Workers at New Fabris, a bankrupt French car parts supplier, are ready to blow up their factory unless carmakers Renault and PSA-Peugeot pay them compensation, a union official said on Sunday.
The 366 employees are occupying the plant in central-eastern Chatellerault to demand that the auto giants, who accounted for 90 per cent of their business, pay 30,000 euros ($42,000) to each worker.
CGT union official and secretary of the company works council Guy Eyermann said that ‘the gas bottles are in the factory. Everything has been planned for it to blow up’, unless there is an accord by July 31.
The Chatellerault factory is thought to house car parts worth some two million euros, as well as a new Renault machine estimated at a further two million, the CGT union leader added.
He warned: ‘We are not going to let PSA and Renault wait until August or September to recover the spare parts and machines still in the factory.
‘If we get nothing, they get nothing at all.’
Eyermann said two coachloads of workers had visited Peugeot headquarters last week, and a similar delegation would, on Thursday, head to Paris to visit Renault bosses and the French employment ministry to try to negotiate a settlement.
They hope to force the Sarkozy government to put pressure on the carmakers, which both received public funds to help them through the global downturn.
The New Fabris workers, whose employer was declared bankrupt on June 16, insist that Renault and PSA paid some 30,000 euros to 200 workers laid off from another supplier, the aluminium specialist Rencast.
