ReportageOn Saturday July 31, the employees of the Ingrandes-sur-Vienne plant bade a forced farewell to their profession, not without resentment towards the industrialists and the government.
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It was a dark universe. Charcoal sand that blackens the shoes as well as the cheeks, the natural light that barely pierces the factory that looks like a giant shed, the noise of machines. And an animal heat reminiscent of the constant danger of cast iron tanks at 1,400 ° C running on forklifts. A harsh world. But it was their world. For the 292 employees of the Fonderie du Poitou Fonte, it stopped filming on Saturday July 31.
A few days after casting its last engine casings for Renault, the factory installed in Ingrandes-sur-Vienne (Vienne) since 1981 has definitively closed its doors. “When I started here, the first week I thought to myself “i will never stay in there” », says Christophe Berger, hired at the age of 20. It was October 16, 1989. “Then you turn around, ten years have passed, then twenty… Today, I am very attached to it. This company, I have it in my body. So closing is very hard. “
To understand this attachment, you have to attend the spectacle of these tons of scrap metal which become molten cast iron, this fiery cream which flows while projecting small sparkling sparks like the candles which enchant birthday cakes. “From solid we go to liquid. In the molds, any void becomes matter… After thirty-two years here, I am still amazed… ”, Christophe explains with poetry. And bitterness. “We never imagined having to leave here. The heart is heavy. It is a sadness to lose a know-how like that. They will pay for this technicality not to have it anymore ”, he breathes, half defeated, half angry.
The buyer, “a rotten board”
These men feel “Abandoned”, “betrayed”. A little humiliated even. By Renault, first. The manufacturer has always been the sole client for this plant and its neighbor, the Aluminum foundry (still under observation), which it set up in Ingrandes forty years ago to relocate the activity of its historic factory in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine). It was he who gave the coup de grace by deciding, in October 2020, to entrust the production of its new crankcase to the Spanish Fagor rather than to the Poitou foundry. A relocation policy to reduce production costs, which precipitated the fate of other French foundries, such as that of MBF Aluminum in the Jura, which was liquidated in early July.
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