Over the last few days, both IBM France SA and Digital Equipment France SA have seen their plans for eliminating jobs at their French subsidiaries blocked by the courts. The superior trade court of Montpellier has forbidden IBM France from laying off anyone in its Montpellier factory who refuses to be reclassified as a part-time worker at its factory in Corbeil-Essonnes. At the beginning of July, the Montpellier management had threatened to lay off 44 workers who refused to be transferred to Corbeil-Essonnes after the closure of an electronic module production unit. The court said the management did have the right to do that, but only after a management-labour committee consultation. For IBM France, the Montpellier court decision marked the second such judicial intervention in less than a month. Towards the end of June, a court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre annulled an agreement IBM France had concluded with its house union SNA that provided for the indexing of salaries according to company revenues. A central management-labour committee meeting on Friday, which was supposed to debate the issue of salary flexibility, did not approve any of management’s new proposals. Rather, the committee got the Ministry of Labor to agree to apply the FNE convention, which guarantees 65% of a salary up to the Social Security ceiling and 50% beyond that, to all 1,700 employees 56 years of age or older. Another meeting between management and personnel representatives is scheduled for the end of the month. Digital Equipment France saw its plan to eliminate 446 jobs annulled, being declared in non-conformity with existing labour legislation by a court in Evry, the suburb of Paris where the company is located. The court decided that the plan does not contain the job reclassification scheme required by law; that is, it did not give the court a means for verifying that the reclassifications would be made. A report in La Tribune-Defosses says that the DEC France employees consider that the company has not sufficiently explored alternatives to the job cuts. They say, for example, that the company suffers as much from chaotic management as from too many employees. A DEC France spokeswoman said no decisions have yet been taken about DEC’s next move in light of the court decision. Last month, employees from across Europe marched on DEC’s European headquarters in Geneva.
