Sacked French Sony workers hold chief exec hostage Sacked Sony workers at a video tape plant in Pontonx-sur-l'Adour, south-west France, yesterday demonstrated a bit of the old Bastille spirit by taking hostage the company's chief exec who'd dropped in for a final "courtesy visit" to the 300 dismissed employees. The workers are apparently a bit miffed that their redundancy …
The one thing I always have to admire about the French is their ability to stage direct action when things go pear-shaped. If they're not happy then the rest of the world must hear about it, we really need a bit more of that spirit here, with crap like Phorm and "the UK Gov DB" fiascos!
Hey, love 'em or hate 'em you gotta hand it to the French, they don't take things lying down.
Blockade the ports/motorways/Bastille, kidnap the boss, who cares, but do SOMETHING.
Compare that with us pathetic Brits who would just shuffle around kicking the dust, bleating that ever-so-British catch-phrase, "but what can you do?"
I am surprised that as many as 80 workers would expose themselves to prosecution for serious crimes. I realize that French political culture may possibly be sufficiently different from that elsewhere that there may not be outraged calls from one end of France to the other to lock the lot up and throw away the key, but, how can France be that different when Sarkozy was able to get elected?
> It appears Foucher has now been released, having agreed
> to return to the negotiating table
Gotta wonder how long he'll remember that "agreement". Trouble is, as soon as you actually release hostages, that's when the bullets start raining.
Can't see what else they could have done, though. Other countries' plebs may seem like chicken when compared to the French, but even the French are little more than barking chicken. Sound good, but still deliver their eggs dutifully.
You're surprised that people whose livelihood is disappearing would be so distraught and angry and the perceived injustice (getting a lower redundancy package than other workers at the same company in the same country) would take the law in their own hands?
Oh, perhaps it's better to be British. When your job disappears, when your savings disappear, when your police force monitors you via video in your pub, when your army's sent overseas to prop up another country's failed foreign policy, when your personal details are strewn in the wind by a government that doesn't know the first thing about privacy, when you're out of a job and out of money and out of a home and your stupid government lackwits and bullies are still living high off the hog - the important thing is to not break the law?
There's more stiff there than the upper lip, mate.
I thought we'd already ascertained, in the forum for the original article about the unfortunate Mr Choudhary's demise, that it was largely the actions of "activists" unrelated to the company, and not ex-employees. Seems the difference is in India the communists are trying to agitate the workforce, whereas as in France they still are the workforce. Thankfully, apart from that nonce Scargill, our own union bosses are too busy getting fat off their members' dues to start killing/beating/kidnapping managers. Scargill got fat but did the violence as well.
The idea of communism always made me laugh - take everything away from those that had got to their position through hard work or their forebears hard work, and make all equal, and what do you think happens next? Just a new set of clever people climb to the top and within a few decades the dumb are the poor again, and there is a new elite, only they now have rule buy communist mandate so the dumb revolutionaries don't even have recourse to democracy to unseat them.
... welcome our garlic-chewing overlords.
At the same time while direct action has been recognised as political activity by the French supreme cout, it doesn't stop the French workers from been done again and again by 'le patronat'. Still it's nice to know that Paris agricultural show visitor record was broken this year.
While there are some decent bosses out there (who work as hard as the rank and file and share the profits from their work with them equitably), I'm surprised that there are not more CEOs, boards of directors, &c -- you know, the folks with the stock options, unjustified bonusses, golden parachutes, seven+ figure (or two+ comma) salaries that are paid for out of profits that more rightly should be shared among those who actually DO the work that makes the company its money -- being similary feted elsewhere.
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