade de France (Saint-Denis), to be heard. The CGT, FO, Unsa and La Base call for a strike on Saturday May 28 on the RER A and B, to denounce “the lack of staff maintained for several years by the management of the RER”.
First limited to RER B, the movement was extended to line A on Wednesday. pit Liverpool against Real Madrid on Saturday at 9 p.m. Originally scheduled in Saint Petersburg, Russia, it was relocated to the Stade de France after the invasion of Ukraine. A “fan zone” will also be set up in the Cours de Vincennes, in the east of Paris, to accommodate tens of thousands of English supporters.
On the RER A, the RATP has already announced that traffic would be “almost normal”. On the other hand, on the RER B, traffic will be more disrupted. The RATP plans “two out of three trains on average during the day and four out of five trains from 5 p.m. until the end of service”. It invites you to take the RER D, operated by the SNCF network. The timetables of the trains in circulation will be communicated this Friday at 5 p.m.
In the leaflet distributed on Monday, the unions say they share “the same observation on the understaffed management of the RER department resulting in serious deterioration of our working conditions and use”. They were received urgently by the management of the RATP on Tuesday, following a “social alarm” on the lack of personnel. But the meeting failed to iron out the differences.
RATP management blamed driver staffing problems on a high failure rate for “series”, RER driving training sessions, at the end of 2021 and early 2022. It therefore proposed to organize two “ additional series” on the RER A as well as on the B in the second half of 2022, “which brings to eight the number of series planned during the year on line A and to five on line B”, can we read in an internal document consulted by AFP. The unions considered the proposal insufficient and stressed that 34 retirements were planned in 2022 on line A and 22 on line B. “The dysfunctions (…) will continue as the proposal (from management) is weak”, they point out.
The RATP has already been shaken this week by a three-day strike on its bus and tram network, while a smaller movement affected three metro lines on Wednesday.
