PSA Peugeot Citroen must be casting some fairly envious eyes from its exclusive eyrie on the Avenue de la Grande Armee, just down from the Arc de Triomphe and across the City of Light to Boulogne-Billancourt and Renault’s HQ.
Both automakers have been engaged on perhaps not surprisingly similar, but equally tortuous, marathon negotiations with their alphabet soup of unions in a bid to drive through ambitious productivity improvements.
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And it’s Renault that has breasted the finishing line first, posting a creditible 64% acceptance rate of its package that will, remarkably, see no factory closures and a major expansion of annual production to 710,000 cars by 2016, compared to 530,000 today.
PSA is not in quite the same bullish frame of mind – looking as it is to shutter its Aulnay plant near Paris – itself the unfortunate victim of France’s extraordinary snowstorm that smashed as far south as Paris this week – but is nonetheless pinning its hopes on a Works Council next week to secure approval of its main proposals that also include up to 8,000 redundancies.
Most of those labour bodies – CFE-CGC, FO, CFDT et al – have if not exactly willingly but perhaps grudgingly – signed up to both Renault and PSA’s drastic medicine – which between them will see 15,500 jobs cut and perhaps many more in the supply chain.
However, and as usual, the one glaring exception to union solidarity is the ever-reliable Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), which has stuck its significant spanner into the works by appearing to stand diffidently on the edges and declining to put pen to paper.
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By GlobalDataSeemingly deaf to the plight of France’s economic situation with unemployment now approaching a coffer-straining 3.1m – this relic of a bygone era – ‘Trotskyists’ as they were described to me recently – stubbornly refuses to engage in what many would term reasoned debate.
Only last week, the CGT in the guise of hundreds of protesters, occupied France’s UIMM (Union des Industries Metiers de la Metallurgie) or Metalworking Industries Association in Paris, chanting and fixing up a “strike centre” banner at the organisation’s entrance.
A lot of bravado and a stony-faced stand off later with some heavily armed riot police for good measure, the same protesters made their way back outside for the obligatory round of TV and press interviews.
But that was just one small glimpse into the CGT world. For the past few months, the union and in particular, around 300 striking die-hards, have been engaged in a bitter dispute at PSA’s Aulnay plant as it looks to change the automaker’s mind concerning its closure.
There’s pretty much zero chance of PSA reneging on its plans to shut the factory, but still the CGT persists in striking, using a series of flying demonstrations around Parisian train stations and even on motorways to make its extremely vocal point.
The one snag, the fly in the ointment, is they’re not being paid, so in a show of French fraternal solidarity, they frequently persuade toll booth operators to mount a peage gratuit, where motorway barriers are lifted and drivers pass on their way for free.
Unsurprisingly, this has proved a hit with the average French driver, who in perhaps a more jolly frame of mind than would otherwise have been the case, tips a few Euros into outstretched CGT buckets to fund the strikers.
That plan was slightly scuppered this week with that huge quantity of snow which brought northern France to a standstill – and with it French drivers unable even to take advantage of the CGT’s – and motorway toll personnel’s – generosity.
This of course has a knock-on effect on the toll operators themselves – do they pick up that tab or is it France’s cash-strapped government grappling with its mountain of unemployment that has to foot the bill?
Once-booming France doesn’t exactly have pots of cash to throw around at the moment and Hollande’s sunny promises at his election last year, wrapped in a distinctly left-leaning package and warmly embraced by his Economic Redevelopment Minister, Arnaud Montebourg, now appear to look as appetising as left-over foie gras.
Talking of the effervescent Montebourg – fresh from his epic trans-atlantic clash with Titan International’s Maurice ‘The Grizz’ Taylor and his – er – robust views on the efficiency or otherwise of French workers – the ever-quotable Cabinet member has been at it again – basking in the inking of Renault’s deal – but also finding time to make a highly political point.
Renault managed to secure acceptance – not blind acceptance – but reasoned and hard-fought acceptance – of its package from its CFE-CGC, FO and CFDT labour bodies – although not from the CGT.
In waded the politician with the following from his Ministry: “Arnaud Montebourg hails the transparency and anticipation of [Renault] management, as well as the constructive spirit of responsibility of the unions, both signatories and non-signatories.”
Eh? Does that “constructive spirit of responsibility” extend to the CGT, to which his ‘non-signature’ comment must surely be directed?
There will be many who read that with disbelief, but Montebourg appears surgically attached to his socialist doctrine, come what may, with even the non-signing CGT praised for its ‘constructive spirit.’
Addendum: Talking to the influential UILM union in Rome this week, its secretary general, Rocco Palombella, keeping a careful eye on the election of the new Pope, cheerfully told me in exchange for Fiat’s pay and bonus deal worth up to EUR13m (US$17m), there would be “definitely no redundancies,” among its 80,000 staff, a position backed up by the automaker from Turin.
There will also be no factory closures required and although Fiat has previously extracted productivity increases, its latest pay deal seems remarkably generous.
Only last week at the Gevena show, Fiat CEO, Sergio Marchionne, said he saw the Italian car market falling to below its 2012 level this year when it returned to volumes not seen since the 1970s.
How does Fiat do it?
