Les Kelloucq en voyage

Demonstration day

  I have been dropping hints (in French ? in English?) about my longest-running employer’s plans for a layoff. There are 38 jobs at stake as well as a drastic – and to us, unacceptable – way to reorganize how the newsrooms work in that publishing group. Since French law considers ongoing freelance reporters as regular employees, a company which wants to stop giving us work has to let us go with a severance package just as any employee. The severance package is obviously based on our revenues with that company and how long we have working there. In my case here, 12 years! Yes, it is about money and loss of revenue. But it is also about loyalty to people I have known for years and about respect for the work we do together.

In keeping with French tradition, the employees are putting up a stink about the planned layoffs and negotiating hard to change the rules announced by the owner. In the final days of the negotiation process, this has meant a strike and a demonstration this morning to put some pressure on the company’s negotiators. I know this will sound unbelievable to any American reader unfamiliar with French labor relations. In any case, as an elected representative of freelancers in that company for the past three years, I was pounding the pavement and waving my homemade sign this morning in the fine June rain. And I will be back there tomorrow morning for a general meeting where the employees will decide what steps to take next.

kelloucq le 15.06.09 à 22:47 dans Actualités -
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