We will only talk here about private sector employees, while knowing of
course that those in the public sector are just as crushed by austerityand also suffer job cuts and deplorable working conditions. ---- We will
not make a census of all the companies affected, as they are so diverse
and numerous, but we will try to identify the common features that
characterize this impressive wave of layoff plans and company closures.
---- Macron, after forty years of continuous crises between 1970 and
2000, had boasted of reindustrializing France and had maintained this
mirage since coming to power; which does not fit well with the plethora
of job cuts and factory closures that have multiplied since 2022. This
cycle of destruction is far from over.
On December 5, the CGT updated a map of France which lists these cuts
(1): 286 layoff plans; nearly 300,000 jobs threatened or eliminated.
The year 2024 will see the highest number of bankruptcies (2) in the
last fifteen years: 65,000 expected at the end of 2004, an increase of
21% compared to 2019. Nearly 300,000 jobs are under threat, or 40% more
than five years ago.
The sectors most affected by bankruptcies and direct jobs lost or
threatened are in metallurgy (automobile-equipment manufacturers and
other sectors): 13,000 jobs; trade: more than 10,000 jobs; banking and
insurance: more than 6,000 jobs; chemistry: more than 7,000 jobs, with
the fear of losing 15,000 jobs within three years...
However, no sector is spared: agri-food, construction,
books-paper-communication-media, glass and ceramics, textiles, personal
services-collective catering, video games, logistics-transport, etc.
Large-scale layoffs are occurring in well-heeled multinationals such as
Michelin, Valéo and Auchan, but a cascade of less publicised job losses
is taking place in lesser-known companies.
All these big companies that are laying off people are far from being
destitute; they are in good financial health.
COMPANIES THAT MAKE PROFITS AND WATER THEIR SHAREHOLDERS
France posted dividends paid to shareholders of 54.3 billion euros, up
6.8% in the second quarter of 2024.
Sanofi, a successful pharmaceutical multinational, is planning 300
layoffs (Val de Marne and Hérault sites).
In the automotive sector (see "Wage insubordination" in this same issue
of CA regarding Stellantis, Valéo, Michelin): the workforce in the
sector was 200,000 in 2018 and fell to 176,000 in 2023, a new wave of
announcements in 2024 reinforces this phenomenon. The entire
subcontracting chain is under pressure. Orders placed with equipment
manufacturers have fallen by 27 to 40% in recent months.
MA France Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-St-Denis), which produced body
parts, 80% for Stellantis and 20% for Renault, liquidated the company,
eliminating its 400 employees and temporary workers, last May.
Michelin, which announced massive layoff plans, made a net profit
of nearly 2 billion euros in 2023. In 2024, the group (132,000 employees
worldwide) paid out more than 1.4 billion in dividends and share buybacks.
By more than largely passing on the rise in raw material and energy
prices in recent years, even if it meant sacrificing sales, Michelin
recorded record results in 2023 (2 billion euros in profits; 3 billion
in free cash flow, cash available to shareholders), and resumed its
share buyback policy for at least 1 billion euros by 2026. As a result,
the company was able to relocate parts of its business considered less
interesting to low-cost countries (Poland, China), or even abandon them
to Chinese competition. This is particularly the case for tires for vans
and utility vehicles manufactured in Cholet and Vannes, where the
factories are closing.
The Fonderie de Bretagne, near Lorient, a factory manufacturing cast
iron car parts for Renault, has been sold, threatening the situation of
290 employees.
In construction and real estate, the deterioration of companies is
clear, with, over the past year, 16,362 bankruptcies (+27% compared to
2019), and the destruction of 25,000 jobs in the first quarter of 2024.
According to the FFB (the French construction federation), 300,000 jobs
in new real estate will be seriously at risk by 2025.
Bouygues Immobilier is laying off 225 employees, despite having paid 700
million euros to its shareholders in 2023.
In the steel industry, Arcelor Mittal is the second largest steel
producer in the world. It has 15,350 employees in France and nearly
150,000 worldwide. Its turnover of 79 billion euros in 2022 has fallen
to 68 billion in 2023. It recently announced a 10% reduction in its
workforce at Fos-sur-Mer near Marseille (2,500 employees in total). At
the same time, it has not undertaken a major decarbonization project at
its Dunkirk plant, for which it has nevertheless obtained public aid.
Furthermore, on November 19, the steelmaker announced its intention to
close two centers of its services branch, in Reims and Denain,
threatening 135 jobs, which represents more than a quarter of the
workforce in France of ArcelorMittal Service Centers, a subsidiary
specializing in the transformation and distribution of steel.
