Gérald Darmanin on Tuesday March 14 ordered the Paris police chief to ask the town hall to “requisition” staff, in order to evacuate the garbage strewn on the sidewalks of the capital, after nine days of garbage collectors’ strike . The entourage of the Minister of the Interior explains this decision by “the current sanitary conditions”, after the LR mayor of the 7th arrondissement, Rachida Dati, sent him a letter to this effect.
Some 7,000 tonnes of uncollected garbage were counted on Tuesday March 14, according to the first deputy mayor of Paris. If the town hall “does not follow up on the requisition, the State will take the place” to evacuate the garbage cans, it was added in the entourage of Gérald Darmanin. the garbage collectors continued the strike “at least until March 20”.
On Tuesday, the blocking of the incinerator of Ivry-sur-Seine, south of Paris, continued and the strikers organized themselves to hold the pickets at night. “We are blocking but we are not doing anything,” says Julien Lejeune, 44, an agent for the town hall of Paris in charge of wastewater and CGT delegate. “We do guard shifts, we watch that there is no deterioration of the equipment or intrusion”.
The Ivry incinerator – the largest in Europe with nearly 700,000 tonnes of waste treated each year and managed by the public operator Syctom – has been shut down since March 6, just like that of Issy- les-Moulineaux (Hauts-de-Seine), also on strike. That of Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis) is undergoing maintenance.
The strikers say they feel “supported by the majority of the population”. “We see that public opinion is on our side, it’s nice,” said Guillaume Konrad, 38, head of the Paris sewer office. “Even the police came by yesterday (Monday) to encourage us,” he said. That the dissatisfied “address (to President) Emmanuel Macron so that he abandons his reform”, asserts Régis Vieceli, CGT general secretary of the FTDNEEA (Processing, waste, cleaning, water, sewers and sanitation sector) of Paris.
The movement also affects some provincial towns. In Rennes, the strike started on Monday and the collection could not be carried out on Tuesday, according to the Suez group, which is responsible for it. Collection is also disrupted in Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d’Armor).
Actions also disrupted waste collection in Nantes, as well as in Seine-Maritime. Tuesday morning, “a hundred demonstrators blocked the trucks” at the waste treatment center of the Metropolis of Rouen, assured Gérald Le Corre of the CGT departmental union.
The town hall of Paris, whose agents manage the collection of household waste in half of the arrondissements, says it is “in solidarity” with the social movement. A position attacked by the government. On Tuesday, the Minister of Transport, Clément Beaune, declared on France 2 to expect from the mayor of Paris “that she take concrete measures such as the pooling of collection and storage between arrondissements, even the requisition”.
“The requisition consists in forcing strikers to come and do their job: it is a competence of the State on a problem created by the State”, replied Emmanuel Grégoire in the afternoon. The City is “putting in place palliative measures” and “it is more than the minimum service” which is provided with 23,000 tonnes picked up out of 30,000 in ten days, he said, acknowledging the use of private agents “on absolute emergencies”.
In the 15th arrondissement of Paris, the private operator Pizzorno, whose garage in Val-de-Marne has been blocked by students and activists for several days, called on dumpsters from the suburbs and the provinces to collect , assured AFP the LR mayor of the borough, Philippe Goujon. “We come from Var (Draguignan) and we came as reinforcements for the strike”, declared to AFPTV in Paris a garbage collector for Pizzorno, Mourad Nacer.
If the reform is passed, garbage collectors and sanitation workers should retire at 59 instead of 57 currently. An “unthinkable” extension of working hours for strikers who claim “excess mortality” in their professions and a very shortened life expectancy compared to other professions. “Our job is not only arduous, it is dangerous and unhealthy,” argues Julien Lejeune.
“We do shifts to keep a minimum salary, we work in slow motion, so we don’t break the strike,” explains anonymously Eric, 54, a garbage collector in the 16th arrondissement, who says he earns less than 1,900 euros gross per year. month but says he is “willing to lose days of pay to win this fight”.
