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The BT21 group brings together several aeronautics subcontractors: MAP (Mécanique Aéronautique Pyrénéenne), Cauquil, SimAir and Caromar. All of these companies are affected by the social plans announced by the BT2I group, and some sites are threatened with closure. Like the rest of the aeronautics industry (subcontractors and principals included), the management of the BT2I group uses the argument of financial difficulties to make employees pay for the crisis.
In Cauquil, 35 out of 75 employees are threatened with layoffs, and at SimAir Rochefort, management has announced the elimination of 11 positions. At MAP, management has announced a social plan that threatens 106 jobs out of 270 employees. For its part, Caromar Techno with its 47 employees is threatened with closure. This is also the case at SimAir Colomiers where management announced at the beginning of October a total closure of the site and therefore the elimination of its 49 jobs.
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Faced with the scale and violence of these attacks and against the closure of the site, the employees of SimAir Colomiers decided to gather this Thursday in front of the factory. Out of 49, they were in good thirty and this knowing that some employees were not able to go to the site because the management refused them the certificate necessary to move in this phase of confinement. About ten members of the Collective of Aeronautical Employees came to support.
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Like the MAP employees who demonstrated against the social plan on October 13, the injustice felt by the workers at SimAir is the source of their anger and their mobilization. Many of them denounced the employers’ contempt for employees and their families. After having worked in the midst of a health crisis, after having worked many unpaid hours, employees are dismissed, with the support of the government, by massive layoffs. And this while the prospect of finding a job is severely degraded by the depth of the current economic crisis.
Gaël and Frédéric, employees at SimAir Colomiers, reviewed the situation in the plant, but also the need for union leadership to get in line of battle and the importance of building solidarity between employees in the sector.
The dimension of the social drama implicating these attacks was present in the testimonies of the workers. An employee told us: “I have a loan and 3 children and we will have to sell the house”. Another explained to us that “with 7 years of seniority in this company, with all that I have given, often without counting my hours, I will receive 2700 euros of supra-legal indemnities”. Suffice to say a misery, allowed by the labor law of 2016 in particular. “I lost 10 kilos this year and I went to a pack of cigarettes a day whereas before I smoked only 4 or 5”. Another worker testified: “we had no recognition for all these years when we allowed huge profits to Airbus and the bosses of the sector”.
Indeed, while the management told the employees that they have already “eaten all the carrot”, that it is forced to close the site, the employees see clearly that the employers mainly choose to unload the costs of the economic crisis on their backs. Not only the management is careful not to talk about the salaries of the management and the profits collected by the shareholders during these last decades, but the activity of the site will be partly relocated to Tunisia and Rochefort. This shows that the closure is only motivated by the employers’ desire to keep their profit margin. In addition, as Gaëtan Gracia, union delegate at the Ateliers de la Haute-Garonne and member of the Collective of Aeronautical Employees, recalled, what matters is not the accounting of an isolated boss but the accounting of the sector in as a whole: “the aeronautical sector made 40 billion profits only in the year 2017”
Gaëtan Gracia’s denunciation and questioning of union leadership were also shared by SimAir employees: “they let us die all alone! “. In fact, employees and union teams, especially in small boxes, are abandoned in the face of the employers’ offensive. But the passivity of the union leadership, which refuses to set up a battle plan commensurate with the attacks and for the entire sector, contrasts with the combativeness that we have seen at Derichebourg or Onet Airbus but also at SimAir. .
While management, as is usual in these cases, prefers to channel and temporize the anger of the employees in negotiation frameworks to have to deal only with the staff representatives alone, the SimAir employees have managed to return all together at the first meeting of the day. As they were telling us, they didn’t let management fool them with stories. Faced with the “staging” of the management, who “rocked figures and big sentences”, who “pretended to worry about our future”, the employees firmly denounced the hypocrisy of the group and threatened to “Go on strike and block the site until they are treated properly”. This shows how what seems impossible in negotiation frameworks between management and isolated delegates, is possible when the workers decide to act all together and not to allow themselves to be imposed the conditions and the rules of the fight chosen by the employers. .
Obviously this path was quickly banned by the management who accused the employees of “wanting to sink the box”. A totally cynical accusation when the group has already decided to close the plant on January 15 and leave its 49 employees on the floor. What the group really fears is that the workers will realize, through their struggle, that they are the real masters of the factory, that without them nothing works and that therefore, if they want to, they can continue to operate the site against the will of the employers. It would not be the first time that faced with threats of closure, the workers, organized in assembly, decided to occupy the factory, protect the equipment and keep its work tool to be able to make it work by and for them- same.
For the moment, the management, by prolonging the negotiations for hours on this first day of the rally, has managed to avoid a scenario of hardening of the fight and to save time by postponing until Tuesday the announcements of new proposals concerning in particular the supra-legal indemnities. The employees are waiting for concrete proposals and, as explained by Hamid and Pierre, union representatives of the site, by Tuesday they will seek to obtain the most dignified possible conditions of departure.
However, the supra-legal indemnities proposed by management are not unanimous among employees who are wary of the group’s maneuvers and who consider that beyond the amount, it is a limited measure in the face of the growing difficulty in find a job in the midst of an economic crisis. The situation is therefore still open and could change this Tuesday following the announcements of the management, in particular if they disappoint.
If the employees resume the path that seemed to take shape after the collective meeting with management, if they decide to discuss all together in assembly, after the announcements on Tuesday, to collectively decide on the follow-up, the situation could still change and open the way for the construction of a balance of power in the face of attacks from management.
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