French workers at Goodyear tyre plant take bosses captive
Workers at a French tyre factory threatened with closure have taken two company executives hostage and promised to hold them until given "enormous amounts of money". The "kidnapping" was carried out at the Goodyear plant in north Amiens that was at the centre of an international spat a year ago after an American businessman called the workers there lazy.
"Even if we have to wait three or four days, they are not getting out," Franck Jurek of the CGT union told RTL radio. "We're going to find mattresses, all of us, and sleep here. "We want to go back to the negotiating table to seek a voluntary departure plan and see if someone will take it [the factory] over. If there's nobody, then [we want] a departure plan for everyone with an enormous amount of money."
Last year, France's minister for industrial regeneration, Arnaud Montebourg, wrote to American businessman Maurice "Morry" Taylor Jr, the head of the tyre company Titan International, asking if he would like to take over the Goodyear factory in the struggling industrial heartland of northern France.
Taylor, a former Republican presidential candidate nicknamed "the Grizz", responded with the written equivalent of two fingers. "Do you think we're stupid?," he replied. "I've visited this factory several times. The French workers are paid high wages but only work three hours. They have one hour for their lunch, they talk for three hours and they work for three hours."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/06/french-workers-bosses-hostage-goodyear-amiens