French workers pull few punches in fight to keep jobs

[depakid]

Source: LA Times


Workers at a factory in the northern French city of Amiens set fires to block access to the plant during a protest against the announced layoff of 817 employees.
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Reporting from Paris -- Will threatening to blow up the factory where you work get you a better severance package? What about staging a "bossnapping," and attracting TV cameras? These are the questions some French workers have been asking in the last six months. The problem is, they're doing more than asking.

As jobs are lost, and factories close because of the global financial crisis, French workers have resorted to threatening management with violence; forcefully holding their bosses on company grounds; blocking and burning property in factories; and, in one instance, ransacking police headquarters.

The radicalized trend among the workers has "awakened an old anarchistic French tradition," said Bernard Vivier, director of a French research institute on labor issues, the IST. He and other experts say the climate is a sign of an increasingly grim outlook for laborers rooted to the same factory, often located in small, centuries-old towns, where they have worked their whole adult lives.

The radical methods "are the expression of local desperation, because a person's job isn't just a job in our country," Vivier said. "In these towns it is something that is very rooted to the territory, a factory, the history of a people and place." The workers echo that sentiment. "We're not savages," Guy Pavan, a union representative for workers involved in the latest incident, said by telephone. "We are workers who don't want to get fired."



Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-france-workers9-2009aug09,0,7784068.story

[tomreedtoon]

1. The French are more courageous than American unions.

In a similar situation, the UAW would have its members write strongly-worded letters to their bosses. And their jobs would continue to be outsourced and ended.

The French unions realize what the UAW and other American unions don't; they are nothing but management's bitches. Only the French are tired of this state of affairs.

[troubledamerican]

2. France, the U.S. -- The original democracies, on opposite paths.

My money's on France. The U.S. will perish.

[Vidar]

3. At least France still is a democracy. All our candidates are pre-selected

corporate shills.

[Auggie]

4. The French are feared by their politicians. Ours laugh in our faces.

[Mudoria]

5. And in the end they will still be unemployed...

[tocqueville]

6. On the other hand

those guys are

1) breaking the law
2) often asking for compensations far over than any worker in industrialized countries might dream of, like $50 000 each above what's legal
3) pretend they are "dying" when they get full unemployment fees for years ahead, formations for new jobs and have still access to free healthcare, subsidized housing etc...
4) a lot of them are rather already well off compared to the 10% poor
5) live in the belief that the corporations or the government OWE them a job or that unions should run factories
6) don't want to move

recent polls find that a 50% of the French disapprove of those behaviours but "understand" them, 20% outright condemn them and only 20% approve them full out.

The amount of unionized French is staggering low (6%) and most of them are in the public sector and most unions are politically anarcho-communistic. In countries with mass unions like Sweden, Germany etc... this kind of stuff practically never happens and wouldn't be tolerated.

[wroberts189]

7. knr ..choice quote:

The radical methods "are the expression of local desperation, because a person's job isn't just a job in our country," Vivier said. "In these towns it is something that is very rooted to the territory, a factory, the history of a people and place." The workers echo that sentiment. "We're not savages," Guy Pavan, a union representative for workers involved in the latest incident, said by telephone. "We are workers who don't want to get fired."

[Odin2005]

8. The French don't pussyfoot around!