SNCF strike: what cost for the railway company?

Tiphaine Dubuard / Photo credits: Maxime Gruss / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP 7:30 a.m., February 23, 2024

Rail traffic will be "normal this weekend" with "some localized disruptions" due to a switchers' strike, SNCF management announced on Wednesday.

The switchers, responsible for regulating traffic on the network, are called to stop work by Sud-Rail on Friday February 23 and Saturday February 24, a week after a very successful controllers' strike which led to the cancellation of a train on two on the main lines.

The increase in strikes is bad news for the finances of the SNCF.

In 20 years, five million working days have been lost.

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700 million euros lost during strikes against pension reform

In the first half of last year, more than 350,000 days were not worked.

These absences are very expensive for the company: in December 2019, during the mobilization against pension reform, the SNCF counted almost 330,000 days not worked with 700 million euros in lost turnover.

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According to Stéphane Sirot, historian specializing in strikes, railway workers abuse their power to cause harm: "The number of strike days and SNCF conflicts has tended to increase. The railway sector is quite important in terms of economic, in terms of the movement of populations and, a fortiori, it is more and more so.

These mobilizations are all the more massive as SNCF agents are three times more unionized than the rest of French employees.