Purchasing power crisis: the CFDT joins the call for strike on November 17

“A meeting for nothing”: the civil service inter-union calls for a strike and mobilization in France after a meeting with Sébastien Lecornu on Friday who announced the opening of a month-long discussion to upgrade low salaries, measures “which do not respond to the emergency”, denounce the unions.

Representatives of the 5.8 million public employees were received on Friday at Matignon, a first in almost 20 years. They were awaiting announcements on their remuneration, a few days after a boost to the minimum wage which only concerns private sector employees, and before a call for a strike in the public sector on November 17.

With the increase in the minimum wage on December 1, the basic salary of 1.2 million public agents falls below the minimum wage, and despite measures announced on Friday in favor of "lower scales", the basic salaries of 600,000 public agents will remain lower than the minimum wage, underlined the number 1 of the CGT, Sophie Binet, in a joint declaration from the inter-union at the exit of Matignon.

At the end of the meeting, Sébastien Lecornu announced on He will receive the unions again on December 11, after the professional elections in the public service, to “seal progress from mid-December”.

But representatives of public employees are still demanding general increases, that is to say a revaluation of the value of the index point on the basis of which the basic salary is calculated as well as its indexation to inflation, to which the government closed the door in July.

After the strike of September 29, then that of November 5, all union organizations are now calling for mobilization next Tuesday. Before the meeting on Friday, only the CFDT had not called for mobilization.

The government's proposals are "insufficient, even non-existent", regretted Laure Revel, general secretary of the CFDT Public Service at the end of the meeting. “The CFDT, which had chosen to negotiate until the end, calls for joining the mobilization of November 17 in order to have real answers by mid-December,” she continued.

Machine-translated from French