International: Airbus and Alcatel-Lucent protests highlight rise of the 'Euro-strike'
Europe-wide protests in March 2007 at Airbus and Alcatel-Lucent are the latest examples of a growing tendency for trade unions and European Works Councils to organise forms of coordinated industrial action over restructuring and jobs losses in multinational companies.
On this page:
Airbus
European action day
Franco-German tensions?
Alcatel–Lucent
European rally
EWC court case
Trend towards Europe-wide action
Resources
AIRBUS
In February 2007, the EADS aerospace and defence group – headquartered in the Netherlands, but with its main shareholders in France, Germany and Spain – announced a restructuring programme entitled “Power 8” for Airbus, its aircraft manufacturing division. Airbus has a direct workforce of 57,000, with a further 30,000 employed by subcontractors.
The plan, presented to the Airbus European Works Council (EWC) on 28 February, seeks to tackle problems such as increased competitive pressure, the financial burden related to delays in producing the new A380 “super-jumbo” aircraft, and the weakness of the US dollar. Cost-cutting measures include a reduction in the Airbus European workforce of 10,000 (including temporary workers and the workforce of on-site suppliers) over four years – with 4,300 job losses in France, 3,700 in Germany, 1,600 in the UK and 400 in Spain. According to management, the workforce reduction will be achieved through voluntary departures and early retirement, without compulsory redundancies.
Airbus will consider “industrial partnerships” for its plants at Filton (UK), Méaulte (France) and Nordenham (Germany), which might include external parties investing in these sites and possibly taking partial or full control. It will also seek “viable future opportunities” for the sites at Laupheim (Germany), Saint Nazaire (France) and Varel (Germany), which include options to sell them to key suppliers, management buy-outs, or combining the sites with others nearby.
Management had been drawing up the Power 8 plan since summer 2006 and the process had caused some friction between France and Germany, where the main EADS shareholders and sites are located. The issue even featured in the campaign for the forthcoming French presidential election, with the candidates all visiting Airbus plants and expressing their support. German politicians were critical of what they saw as attempts to influence the Airbus restructuring plans through political and media pressure, with accusations of electioneering.
European action day
In February, the European Metalworkers’ Federation (EMF) organised a meeting of its EADS trade union coordination group – made up of union and works council representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK – to discuss the Airbus restructuring plan and their response. Participants drew up a “joint platform”1 to be sent to management and agreed to hold a “European action day” in March to promote the platform and “give a clear demonstration of their solidarity”.
The form that this EMF-coordinated action was to take – work stoppages, strikes, plant assemblies and demonstrations – depended on the legal possibilities open to unions in each country as well as their national practice. Meanwhile, French unions held a “national action day” on 6 March as part of the overall European campaign.
The European action day was held on 16 March and involved tens of thousands of workers across Airbus’s sites in France, Germany, Spain and the UK.
In Germany, where two or three Airbus factories may be sold off, strikes were held at all production sites and a demonstration in Hamburg drew 20,000 protesters, according to the unions (10,000 according to the police) and was supported by local politicians. At the Laupheim site, 2,000 workers formed a human chain around the premises.
In France, the unions organised a rally at the company’s Blagnac site in Toulouse, which they said was attended by 7,000 (5,500, according to the police) employees of Airbus and its subcontractors, including small groups of German and UK workers. Further demonstrations drew 4,000 protesters in Saint Nazaire and Méaulte. Two-hour strikes were held at the Saint Nazaire, Nantes and Méaulte plants.
In Spain, unions claim that 80% of the 9,000-strong workforce at seven sites participated in a one-hour stoppage. UK unions organised a protest demonstration attended by “several thousand” workers in Chester, near the Airbus site at Broughton. A “symbolic” demonstration was held in front of the EADS headquarters in Paris, with 250 demonstrators joined by a Belgian delegation representing workers in supplier companies.
Peter Scherrer, the EMF general secretary, attended the Paris demonstration and stated: “Airbus is a European project which needs European solutions. Airbus is a European success that Europeans should continue to be proud of. Today, we are successfully undertaking a European action day to demonstrate our unity and European solidarity with regard to safeguarding the future of Airbus and European jobs.”
Franco-German tensions?
According to some observers, the apparent trade union unity on 16 March masked some tensions between French and German unions. They point out that the EMF had originally envisaged a single protest demonstration in Brussels, rather than the “decentralised” actions across Europe – although the EMF attributes this to practical difficulties, rather than any Franco-German disagreements.
A number of officials of the FO, the majority trade union at Airbus in France, stated publicly that Germany was treated better under the Power 8 plan than France, while the CFE-CGC managerial and professional union claimed that there had been a “purely political” deal that did not “take account of the economic and industrial realities”. However, the CGT and CDFT unions called for cross-border union unity, while in Germany the IG Metall union stated that “we should not make the error of reproaching each other – what is important is to oppose the Power 8 plan together”, irrespective of “differences of mentality and of legislation”. The chair of the IG Metall organisation in Northern Germany, Jutta Blankau, claimed that there was good cooperation with the French unions, despite reports to the contrary in the German press. He added that “the only union which has a ‘populist’ attitude is a small one which is close to the management” – a reference to the CFE-CGC.
France union officials have threatened further, tougher action, if management refuses to negotiate over the Power 8 plan.
ALCATEL-LUCENT
Alcatel-Lucent is a telecommunications multinational formed in autumn 2006 by the merger of the France-based Alcatel and the US-based Lucent. On 9 February 2007, management announced that it would cut its worldwide workforce of 80,000 by 12,500, as part of a plan to make savings of € 1.7 billion over three years. When the plan was presented to the Alcatel-Lucent EWC on 23 February, it was reportedly announced that the job losses would include 1,470 jobs in France, 880 in Germany, 310 in Spain, 250–280 in Italy, 140–180 in the Netherlands and 140 in Belgium. The total workforce reduction in Europe will be 4,500; and some European operations are reportedly to be relocated to Asia.
