Despite a court decision on Saturday January 29 which ordered the lifting of the pickets, the garbage collectors’ conflict is still bogged down in Marseille, with 3,000 tonnes of waste accumulated in the streets. The metropolis on Friday summoned the FO union, the majority in the city and the metropolis, in order to request the lifting of the blockages of the transfer centers and garages where the dump trucks are stored, which prevent non-strikers from working.
On Saturday, the administrative court of Marseille ruled, ordering to “release without delay” these strategic sites, under penalty of a penalty of 250 euros per day of delay and per person blocking these sites. “It’s a non-event, we judge something that no longer exists”, reacted Patrick Rué, the boss of FO in Marseille, questioned by AFP, estimating that the strikers, who are now forty on average per day, no longer block the sites. The Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis, which manages waste collection, believes on the contrary that these blockages remain intermittently.
Be that as it may, the strike continues, insisted Patrick Rué, who believes that “the solution does not lie in the courts but in social dialogue”. This new strike, which has lasted 10 days, is the third in four months in Marseille. FO considers that certain provisions of a previous agreement concluded at the end of December with the trade unions around the application of 35 hours, and in particular on Sunday bonuses, are not respected.
On Saturday, the mayor of the city, Benoît Payan, banged his fist on the table: “That’s enough (…), I wish, I want and I demand that the city be clean”, he got annoyed in the daily Provence. And he accused the metropolis of “to bury one’s head in the sand” : “People are going to have to talk to each other, willingly or by force”. The Marseillais themselves express their fed up, in the streets, where they have to step over the heaps of overflowing garbage cans, or on social networks. Some even came to deposit their waste in front of the FO headquarters.