“The ax has fallen”: the Swedish-American automotive supplier Autoliv has announced the elimination of 320 positions in France, including 178 on the Chiré-en-Montreuil site in Vienne. Staff representatives began negotiations on the social plan with management on Monday.
In Chiré-en-Montreuil, about twenty kilometers northwest of Poitiers, the 248 employees of the Autoliv IsoDelta factory, specializing in the manufacture of car steering wheels, are “disgusted”, declared CFDT union representative Dominique Leek.
The union representative regrets an “increasingly important transfer of activities to Tunisia”
The reason given by the company to justify its plan? A restricted automobile market in Europe since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a press release putting the number of positions that the group wishes to eliminate in France at 320, or around 20% of its total workforce in France. “But we are not fooled, in reality it is a question of promising more dividends to shareholders and to achieve this, they are reducing costs by reducing the workforce,” accuses Dominique Poireau.
The union representative regrets an “increasingly significant transfer of activities to Tunisia, where a factory has already been built”: “They are dismissing employees from countries with high production costs to make employees work in countries with low costs “.
Average age of almost 50
Negotiations with management will last three months and the CFDT, the majority union, wants to try to “reduce the number of layoffs as much as possible and negotiate the terms as best as possible for those who will be impacted”.
With an average age of almost 50 years, “it is very difficult for these employees, who are also very competent in a specialized field, to retrain”, estimates Dominique Poireau, who also deplores “collateral damage” on several SMEs under -treaters.