On October 23rd 2008, after several weeks of doubt and rumours, the management at Villemur/Tarn announced that they planned to close the site in June 2009.
The climate in the company had been far from sunny for months, with terrible rumours circulating and the management denying nothing, a sure sign that something serious was afoot.
The announcement was made on a Thursday; it hit all the workers like a ton of bricks. Even if most of them expected some sort of bad news, facing the fact that the whole site was to totally close down had the effect of a bomb. One of the European managers of Molex who had come to the site especially for the occasion, was almost lynched when he announced the reasons for the closure. They said that the decision was for economic reasons, but this has never been proved. These economic reasons are all the more incomprehensible as just two months before, Molex had congratulated all the workers at the Villemur site on their previous year’s results. Because the fact is, that the Villemur site was very profitable, and we were informed in May 2009 in the course of an independent financial audit - something to which all representatives of salaries workers in France are entitled in the course of mass redundancies (called a “social plan”), - that Villemur was the most profitable site of the whole Molex automobile division...
The immediate reaction of the workers was the reflex of wanting to pocket as much cash and get out as quickly as possible. It is actually fairly good to leave with a lump sum, and it’s a way of compensating for the damages incurred. But whatever the financial compensation, there are still 283 jobs that have been lost, as well as the loss of a company that Molex had bought “for a song” in 2004 from SNECMA (Aeronautics), a State-owned company at the time (and many of the political personalities in Sarkozy’s government were indirectly involved...), the loss of know-how in a hard-hit catchment area, the loss of a factory where generations of workers had succeeded each other.
The announcement of the closure made all the local politicians angry, as well as the public bodies. A lot of solidarity rapidly developed with local elected representatives to help do everything they could to save the factory. There were a lot of skills present on that site, and these skills were recognised even by such companies as PSA, who had classified the factory second on their internal rating of best suppliers. Second, because our management refused to provide a long-term industrial plan for the site; and guess why? Because Molex were preparing to close the site down...
That’s why it was natural for the workers to put up a fight and to defend their factory. We have gone down all possible legal avenues, and defended this site tooth and nail against the rogues of international finance who have stolen our wealth.
From the beginning of the conflict, we saw how cynical the rogue bosses were: we were able to prove that the legal procedure for informing the Works Council had not been respected as early as November 2008, and there were many other proofs of this as we continued our struggle. It was one of these elements that led to the sequestration of 2 of our bosses for 26 hours in April 2009: we discovered that Molex had “cloned” our production in the United States without informing us, and that PSA (Peugeot-Citroën) had known about it all along.
Molex was convicted by the law courts 4 times over an 11-month period:
– February 2009 : Molex refused to produce the requisite documents for a financial audit, hiding behind American Federal law. Molex was convicted, but never produced all the requested documents.
– May 2009: Molex was legally obliged to stop the implementation of the planned redundancies and to justify the economic reasons of the closure. Molex put forward the same reasons as before.
– August 2009: After a one-month strike that started on the 7th of July, caused by a general dissatisfaction with the management’s attitude and total refusal to negotiate, and also in order to bring pressure to bear on the French political class to take action to save the factory, the management broke off all negotiations with the workers’ representatives on August 4th 2009. This is what caused two of the company managers to have eggs thrown at them. This was qualified as “an act of violence”, and was used by the management to block workers’ access to the site, using dozens of vigils for security.
The following day, the workers decided to go back to work, and called off the strike, but they were locked out of the plant by Molex’s private militia who wouldn’t allow the workers in to work! But in France you need a judge’s permission to close a plant. And two days later, the courts refused to grant Molex that authorisation: they had to open up again! The site would never open again …
Molex considered the workers were on strike, and refused to pay their salaries, although it was they who were preventing us from working! This led to a fourth conviction in September. But this conviction came too late, because after two months with no pay, and after having been victims of the most terrible blackmail by the rogue bosses, who demanded that the workers accept the planned mass redundancies against the payment of salaries and severance pay, after the French government’s blackmail to accept saving 20 jobs in exchange for the Molex mass redundancies, on September 15th, 65% of the workers threw in the towel and decided that their elected representatives should accept the offer.
So yes, we lost the battle for our jobs, but it was lost from the outset, given that Sarkozy’s government is working with the self-same financiers who caused us to be laid off.
But the workers didn’t leave empty-handed either, because the severance pay we got was well over the national average (with 62 000 euros on average and 9 month’s pay at 100% to help find a new job).
But the limits of the struggle to save our jobs are also clear. Still, the Molex conflict did create a lot of hope for workers engaged in struggles and citizens too. But what was missing was a strong united political link to oppose Sarkozy’s ultra-liberal policies. We did everything we could to call on the politicians, and many of them did come and demonstrate at the factory gates. The General Secretary of the CGT even came to Molex twice. (Bernard Thibaut is currently highly contested by the radical trade union grassroots, and comes up for re-election in December. The reformist strategy of the trade union approach of the CGT confederation is strongly criticised...)
But the political forces of the left were not capable of unity and singing from the same songbook when it came to the requisition of the company. Yet everyone in their own way had talked about “taking over” “requisitioning” or “sequestering’ the company; they just never got together to put their joint weight behind the idea.
We may also have missed something on our side. Yet at the same time, when you look at the fact that the French government was incapable of ensuring that legal decisions were implemented, we can only wonder what else we could have done.
Sarkozy’s government made a lot of noise about Molex, but they never showed any real will to save the plant. But when it came to pouring money into the venture capital investment fund (HIG Capital) that has taken over the 20 jobs that are left in the plant, the government came up with 6.6 million euros to support them.
But at the end of the day, who foots the bill?
Alexis Antoine