I learned a new word this week. “Bossnapping” is a variation on kidnapping except that it is not kids that are held against their will but bosses. Bossnapping is all the rage in France and has extended to other parts of Europe. It is a high-profile industrial action tactic that consists of locking up management executives in their offices overnight and forcing them to return to the negotiating table in a more compliant mood. There have been at least six cases of bossnapping in France in the last fortnight, and the worrying thing is, it works. In all six cases, bossnapping has resulted in concessions being made. Is this the future of industrial relations? Is violence an acceptable part of negotiating a better redundancy package for workers?
For it is violence. The way bossnapping is described, often rather humorously, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a lot more civil than it is. Where is the harm? They spend 24 hours locked up in the comfort of their own offices, they are fed (some have ordered take-away pizzas), they have all their basic needs taken care of and they have no choice but to listen. And I can see the appeal. How many women reading this have not wished to be able to lock up their husband in a room for 24 hours without mobile phones or any other distractions and force them to listen to their concerns?
But this is not a domestic situation and though some of the “sequestrations” as French union officials prefer to call them have gone smoothly and relatively peacefully, it remains a frightening and in some cases violent experience for the managers who are taken hostage. Consider the experience of the four executives of the American firm Caterpillar who were taken captive last week in Grenoble.
Caterpillar is making more than six hundred workers redundant at their plant in Grenoble. Last Tuesday, a meeting with unions boiled over and the three executives leading the negotiations for the redundancy plan took refuge in the office of the company’s general manager. The four men locked the door and hoped for calm to return. Instead the angry mob broke into the office, took away their mobile phones and held them captive overnight. During the night, the union officials holding them captive, who incidentally do not work at Caterpillar, used all kinds of tactics to break down the four executives: They phoned their families and threatened them, they played loud music and kicked at the door to keep them from sleeping, they wrote a list with names and addresses of their next of kin and drew death signs next to the names. In other words, the four men lived through a nightmare and so did their families back home. The following day at noon, they were led out now escorted by police as well as union officials. As they came out they were spat at, insulted and one of them was even kicked in the knee. They were taken not home to their families but straight to a meeting at the town hall to renegotiate the redundancy package.
Is this an acceptable way to negotiate a better redundancy package or is this a worrying trend for a country already suffering from a reputation of industrial unrest? Polls show that almost half of the French population is not unduly worried by this latest development, quite the opposite. 45 percent of those polled thought that workers were justified in taking their bosses captive in order to obtain a better redundancy deal during such a difficult time. Politicians too have voiced support for the bossnappers.
President Sarkozy has condemned the bossnappings and has now indicated that he will not tolerate the law being broken in this manner, but all this within a framework of trying to sound sympathetic. He understands their anger, and he has made more than one promise of keeping factories open that he may not be able to keep. Caterpillar has promised Christine Lagarde, the economics minister, that it will not close any factories in France over the next 30 years. One wonders not only what was promised in order to achieve such a promise but whether it has any validity. Sarkozy famously made a promise in January 2008 with ArcelorMittal not to close down its steel plant at Gandrange. The plant closed down last month.
Whichever way you look at it, this is not good news for France. The country already suffers from an industrial relations image problem as well as from a fiscal structure that often makes it prohibitively expensive to employ people. These latest developments will only serve to make it harder to make France an appealing destination for investment. Pity the workers being made redundant, their chances of finding alternative employment look increasingly dim and the actions of their unions only make their prospects even bleaker.
