Sacked French Sony workers hold chief exec hostage
Liberté, égalité, fraternité at video tape plant
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Updated Sacked Sony workers at a video tape plant in Pontonx-sur-l'Adour, south-west France, yesterday demonstrated a bit of the old Bastille spirit by taking hostage the company's chief exec who'd dropped in for a final "courtesy visit" to the 300 dismissed employees.
The workers are apparently a bit miffed that their redundancy packages are less than those offered to other French Sony workers, and "dozens of staff" seized Serge Foucher at 5pm and then "barricaded the entry to the site with tree trunks".
According to the Guardian, roughly 80 workers presented themselves for picket line and guard duty at the factory at 8am this morning, while local authorities attempted to negotiate Foucher's release.
Patrick Hachaguer of the "communist-leaning" CGT union "confirmed that Foucher had spent the night shut in a meeting room". He reported: "He won't listen to us, we didn't find any other solution."
Those among you who consider the workers' reaction to their dismissal a little excessive should note that Foucher is fortunate not to be chief exec of Graziano Transmissioni India.
Lalit Kishore Choudhary was last year beaten to death by angry former employees at the company's car parts factory in Uttar Pradesh state. ®
Update
It appears Foucher has now been released, having agreed with to return to the negotiating table. More here for those with a command of the French lingo.
COMMENTS
Vive la solidarite!
While there are some decent bosses out there (who work as hard as the rank and file and share the profits from their work with them equitably), I'm surprised that there are not more CEOs, boards of directors, &c -- you know, the folks with the stock options, unjustified bonusses, golden parachutes, seven+ figure (or two+ comma) salaries that are paid for out of profits that more rightly should be shared among those who actually DO the work that makes the company its money -- being similary feted elsewhere.
I for one...
... welcome our garlic-chewing overlords.
At the same time while direct action has been recognised as political activity by the French supreme cout, it doesn't stop the French workers from been done again and again by 'le patronat'. Still it's nice to know that Paris agricultural show visitor record was broken this year.
RE: Lalit Kishore Choudhary
I thought we'd already ascertained, in the forum for the original article about the unfortunate Mr Choudhary's demise, that it was largely the actions of "activists" unrelated to the company, and not ex-employees. Seems the difference is in India the communists are trying to agitate the workforce, whereas as in France they still are the workforce. Thankfully, apart from that nonce Scargill, our own union bosses are too busy getting fat off their members' dues to start killing/beating/kidnapping managers. Scargill got fat but did the violence as well.
The idea of communism always made me laugh - take everything away from those that had got to their position through hard work or their forebears hard work, and make all equal, and what do you think happens next? Just a new set of clever people climb to the top and within a few decades the dumb are the poor again, and there is a new elite, only they now have rule buy communist mandate so the dumb revolutionaries don't even have recourse to democracy to unseat them.
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