VA-VA-BOOM!

Following a spate of ‘bossknappings’, blockaded ports and barricaded factories, feisty French workers have gone one step further and are now threatening to blow up their factories in response to job losses. 

Car parts manufacturer New Fabris, in the town of Chatellerault in central France, went into liquidation in April, making every one of its 366 staff redundant with, at most, two months wages in compensation. 

As the operations were winding down, workers decided to take action and occupy the factory. After hanging black cardboard cut-outs in the shape of coffins noting workers’ names, they dragged machinery from the factory into the courtyard and torched it. Then, deciding to get really serious, they placed 20 canisters of acetylene and butane all around the factory and rigged them to explode. 

They are now threatening to detonate the canisters if their demands for a 30,000 Euro per person redundancy package are not met by 31st of July.

Blockaded in the factory with the workers is millions of pounds worth of machinery and equipment. The workers are now offering the return of the machinery (that hasn’t yet been toasted) in negotiations with car makers Renault and Peugeot, the two customers of New Fabris, whom they hold responsible for its demise.

The action has provoked copycat incidents at Nortel Networks research centre in Châteaufort, near Paris, and at US construction equipment-maker J.L.G., in the Lot-et-Garonne region where workers loaded gas canisters on top of aerial platforms and threatened to blow them up. 

While representatives at Nortel claimed they wouldn’t have followed through on their threats after they obtained an agreement to stage talks, the New Fabris workers maintain that they are completely serious. “We are at the end of the line,” union rep Guy Eyermann said. “A lot of people worked here for 25, 35 years. Many have given their lives to the company.” Eyermann called on “all factories in Europe that are closing to protest and do what the workers are doing here.”

* www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/15/french-auto-workers-threa_0_n_233890.html