Job cuts, less vacation? It won’t resolve anything

After the Hoog Plan, the Fries Plan: the CEO wants to cut 125 jobs by 2023. “The inviolable objective for me is to have savings at the end … if there are other methods to arrive there — which is what the trade unions say — other than 125 job cuts, the door is open to discussion,” he told lawmakers.

Warning, danger!

Some think that one could nibble away again at our vacation days, which would worsen work conditions even more. Others seem conciliatory concerning our salaries, despite our wage freeze entering its seventh year and the lawsuit about the SPQN raises having been delayed until the first quarter of 2019 at the earliest.

Most important don’t enter again into their game of endless sacrifices! Accepting that logic is to misunderstand the objectives of the CEO. Because the Fries Plan isn’t a turnaround or development plan, but a transform plan to make it possible to privatize the Agency according to the roadmap agreed by the European Commission and the French government in 2014-2015.

“The destruction of AFP is underway”

SUD has prepared a detailed analysis of the Fries Plan and its objectives. The 13-page document, which contains proposals for further action, is published here.

Le Fries Plan is a plan to destroy the Agency as it currently exists and we need to oppose it! We don’t have a choice: to defend the Agency as well as our wages and benefits, we need to call into question the “inviolable objective” of new savings. We need to resist the possibility of privatization and seek that the government fully compensate the cost of our public interest mission, retroactively and in the future. The French state should also absorb AFP’s debt and subsidize its investments.

And don’t tell us that it is impossible!

If political choices made in Brussels and Bercy (the French finance ministry) don’t permit financing the development of AFP as a global agency that is a complete and pluralist source of information with good work conditions for its staff, then, well, a different choice needs to be made.

Paris, November 22, 2018
SUD-AFP (Solidarity-Unity-Democracy)