A strike over pension reform that has strongly disrupted railway traffic since 5 December, costing France’s SNCF about 600 million euros, SNCF boss Jean-Pierre Farandou said on Monday in his New Year message to employees.
“We’ve lost close to 600 million euros, not counting reimbursements to daily commuters and shippers who will leave the railway for road transport,” Farandou said in a video broadcast internally.
The SNCF says it has been losing about 20 million euros per day to the strike, since lost sales are far from being offset by savings on wages, electricity and fuel. Moreover, reimbursements need to be made to commuters and regions that subsidise local transport, plus the expenses incurred in seeking alternative transport.
"The 2019 accounts have been strongly impacted,” especially since “we have not finished tallying the economic consequences,” Farandou had warned in a 24 December interview with Le Monde.
The Brussels Times
