They want Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to grasp their fate, a few days before the second round of the presidential election. This Thursday, the employees of Scopelec called on the candidates to act to avoid “one of the heaviest social plans that France has known for months”.
The Orange subcontractor, in difficulty since the loss of a major contract with the incumbent telecom operator, is preparing a social plan which could lead to the redundancy of 800 people, the company told AFP. confirming information from Figaro.
“Management announced the plan to bring together the social partners in the coming days to prepare the implementation of a PSE (employment safeguard plan, editor’s note) which would concern 800 jobs” out of 3,600, declared a spokesperson for the company, the leading cooperative in France in terms of number of employees.
Open letter to Macron and Marine Le Pen
The company’s associate employees published an open letter on Thursday in several newspapers to presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, as well as candidates in the legislative elections for help. A demonstration of Scopelec employees must also be held this Thursday at Place de la Bastille in Paris.
The company provided Orange with the installation of optical fiber and the maintenance of the copper network, under a contract that expired at the end of March, and which represented 40% of its turnover estimated at 475 million euros. euros in 2021.
The subcontractor, who was notified in mid-November of the loss of this contract, believes that he had no warning signs from Orange about the loss of this volume of business, and did not have time to prepare for it.
Since November, when 1,800 threatened jobs were mentioned, “700 people have either been reclassified internally, or left for other companies that have won the markets, or left the telecom field itself”, continued the spokesperson. from Scopelec.
The company, in the safeguard procedure for a month, requests that Orange “really support it in (its) social restructuring” and finance part of the PSE, and that the State shareholder “play the role of impartial arbiter” .
She intends to appeal the decision rendered Friday, April 15 by the judge in chambers of the Paris Commercial Court, who had dismissed her request for extension of the contract with Orange, and “will also assign Orange on the merits because the rupture commercial contracts does not appear to us to have complied with the rules of commercial law,” she said.
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