French workers threaten to blow up factory

[Magda Hassan]

I just love to see a bit of direct action. Keep the bosses on their toes. Instead of blowing up the factory they should just take it over. Just get rid of the bosses and work for themselves a la Argentina.
July 13th, 2009

Workers at collapsed French car parts maker New Fabris threatened on Sunday to blow up their factory if they did not receive payouts by July 31 from auto groups Renault and Peugeot to compensate for their lost jobs.
New Fabris was declared in liquidation in April, so the workers stand to get no redundancy money, although they are entitled to draw state unemployment benefit.
They want Renault SA and PSA Peugeot Citroen to pay 30,000 euros ($41,800) for each of the 336 staff at the factory, or some 10 million euros in total, in return for its remaining stocks of equipment and machinery.
“The bottles of gas have already been placed at various parts of the factory and are connected with each other,” CGT trades union official Guy Eyermann told France Info radio.
“If Renault and PSA refuse to give us that money it could blow up before the end of the month,” he added
A delegation of the workers has a meeting on Thursday with Renault, which had no immediate comment. Police also declined to comment on the threat by the workers, who are occupying the New Fabris factory at Chatellerault, near Poitiers in central France.
The company is the successor to Fabris, founded in 1947 and put into liquidiation in 2007. It was later acquired by ZEN of Italy which is headed by Florindo Garro. ZEN SpA, based in Albignasego near Padua, makes cast iron parts for vehicles.
Garro controls other metal firms in France such as Rencast and SBFM that also have financial difficulties.
Some French workers have adopted militant tactics in the economic crisis, including “bossnappings” where managers have been held hostage in their offices.
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssConsu...7020090712

[Magda Hassan]

Nortel Workers Threaten To Blow Up Factory Unless They Get Decent Layoffs

Posted by Tyler Durden at 9:20 AM
Liquidating Nortel has more troubles to add to its plate. Not only is the Canadian firm seeing a major push back to its liquidation plans by recently notorious private equity firm MatlinPatterson, which refuses to go gently into that good night and write off its $400 million investment in the failed telecom maker, but now it has to deal with its own employees who have threatened to blow up a French plant unless they get preferential layoff terms. The Globe and Mail reports that "workers had placed gas cylinders in front of the plant in the Yvelines area near Paris, where 480 jobs are set to be axed following bankruptcy proceedings."


From the article:

In the second threat by French workers to blow up a factory in a week, the paper said the workers had threatened to stage an explosion as early as Wednesday if their demands were not met, but said the gas cylinders were empty.
No immediate comment was available from Toronto-based Nortel, once the largest North American telecommunications equipment manufacturer but which filed for bankruptcy protection in Canada and the United States in January.
The workers were also bitter about the way the authorities handling the case in France were proceeding, the paper said.
“We are exasperated by the practices of the administrator. A meeting was planned yesterday, but it was cancelled at the last minute,” the paper cited one union member as saying on Tuesday.
“It is not the first time. They have been stringing us along for four days. They have no respect for us,” the union member said.
Speaking on LCI television, Labour Minister Xavier Darcos pledged to find solutions for the workers.
“We are going to speak to each other, we will find solutions that do not require resorting to extreme violence,” he said.

It seems the French have gotten the upper hand in counter-Rattnerian negotiating tactics. It is yet to be seen if comparable "negotiations" are pursued by the millions of business owners who will have no further recourse to loans by soon to be bankrupt lender CIT.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/no...ow-up.html