In the agro-industry: in Morbihan, the American group - Archer Daniels
Midland (ADM) - to which the French "cooperative" agricultural group
InVivo sold Néovia (animal nutrition) for 1.544 billion euros, announced
a net profit of 18 million dollars at the end of 2024. This does not
prevent gradual layoffs: 270 from 2019 to 2024 and, by June 30, 2025,
115 additional positions eliminated
In the trade
At Decathlon, there will be a thousand fewer jobs in 2024, with salaries
close to the minimum wage, while the store's turnover has risen to 15.6
billion euros in 2023.
Auchan announced 2,389 job cuts at the beginning of November, and the
closure of around ten stores and hypermarkets in France... while no
doubt waiting to close others.
In petrochemicals
The oil giant ExxonMobil announced in April 2024 its decision to keep
its refinery at its Port-Jérôme-sur-Seine site in Normandy but to close
part of its petrochemical activities, resulting in the loss of 659 jobs,
or a third of the jobs on the site. 75 companies have working links with
ExxonMobil in the surrounding area, and 12 of them are even very
dependent on it. The company is far from being in poor financial health.
It earned 55 billion in profits in 2022 and nearly 40 billion in 2023.
CRAZY MONEY FOR THE BOSSES
In addition, these companies that relocate and lay off employees have
all benefited greatly from aid from local authorities and the State. The
amount of this aid, in the form of State equity investments, subsidies,
loans or repayable advances, amounts to 17 billion euros per year from
2012 to 2019 and 26.8 billion per year in 2020-2022. Not to mention the
millions paid out under the research tax credit, 54 billion euros from
the France 2030 investment plan for innovation, exemptions from social
security contributions, tax exemption measures, financing through
apprenticeships (20 billion/year), the CICE (tax credit for
competitiveness and employment) which was supposed to be used for
hiring, innovation, maintaining employment and which has above all
served to improve the profitability of these companies, which have not
held back from relocating. Not to mention the structural reforms,
unemployment and retirement, as many gifts given to the bosses.
In July 2023, the Court of Auditors estimated the total financial
support for businesses at 260.4 billion euros. And this without
compensation, without any condition of maintaining employment.
Sanofi benefits from around a hundred million euros each year thanks to
the research tax credit, and it can be estimated that it has received
between 2 and 3 billion euros in public aid per year since 2008, and
even 5 billion in 2023.
In 2023, Michelin received 42 million euros in state aid in various
forms, and benefited from competitiveness tax credits.
ArcelorMittal has benefited greatly from the State, particularly through
the long-term partial activity scheme (APLD), set up two years ago,
which the company did not have to repay.
In 2008, the public authorities granted the Fonderie de Bretagne EUR5
million in aid to maintain employment. However, in 2021, Renault was
selling again.
Auchan is one of the first beneficiaries of the CICE, even though it has
financially solid shareholders, the AFM Mulliez family association,
which owns, among others, the Leroy Merlin and Decathlon brands (3)
Decathlon, which also received public money from the CICE, will pay 1
billion euros to AFM Mulliez shareholders for 2024, after having paid
more than 800 million euros in 2023.
EMPLOYER ARGUMENTS TO TRY TO JUSTIFY LAYOFFS
The usual reasons are given: the poor economic situation, falling
markets, the major industrial crisis that Europe is going through - with
the steel industry and the automobile sector at the forefront, in the
midst of a shift towards electric power, and shaken by Chinese
competition and low-cost extra-European imports.
Companies are closing in France and relocating their production to
low-cost countries. This is the case, among others, of the Fonderie de
Bretagne which sources from cheaper countries and relocates its
production to Portugal, Spain and Turkey; the same is true of Michelin
which has chosen, like most European manufacturers, to favour volume
prices and high-end products and which plans to relocate to Italy and
Poland production currently carried out in France.
As for Arcelor, if its activity is down in Reims, it is because it has
withdrawn from profitable markets to transfer them elsewhere, reducing
the plant's activity almost by half in two years. The group is turning
away from Europe and investing in the United States, Brazil and India.
The bosses, this is nothing new, are playing the social dumping game and
putting production and trade sites in competition not only at European
and global level but also within France itself.
In fact, groups are laying off employees not because they are doing
badly but to make ever more profits, with employees being the adjustment
variable for financial policies.
These people no longer expect much from elected officials or
politicians. Obviously, local elected officials, and even some ministers
come to reassure those who have been made redundant or who are about to
be made redundant. They try to make the pill go down and display "their
full support (...) and their extreme vigilance regarding the support and
measures proposed by the group to employees and the maintenance of other
activities" (mayor of Reims). But some, - Minister of Industry,
Macronist MP - were roundly booed by employees (as at Michelin Cholet)
when they came to show their commiseration and their empty promises.
