French travelers will avoid getting stuck for a second weekend this holiday season after state-owned railway operator Société Nationale SNCF SA reached an agreement with labor unions to avoid further strikes over the New Year’s weekend.
(Bloomberg) — French travelers will avoid getting stuck for a second weekend this holiday season after state-owned railway operator Société Nationale SNCF SA reached an agreement with labor unions to avoid further strikes over the New Year’s weekend.
Plans to strike on New Year’s weekend have been dropped, SNCF said in an emailed statement on Friday.
Stoppages that started late Thursday are already leaving passengers stranded and were set to run through Christmas weekend. SNCF faced heavy pressure from the government in recent days to prevent further train cancellations next weekend.
The agreement with four unions will allow a “return to normalcy” in the coming days, but travel will still remain disrupted this weekend, SNCF said. A strike notice by train managers forced the railway operator to cancel roughly one in three TGV high-speed trains on Friday with roughly similar numbers expected for Saturday and Sunday.
“It’s a mess for many French who were trying to reach their loved ones for Christmas,” Transport Minister Clement Beaune said in an interview on BFM Business radio Friday. “Some found alternatives but it was complicated and it meant a lot of stress. Others didn’t.”
SNCF has pledged to reimburse double the price of the lost tickets, with the strike likely to cost the company about €100 million, Beaune said in the radio interview.
A spokesman for SNCF said it’s too early to forecast the impact of the Christmas strike. On average, each day of strikes tends to cost the railway operator about €25 million, he added.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne commended the “spirit of responsibility” at SNCF, which will allow to avoid futher strikes, in a tweet Friday.
(Updates with SNCF statement, details throughout.)
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