“Our choice: the environment and employment”, but “Yara chose dismissal”. This is the message of a banner hung on the factory gate, near a fire of pallets and tires. Around sixty striking employees gathered this Wednesday morning in front of the Yara factory in Montoir-de-Bretagne (Loire-Atlantique). They are mobilized against the elimination of 139 positions out of 171 planned by the fertilizer manufacturer since the beginning of November.
This factory, classified as Seveso “high threshold”, has been questioned several times for non-compliance. Yara was ordered in June to pay a fine of 519,900 euros, due to too much dust being released into the atmosphere. The fine corresponded to the partial liquidation of a daily administrative penalty taken against Yara France in June 2020. The State sent it several formal notices, the first of which dates back to 2011.
An alternative project called for
The company justifies the redundancy plan by a sharp drop in consumption of the type of fertilizer manufactured in Montoir-en-Bretagne, known as NPK compound, “divided by four in twenty years” according to it. Yara wants to transform the factory “into an import terminal and a state-of-the-art custom fertilizer mixing and impregnation unit”.
“There is pressure at the environmental level. There are technical solutions, work to be done, but this requires a financial investment. They don’t want it,” declared Philippe Nicolas, CGT delegate, employee of the factory for thirty-three years. “The response to an ecological issue cannot be social destruction. We must invest to produce in conditions that respect the law,” said LFI MP Matthias Tavel, who came to support the strikers. According to representatives of the CGT and CFDT unions on site, “80 to 90%” of the factory’s employees are on strike this Wednesday.
“We are going to lay off 139 people and then bring in fertilizers from elsewhere, perhaps other countries? We need an alternative project,” explained Fabienne Guillard, CFDT delegate, employee of the factory for twenty-nine years. “Our goal is zero layoffs,” she added. The factory has been shut down since October due to a breakage and “the staff have been opposed to resuming their activity since the announcement of the plan”, according to Philippe Nicolas.