Carrefour was ordered to pay 18 million euros to the CGT. This payment, which had been decided for non-compliance with a court order as part of the deployment of its contested work organization project, was canceled Thursday by the Paris Court of Appeal.
The court “overturned in all its provisions” an order of July 2022 from the Evry judicial court condemning the distribution giant to pay this sum to the CGT Federation of Commerce, Distribution and Services Personnel, according to the judgment consulted by AFP. The dispute dates back to October 2020 when the CGT took the hypermarket branch of the Carrefour group to court in order to obtain the suspension of the deployment in its stores of a work reorganization plan called “TOP”.
“30,000 euros” per day, store and offense
On November 20, 2020, the Evry judicial court ordered Carrefour to carry out an assessment of the professional risks inherent in this “TOP” project, involving staff representative bodies. The court also ordered the suspension of the deployment of the project within ten days from notification of the decision, and accompanied this obligation with a penalty “of 30,000 euros per day, per infringement noted and per store” in the event of of non-compliance.
Considering that Carrefour had not implemented this decision, the CGT summoned it again so that the “liquidation of the provisional penalty” could be ordered. This is what the Evry judicial court did, ordering Carrefour on July 12, 2022 to pay a sum of 18 million euros to the union.
The obligation “no longer had any purpose”, considers the court
The Paris Court of Appeal considered that Carrefour had carried out a risk assessment of its TOP project, before the ten-day period from which the penalty could begin to run.
“Under these conditions, the suspension of the implementation of the deployment of the TOP project”, the only obligation which was subject to a penalty, “no longer had any purpose and therefore no longer had to be respected”, underlines the court in its judgment.