A Tuesday rail strike over bonuses for Paris' July-August Olympic Games period will leave just one in five suburban commuter trains running on some lines in the French capital, operator SNCF said on Sunday, May 20.
Traffic will be "very severely disrupted," SNCF said, with certain lines suspended outside peak hours. The operator's Transilien Paris regional network has urged people to work from home or find alternate transport on Tuesday, which follows a Monday public holiday.
Rail workers' unions are pressuring SNCF in negotiations over bonuses for working through the Olympic period. Their counterparts at transport operator RATP, which runs metro and bus services in Paris, have already secured an average €1,000 ($1,086) bonus, reaching up to 2,500 euros for the most in-demand train and bus drivers.
"We thought the talks were dragging on a bit and wanted to provoke something," Fabien Villedieu of the SUD-Rail union told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Friday. "We have a heavy workload with 4,500 additional trains in August, so a whole range of our colleagues won't be able to go on holiday," he added.
Strikes and threats of industrial action during the Games have marked the months leading up to the event, including from rubbish collectors and government and medical workers.
Rubbish collectors this month won a pay rise on top of an Olympic bonus, heading off multiple days of walkouts flagged for later in May and over the period of the Games.