The brutality of these layoffs is enormous and the social damage
immense. Families and entire territories are affected. Hence the anger
against bosses, shareholders and the State; hence the solidarity
mobilization of employees of other companies and residents of the same
territory alongside the threatened employees.
RESISTANCE BUT RATHER SYMBOLIC AND LED BY UNION TEAMS
The difficulties in holding a long strike are obvious, especially since
management sometimes goes to great lengths to devise obstacles to work
stoppages, for example in the form of production and/or productivity
bonuses which make strikes all the more costly.
Furthermore, is a strike the best means of struggle when the closure of
a company is announced?
The demands are becoming "reasonable": we are not fighting to keep the
job or the factory, an objective deemed unattainable and perhaps not
desired, but we are counting on the unions to negotiate with management
the social measures that will reduce the impact on employment and better
starting conditions. In an attempt to create a balance of power,
mobilizations are being organized, almost everywhere. General assemblies
at the workplace, road blockades, demonstrations, strikes and picket
lines (to block the moving of parts and tools, as at MA France, or to
prevent trucks from entering the factory as at Michelin-Cholet), all
actions through which employees raise their heads, recreate a
collective, and find forms of relative power.
Thus, demonstrations and strikes, and even occupations of the factory
have already taken place at the Exxon refinery, at Auchan, at Decathlon,
at Vencorex (Pont-de-Claix), at MA France where employees guard and
monitor stocks of parts and machines that have become "hostages" and are
trying to prevent them from moving, at Michelin, at the Fonderie de
Bretagne, at Arcelor, at Valéo. There, management did not hold back from
maintaining a more than tense atmosphere and doing everything to break
the strike using illegal methods: an HR manager attacked union members,
strikers were replaced, management monitors employees on sick leave, etc.
In the case of Arcelor, employees from other industrial sites in the
region (Dunkirk, PSA Valenciennes or Montataire-Oise) came to reinforce
the picket lines in Denain. Arcelor workers went on strike in
Saint-Nazaire, to protest against the announcement of the closure of the
sites in Reims and Denain. And a call for a strike was launched in
mid-September not only on all Arcelor Mittal sites in France
(Val-d'Oise, Moselle, Isère and Haut-Rhin) but also throughout the world
(60,000 employees).
In Cholet, the picket line against the closure of the Michelin factory
was fuelled on 6 December by militant and solidarity canteens (4),
supplied with products by the Peasant Confederation, which refers to
"common adversaries" of workers and peasants and points the finger at
"free trade and internationalised competition".
On December 12, at the initiative of the CGT, joined by Solidaires and
the FSU, walkouts and strikes took place throughout the country, to
protest against the "historic wave of deindustrialization" and to bring
together struggles in order to win "an industry, public services, and
social security that meet our needs". Interprofessional mobilizations
took place in nearly 80 departments, with around a hundred initiatives
on work sites (including train stations as part of the railway strike
led with the CGT and SUD alone); rallies or demonstrations on public
roads, particularly in front of companies threatening to close or lay
off workers, in front of employers' chambers as well as prefectures and
ministries.
On that day, the unions had to orchestrate numerically significant
mobilizations, certainly, but which remained symbolic, in order to
maintain pressure on the future government; a perspective which is far
from being sufficient to push back the employers and the austerity
offensive. The anger of the workers is deep, but the signs lack a real
will to converge and extend the struggles.
Conclusion
The unions are trying to "manage" the situation, as usual, that is to
say, they are betting on social dialogue to try to lessen the shock of
the layoffs; this does not allow them to seriously combat the employers'
offensive, nor to generalize the struggles which are reduced to
scattered skirmishes that barely go beyond the boundaries of localism
and corporatism.
Of course, fighting against factory closures and layoffs is difficult.
On the other side, the employers have their clear aim, that of
maximizing their profits and sabotaging any movement of insubordination.
And they are intensely supported in this by the State. Faced with the
social and economic fiasco, governments will continue on the same paths
of attacks against workers and support for bosses: further reducing
corporate taxes and regulations; continuing to pay public aid without
conditions, undermining the rights of employees, degrading working and
living conditions... This in the name of property, competitiveness,
sacrosanct growth and the profits of capitalists.
Kris, December 13th
Notes
(1) https://www.cgt.fr/actualites/franc...
(2) These are difficult but contrasting financial situations, ranging
from the opening of a safeguard procedure to recovery (as soon as there
is a cessation of payments) or to compulsory liquidation (which signals
the end of the activity).
(3) AFM Mulliez, which carries out a quarter of its activity in France
and whose turnover is around 100 billion euros, saw its turnover
increase by 1.24% over one year in 2023 and by 22.52% since 2019.
(4) https://reporterre.net/Ces-cantines...
https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4336
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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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