Sophie Binet does not admit defeat. The pension reform may have been adopted, the unions have not “lost”, in particular because “the mobilization has made it possible to put trade unionism back at the center”, estimates the general secretary of the CGT in a column published Friday on the World website.
“Despite a mobilization of record duration and level, the pension reform has been adopted. Should we conclude that we have lost? No. For Emmanuel Macron, everything will be more complicated now, and the price to pay will be high, ”she writes.
keep on fighting
For the one who succeeded Philippe Martinez in March, the unions “won on three major points”: the “battle of ideas”, with a “large majority of employees (…) favorable to the return of retirement at 60”; a revival of trade union membership, while trade unionism has been put back “in the center”; finally, the unions find themselves in a “position of strength” facing a government “which no longer has either a social majority or a political majority”.
This configuration is an opportunity to “multiply conflicts over wages”, to “bring up to date the revolutionary project of the National Council of the Resistance of a social security protecting from birth to death and building “union plans for the environment” in companies. The text of Sophie Binet appears the day after a press conference of the inter-union, which took note of the failure of the challenge on the pension reform, while promising to continue to fight step by step on the modalities implementation of the reform.
Sophie Binet calls in particular for her wishes “the opening of negotiations in all companies and all branches to win early departures for hardship and taking into account the years of study”. She hopes that the Agirc-Arrco negotiation on the supplementary pension for private sector employees “will make it possible to improve the level of pensions”.
“New referendum proposals of shared initiatives will be tabled” and “we will challenge each decree of this unjust reform”, she promises. Invited on Friday morning by Ajis (Association of Social Information Journalists), Sophie Binet estimated that “at least 100,000 people” had unionized since the beginning of the protest movement, which gives hope “ transform the balance of power in the medium/long term”.
Because “if we look at what we lacked in this mobilization, it is the ability to extend strikes, which is linked to the fact that there are too many union deserts”, with “40% of private sector employees who do not ‘have no union in their company’.