Next to smoking pallets on the roundabout in front of the ExxonMobil-Esso refinery in Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon, Pierre-Antoine Auger, 36, a Force Ouvrière central union delegate and outside operator for nearly half his life, is demanding his “share of the pie.
Among the few dozen discontented people at the edge of the traffic circle, his colleague shows a stock market article on his phone: “ExxonMobil tops out on Wall Street”.
“We can’t say we’re poorly paid,” Auger concedes, “but we don’t want a loss of purchasing power” because of inflation. Entry level salary? “I was at 1,600 the first month, seven years ago,” says a colleague. The conflict began in June, inflation was already soaring in France and employees were demanding a bonus. The management responds that it will bring forward the annual salary negotiation, which usually takes place in December, to September, after having conceded a 1,000 euro bonus and an increase of between 3 and 4% in January 2022. The management agreed to a meeting in September, and calmed the ardor for the summer by promising “something substantial for September”, that the employees would “not be disappointed”, according to the CGT.
On September 20, FO, CGT, CFDT and CFE-CGC, the four unions present in the plant, met in the offices of the management in Paris.
The FO-CGT trade union is calling for an inflation catch-up for 2022 and coverage for 2023: 7.5% increase in total, and a value-sharing bonus (PPV) of 6,000 euros. The management refused and put another offer on the table: a minimum 5% gross increase or 125 euros and 3,000 euros of PPV. Some of the employees, informed by their representatives, stop work immediately.
“Never seen that.”
The strike has been going on for 16 days and no one is cracking. “I’ve been here for 32 years, to see the two activities here stopped for so long (chemistry and petroleum NDLR), with the units emptied, I’ve never seen that”, testifies Domingos De Jesus Mendes, 55 years old consolist.
“In chemistry, there are 80 to 90% of strikers, on the oil side a little less, on average we must be at 60-70%” he continues, when the management speaks of “35% of strikers on shift, less than 5% on day workers” on this site of Port-Jerome which counts 2000 employees in total. Whatever the number of strikers, nothing leaves the plant “for lack of operators to fill the tankers”, and the same is true at Fos-sur-Mer, ExxonMobil’s other French refinery, where “100% of the workers dropped out in the first few days”, according to De Jesus Mendes. This movement is combined with the strike of employees of TotalEnergies, for other wage reasons, while one in 10 gas stations is deprived of all or part of its fuel in France Wednesday, said government spokesman Olivier Véran. And the situation could last: “the strikers are organized to last, our strike fund is growing”, warns Germinal Lancelin, resin operator for 15 years. Or even worse, because “there is a demand for radicalism on the part of the workers,” adds the CGT chemical secretary of the site, the second largest union with 200 members. Even if an agreement were signed today, “it would take 12 days to restart everything,” says Pierre-Antoine Auger. Management, for its part, indicates that its offer of 20 September – signed by the minority CFE-CGC union after 11 days and refused by the CFDT – still stands.
