KIDNAPPING THE CEO

In late April it happened again: french workers once again took their own bosses hostage. Five Managers of the logistics company FM Logistics were imprisoned by furied workers and union members after more than a year of negotiations about job reductions in the company. Around 125 employees of the company stormed a meeting of the management to protest the plan of FM Logistics to cut down 475 jobs, to get the management listen to the suggestions of the union about conditions of layoffs and new jobs for laid off employees. The management of the company announced that illegal measures and violence will not help the discussions. They understand that workers are going through bad times, but blackmail won't any good to anybody. Other protests of this kind in the past months were more successful, as management of French departments of Sony, Caterpillar, 3M or the British Scapa Group may tell.

Especially French workers are more and more akin to take to measures of self justice to make "those up there" listen to their demands. A little recent history: Two days before the G20 summit unionists of Caterpillar France took their CEO Nicolas Polutnik and three of his managers as hostages. They kept them in their offices for 24 hours before releasing them. The US-american holding is cutting 22.000 jobs worldwide, in the two factories close to Grenoble it will be 730 of 2.800. Francois-Henri Pinault, not only husband to Salma Hayek but also director of the board of luxury goods producer PPR, was circled in his taxi after a director's meeting by fifty furious employees and had to stay inside the car for over an hour until he was freed by police. The reason: two of his companies, Conforama and the book and CD-chain fnac, are planning about 1.200 lay offs. End of March employees of the Continental factory north of Paris built blockades with iron rods to stop entry to the factory. They also threw eggs at their director. Because Continental wants to close the shop with 1.120 workers. Almost at the same time the pharma company 3M was hit by protests against more job cuttings during which the national CEO of 3M was kept hostage in the 3M-department in Pithiviers, close to Paris.

The most spectacular scenes up to now happened end of January, though. In Pontox-sur-l'Adour Serge Foucher, the CEO  of Sony France and his HR manager had to spent the night sleeping on the floors of their offices, because Foucher announced that the factory would be closed down. He was freed after he signed a paper saying that every worker laid off will receive a compensation of 45.000 €. This a much more painful idea for Sony than the uncomfortable sleeping of their CEOs. How much this paper will be worth when the ends hit the fan will be seen, but not all that much if it was signed under pressure - as any court will tell you. On the other hand it also shows the inability of workers and unionists to think outside economic boxes and outside the theoretical framework that economy has built. In other words: it is all about money to all parties involved. In the end kidnapping the boss is a very clumsy act of helplessness and of not knowing what else to do anymore.

In Burgundy, the workers of a battery factory forced their boss to join a demonstration they organized, during which they also forced him to wear a t-shirt showing the number of jobs to be cut. "The boss joined us by his free will", they joked, "we are just guarding him." This kind of humiliation of the upper level of management has a few decades of history in France, and as most sides will admit, it is very good to let of steam short term but rarely ever has any lasting effects. Why France? Probably  because the president is very amicable towards protesters, never prosecuting them and sometimes even indirectly supporting them. For instance when Nicolas Sarkozy in the wake of the scenes at the Caterpillar work announced that he will try to safe production in France. Which is interesting because Sarkozy was regarded as a president of the rich and upper class more than of the workers. But at least he made a law which forbids that the management of companies that received any kind of funding or subsidies by the state to pay any kind of bonuses to their CEOs and top level management, be those stock-options or cash.

How the story will go on, we will see in the future. The economic crisis is currently upon us and while some companies are folding others are using the signs of the time to lay off unwanted employees and do all the painful restructuring they couldn't have done in times of prosperity. How much more social unrest can this world take?

Georg Cracked, May 2009.