Focus on France Ian Sparks reports from Paris

EURO-REPORT

FOCUS ON... France

Ian Sparks reports from Paris on more trouble in France’s declining industries.

Anew spate of ‘boss-nappings’ has erupted in France as militant workers react to soaring numbers of lay-offs and the highest level of unemployment in the nation’s history. Just over 10,200 more people were listed as jobless in December last year, breaking President Francois Hollande’s promise that unemployment would fall by the end of 2013 and bringing France’s jobless total to more than 3.3 million.

The phenomenon of boss-napping, when angry staff take their managers hostage, had subsided since its peak in 2009. But the practice has now resurfaced as workers around the country face mounting redundancies. The latest incident took place in January at the La Montagne newspaper group in central France, when disgruntled employees locked two senior executives in an office after tempers flared during a meeting over redundancy pay for 78 print workers facing the sack.

Company head Gilles Cremillieux and human resources chief Jerome Riviere later said they were ‘not harmed’ during their 24 hours in captivity, and talks resumed the following day.

Earlier in January, workers at a Goodyear tyre factory in northern France held two executives captive for an entire week to protest the closure of the plant. There were eight similar boss-nappings in 2009, with executives being locked in offices, a conference room, the works canteen and even overnight in the company lavatories.

A French government spokesman said after the latest hostage taking: “We deplore all acts of violence or situations of blackmail. What works is dialogue.”

Minister for subsidies

The surge in boss-nappings also comes as Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg clamours for the right to give more state subsidies to France’s ailing industrial sector – launching a scathing attack on EU rules that restrict it. In a tirade aimed at European competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia, he said: “While our global industrial competitors get billions in subsidies, our bureaucracy is led by political leaders. Mr Almunia is a political leader who has not understood that the world has changed. It is like Rome surrounded by the barbarians. We all await the fall of Rome. It’s not funny.”

He described a rule that requires all state subsidies above 200,000 euros to be notified to the commission as ‘obsoletism, autism, imprisonment and fundamentalism’ and said fellow EU members Germany and the UK were also calling for a revision of controls on state aid.

In recent months, he has launched a drive to regenerate French industry under the banner ‘Made in France’

While the US, China and Japan were pouring billions of dollars into helping their industries, the EU was hindering companies and preventing them from merging to create ‘European champions’, Mr Montebourg said.

He also released a letter to Mr Almunia which he sent in January, which added: “Unfair globalisation justifies an innovative and revised interpretation by you and your office of rules which have been invented by the commission, not decreed by EU treaties. This is how the commission is working to weaken our industry. Do you sincerely believe that this is reasonable?”

Mr Montebourg also published the reply he received from Mr Alumnia, which read: “I deplore the caricature you make of the state aid control policy. Far from being a radical doctrine, this policy has proved to be useful and flexible. Some politicians still fail to understand that the European economy cannot be reinvigorated in a defensive way through protectionism. Europe will not find its place in globalisation by launching a subsidy race with the rest of the world,” Mr Alumnia told the minister.

Mr Montebourg has a record of public spats with EU chiefs and leading industrialists. Last June he branded EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso ‘the fuel’ of the far-right National Front and said Brussels ‘does not respond to any popular aspirations in the areas of industry, the economy and budgets’.

He called Maurice Taylor, the chief executive of US tyremaker Titan International, ‘extremist and insulting’ after Mr Taylor said he would not buy a French factory because the workers were ‘lazy’.

The minister has also made himself the face of his own ‘Made in France’ campaign – posing for the publicity photos sporting a Breton shirt and holding a Moulinex food processor – to urge consumers to buy French-made goods, even if they are not cheaper, in a bid to keep their own countrymen in work.

He even suggested President Hollande should have used a French-made scooter for his secret late night visits to his mistress, the actress Julie Gayet. Asked by the LCI television news whether he would have advised Mr Hollande to swap his Italian scooter for a Peugeot one, Arnaud Montebourg agreed the government should make more effort to avoid buying foreign brands.

He said: “Firms are chosen by putting out invitations to tender and there was already a controversial incident when the post office bought Taiwanese scooters instead of ones made in France. I’ve always tried to remind public sector bodies to be patriotic.

“It wasn’t Mr Hollande who bought the scooter, it was a state-owned scooter, but it’s something that needs looking at. Every day we’re keeping an eye on this kind of thing.” n