Wages, Jobs and Working Conditions: An Infernal Spiral

We don’t like to fancy ourselves as a Cassandra, but SUD did warn that after the Grand Accord there would be a new round of belt-tightening, then another as the belt would need to be tightened again and again under the funding system imposed on AFP in 2015 by the CEO under pressure from the European Commission and the French government.
Everyone (or nearly so) understood that the recent court judgement against AFP to raise our salaries was nothing but a pretext for management to announce another turn of the screw on jobs and working conditions at the Agency. Hats off to the Society of Journalists which responded quickly and forcefully to the threatening statement issued by management.

SUD, like any trade union that seeks to defend labor conditions, welcomes the SPQN ruling by the Paris superior court that orders AFP implement a raise of our base wages by 1.4 percent. During a period when management has frozen our wage scales, the court said AFP should have raised our wages in 2013 and 2014, and awarded us back pay.
For employees in France, the gap between inflation and our wage scale is 6.5 percent since 2010, according to a calculation recently made by SUD that management did not dispute.
Each of us has lost thousands of euros in purchasing power during the two
terms as CEO of Emmanuel Hoog, who has always refused to respond to the legitimate question about the evolution of his pay.

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  Paris, December 19, 2017
  SUD-AFP (Solidaires-Unitaires-Démocratiques)