European rally
The EMF’s Alcatel-Lucent trade union coordination group met on 1 March 2007 and decided to organise a protest rally of workers from across the company’s European operations in Paris on 15 March, the eve of an extraordinary meeting of the EWC called to discuss the details of the restructuring plan. The demonstration was attended by 3,000–5,000 participants, mainly workers from Alcatel-Lucent’s French operations, but including several hundred from Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. They marched behind a banner stating, in French and German, “For employment in Europe – against relocations”.
According to Alain Hurstel, the secretary of the Alcatel-Lucent EWC, the demonstration was a “very, very great success and an important stage in our mobilisation”. He added that employees had “reacted strongly to the call for mobilisation with a view to maintaining a strong research and innovation capacity and preserving quality jobs in Europe”. David Hollis of IG Metall stated that: “It’s not the colleagues in Shanghai or Bombay who are our enemies. The enemy is bad management,” while for the EMF Charles Sasso argued: “It is urgent to draw up an offensive industrial policy at European level, via framework programmes, in order to boost the telecommunications technology industry in Europe and develop the jobs of the future.”
For Jean-François Le Duigou, the confederal secretary of France’s CGT confederation, the rally demonstrated that joint action could be developed by unions from around Europe and that they are “not limited to defending our own jobs … The issue is not the sharing of sacrifices between workers in each country, but fighting together all workforce reductions and the financial logic that is taking priority over industrial logic.”
At the EWC meeting on 16 March, management confirmed the restructuring and job losses, which it said were a consequence of duplication of activities following the merger of Alcatel and Lucent.
EWC court case
The Alcatel-Lucent EWC claims that management has not fulfilled its information and consultation obligations over the restructuring plan. It alleges that the information provided to employee representatives on the EWC neither provides a clear picture of the group’s medium- and long-term strategy nor enables employees to anticipate which sites or jobs will be affected. The EWC employee representatives have thus brought a case in a Paris court seeking an injunction forcing the company to divulge additional information on the restructuring. According to Hurstel, the representatives “are still not in possession of official management documents that would enable them to judge, in economic and social terms, the appropriateness of this plan”. The case was due to be heard shortly after we went to press.
TREND TOWARDS EUROPE-WIDE ACTION
The protests at Airbus and Alcatel-Lucent are the latest in a series of such coordinated Europe-wide actions in response to companies’ restructuring plans, often expressing opposition both to the plans themselves and to perceived information and consultation failures on the part of management over the changes. The context is a continuing wave of cross-border restructuring by multinational companies, involving workforce reductions, plant closures and in some cases relocation of production.
The first such “Euro-strike” is generally thought to have occurred at Renault (France, automotive) in 1997 after management announced the closure of the Vilvoorde plant in Belgium. The EMF and Renault EWC organised one-hour strikes at Renault plants in Belgium, France and Spain, with support expressed by employees in other countries, and contributed to a campaign of solidarity actions, which included demonstrations at Renault headquarters near Paris and in Brussels. In the decade since, notable examples of European-scale action over restructuring have included:
Such protests and days of action are usually organised by national and European-level trade union organisations, often in conjunction with EWCs. They generally involve (as at Airbus) simultaneous actions across the multinational’s various European operations – ranging from short work stoppages to rallies and information meetings, with the nature of the activity varying from country to country – and/or (as at Alcatel-Lucent) a demonstration involving workers from a number of countries, often at the company’s headquarters or at a shareholders’ meeting. Only in rare cases are actual strikes involved, and then only brief ones.
The increasing coordination of action across borders in some multinationals reflects stronger links between workers’ representatives, through EWCs and networks organised by European-level trade union organisations. Most of the companies involved have been in manufacturing sectors, and the EMF has a particularly well developed policy in this area, as the Airbus and Alcatel-Lucent cases show. It has drawn up guidelines on dealing with transnational company restructuring2 (adopted in 2005), aimed at promoting workers’ interests in the process and preventing workforces in different locations being “played off” against each other. The EMF strategy includes setting up a European coordination group for the unions organising in the company, drawing up common demands and seeking an agreement on them, backed by cross-border mobilisation and “European days of action”.
Alongside such protests, a small but growing number of EWCs are turning to the courts in an attempt to remedy perceived failings in the information and consultation procedure over cross-border restructuring, as illustrated by the Alcatel-Lucent case. A notable victory came in November 2006 when the Gaz de France (GdF) EWC obtained an injunction halting the merger process between GdF and another France-based utilities group, Suez, until the former had properly met its information and consultation obligations to its EWC. Shortly afterwards, a Brussels court issued an injunction preventing British Airways from outsourcing its customer services department at Vienna airport until its EWC had been properly informed and consulted. Earlier cases, brought by EWCs with varying degrees of success, had included Renault in 1997, Otis (US, lifts) in 1997, Panasonic (Japan, electronics) in 1998 and Alstom (France, engineering) in 2003.
Finally, the Airbus case illustrates the difficulties of pan-European workforce unity in the face of company restructuring. This requires trade unions in each country concerned to overcome “economic nationalism”, and it can be problematic for them to engage in true cross-border solidarity out of fear of losing their bargaining power at national level, or because they are under pressure first and foremost to defend members’ jobs in their home country.
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RESOURCES 1. “A platform for the future of a technological frontrunner” can be found on the EMF website. 2. The EMF website also provides guidelines for transnational restructuring. |
This article is partly based on material submitted by Christophe Boulay, European Employment Review correspondent for France.
