Give us redundancy pay or we'll blow up the factory

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire . . .

A group of French workers has threatened to blow up their own factory if they don’t get their full redundancy pay.

Workers at the Sodimatex car parts plant near Paris were told last year they were getting laid off, and have been in a row at the level of redundancy payments ever since. Stubborn bosses are offering them just half of the amount their demanding to compensate for losing their jobs.

On Thursday, workers blockaded the road in, and then barricaded themselves inside the factory when riot cops arrived.

And now workers have demanded the bosses take action, or they’ll blow the plant. One of those taking action told French radio (by phone):

“We have a 5,000 litre gas tank surrounded by wooden palettes, and I can guarantee you we’ll blow it up. The whole building and everything around it will be flattened.”

Yet again French workers have made us over here look timid. While Scottish unions aren’t even allowed to march in Glasgow city centre, these workers have obviously been taking their lessons from the action movie school of negotiations.

And here it’s likely that, under repressive anti-trade union and indeed anti-terrorist laws, such actions would have to be condemned by the official union.

But in France, union lawyer for the workers Caroline Substelny said:

“These workers fear that once they lose their jobs they will not be able to find another one. If the management does not take its responsibilities seriously, then workers will use all means at their disposal to get what they deserve.”

Shocking and radical as these moves might seem to some readers, the fact is you just have to look at Greece and elsewhere to see the violence bosses have got planned for us, the working class. They intend to make workers everywhere pay for their idiocy by drastically cutting living standards, and if we don’t like it there’ll be riot cops to stop us doing anything about it. In the face of this, these French workers are ready to take it all the way in the fight for what they deserve.

Good for them!