Annual Wage Talks: One Percent Of The Truth?

Management and union representatives on Wednesday held their second meeting in the statutory annual wage negotiations. Unfortunately, management was not forthcoming about AFP’s finances.

Earlier this year AFP’s CEO Emmanuel Hoog said it had been agreed with the government that annual growth in AFP’s wage bill for headquarters staff must be kept down to 1.0 percent at most. He pledged that once that had been achieved, additional savings could be redistributed as general raises.

At the first meeting earlier this month management did not provide any figures about wage growth for 2013, despite various figures provided earlier, including by an independent auditor, showing that wage growth had in fact been brought below 1.0 percent in 2013. Unions asked management to confirm this information at the second meeting, but the figures they provided were greatly at variance with ours.

These annual talks are compulsory under French labor law, and must include negotiations on overall wage increases. However AFP staff haven’t received any such raises for two years now. The talks are also a key indicator of just how constructive management intends to be in discussions on the wide range of issues facing AFP in the months ahead.

For constructive talks to take place we need sufficient information. For the next meeting on October 2, SUD calls on management to provide complete data, along with its methodology for calculating wage growth figures.

Once transparent figures are available, we’ll be better able to understand whether AFP employees should be getting a wage increase on the basis of Mr. Hoog’s criteria.

We will also be able to better understand whether more drastic measures proposed by Mr. Hoog to bring wage growth under control are really necessary. Without that information, we’re left wondering if we are only getting one percent of the truth.

• For more details, see our statement in French at http://www.sud-afp.org/spip.php?article285

September, 19th 2014
SUD-AFP (Solidaires-Unitaires-Démocratiques)