Bank manager being awkward? In urgent need of cash? Then maybe you should take a leaf out of the French negotiating book.
Consider, for instance, the employees of Préciturn, a small engineering company, who occupied a branch of RBS after being told that their jobs were in jeopardy.
Two senior bank executives were forced to sleep on an office floor while union members demanded a U-turn. In the morning, the bankers — tired, hungry and dishevelled — caved in and signed a cheque for €149,000 (£135,000), which kept Préciturn afloat.
They are by no means the only managers who have spent an uncomfortable night in France in recent weeks.
Their counterparts at Sony, the electronics giant, 3M, the Scotch-tape manufacturer, Caterpillar, the heavy equipment specialist, and Michelin, the tyre maker, have all been held against their will by employees.
Executives at Continental, the tyre manufacturer, escaped the same fate by slipping out of a side door while staff performed a mock execution. The spate of bossnappings is being orchestrated by ordinary people angry by the state of the economy. Unemployment is rising by 4,000 a day, national wealth is set to shrink by up to 3.3 per cent this year and anti-capitalist sentiment is fuelled by reports of multimillion-euro bonuses and golden parachutes.
Take Gérard Sugier, who is part of the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail union. He was among the 104 workers who lost their jobs at Préciturn in Thiers, central France, after it was taken over in January, but when he heard that the remaining 135 employees could lose their jobs too because of RBS his blood boiled.
Mr Sugier led 42 colleagues to the Lyons branch of RBS Factor, which had agreed to guarantee Préciturn deals worth €500,000 only to change its mind a day later.
“I was going to pretend to be a delivery man to get in,” Mr Sugier said. “But when I rang on the bell, they just opened the door so we all marched through. They didn’t try to resist — it takes a lot to stop 42 metal workers.”
Olivier Douin, the managing director of RBS Factor, and Sylvain Loiseau, his deputy, caught a high-speed train from Paris to oversee the talks. “We told them that without their guarantee, the business was in trouble, our salaries wouldn’t be paid . . . and we said we weren’t leaving until they agreed to a renegotiation,” Mr Sugier said.
Mr Douin and Mr Loiseau were not technically bossnapped, according to Mr Sugier, who said that they were free to go to a hotel if they wished. “But since we weren’t budging, they didn’t dare to leave us in the branch on our own,” he said. “We’d organised our own food and we had pizzas, sandwiches, cheese, saucisson and beer. We asked them to pay for the meal but they refused, so we didn’t share it.”
The workers emerged as heroes. Matthieu Burthey, their chief executive, said that they rescued the business.
Public opinion is behind the bossnappers. President Sarkozy, fearful of a social explosion of the sort that has rocked France so often in the past, has avoided the suggestion that bossnappings might be wrong and pledged support for protesting workers.
Most have got their way. The employees of the Sony factory in southwest France, which is to close with the loss of 311 jobs, won a commitment from the group to add €13 million to the redundancy package by holding their chief executive for a night.
And the 3M staff in central France, where 110 jobs are to be shed, gained ten months’ redundancy pay by taking the director Luc Rousselethostage.
There is concern that such incidents may prove counterproductive. Guy Groux, a research director at the Centre for Studies of French Political Life, said that employers were “very afraid for the image of France”.
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