Olympic pay strike to disrupt Paris transport and airport on Tuesday.

A rail and airport strike will leave only one in five commuter trains running on some Paris lines and cause major disruption at France's two main airport hubs in a day of mobilisation organised on the eve of negotiations over bonuses during the Olympic Games.

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-euro ($1,086) bonus, reaching up to €2,500 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 AFP. "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.



This announcement coincides with the call for a strike at the Paris airports. The CGT, CFDT, FO and Unsa are calling on workers at Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle and Orly to stop work on Tuesday 21 May. Their demands include recruitment, the start of negotiations on a pay rise and 'uniform bonuses' for workers mobilised during the Olympic Games.  

The workforce is still far too small to cope with the increase in traffic and the growing demands for quality of service,' the unions wrote in a press release. According to a union source interviewed by Le Parisien, the mobilisation, which will affect all staff, should be significant but without causing major disruption at France's two main airport hubs, Charles-de-Gaulle and Orly.

The Aéroports de Paris (ADP) staff representatives are calling for "an emergency recruitment plan" and "the immediate opening of negotiations on revaluation scales". They are also demanding 'a uniform bonus for all ADP staff (voluntary or not/operational or not) working from 8 July to 15 September' for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. 



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.

The French police assigned to the security of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris have secured an extra payment for their services amidst widespread protests and trade union mobilizations seeking better salary conditions.