Since the unions have targeted periods of strong crowds to defend their demands, each strike at the SNCF has turned to psychodrama. Pressure, the management of the company seeks to defuse the anger of holidaymakers by discrediting union organizations which are struggling to massively mobilize the staff. The prevailing atmosphere before the May 8 bridge, threatened by several notice, is symptomatic of the complex relations that the State maintains with the SNCF and that the French have with the train.
Prompts to lecture the strikers, governments obscure their share of responsibility in the inextricable situation of the SNCF. The State asks him for the impossible: contributing to regional planning, producing dividends, modernizing infrastructure, developing high speed, reducing its debt, amplifying freight. Enough to turn their heads to railway workers, many of which consider that the privatization of the sector will not be able to respond to such contradictory injunctions.
This state of affairs also contrasts with the requirements of the French in terms of regularity, service, safety, prices and quality of the rolling stock. A majority of them judge the train too expensive for the service rendered without knowing, for example, that the user pays only 22 % of the cost of transport on board Grand Est, the remaining 78 % being covered by the Regional Council. As a train can hide another, appearances can sometimes be misleading.
Daily worries and strikes, however, do not slow down the enthusiasm for the train observed for five years. After having shunned the rail for a long time in favor of the individual car, the French seem to reconnect with a means of transport which leaves a small carbon footprint and collective plays. A happy perspective that should encourage railway workers to be agility and the state to assume its obligations rather than to put itself sticks in the wheels.
