19 November 2015
L’Affaire des Chemises Arrachées
by Richard Pooley
Until the appalling slaughter in Paris on Friday night buried all other news in France (even the death of at least 11 people, including perhaps children, in the first accident in the 35-year history of the Train à Grande Vitesse), one of the main talking points of the week had been the sacking of four Air France employees the day before. This was the latest in the story which has become known as the Affair of the Ripped Shirts.
On October 5, Air France was holding a works council meeting at its headquarters in Paris. It had been called to discuss the company’s plans to cut 2,900 jobs and increase their pilots’ working hours. Over 500 Air France staff, mostly Air Cargo warehouse workers, were protesting outside about the proposed job cuts. Suddenly, they burst into the meeting room. Several physically attacked the senior managers present. Two of these executives had their shirts torn to ribbons and had to climb over a fence to escape their furious colleagues.
At first the French appeared shocked by the attack. In one poll nearly 70% described the violence as inexcusable. Manuel Valls, the Socialist Prime Minister, condemned it. But only a week later, when six Air France employees were arrested for their role in the attack, opinion had changed markedly. The trades union which had organised the protest, the CGT, condemned the arrests and the manner in which they were carried out – early in the morning at each person’s home. Jean-Luc Melenchon, presidential candidate in 2012 of the le Front de Gauche, which included the Communist Party, described October 12 as “a day of mourning for France”. And articles appeared in print and online which showed that there was growing sympathy among the general public for those arrested. A worker at a shipyard in Saint-Nazaire refused to shake the hand of François Hollande, saying the French President should denounce the Air France management for their violence – the sacking of nearly 3000 employees. The worker was a CGT official but his snub was widely applauded. Not long afterwards, Air France cut the number of planned redundancies to fewer than 1000. But sympathy for the shirtless Air France executives had long disappeared.
The four employees sacked by Air France last Thursday will appear in court, along with two other colleagues, on December 2, charged with criminal violence. The CGT trades union has called for a strike to take place in protest on the day of Air France’s next works council meeting – Thursday, November 19.
Something told me by my bank manager and his estate-agent wife at lunch three weeks ago reminded me of something which not enough people understand about French business culture: the importance of la hiérarchie. They said that film clips of the Air France meeting on October 5 taken before the protesters broke in showed the senior managers treating the staff representatives with open contempt. Their description sounded to my British ears like what one would have expected to find in negotiations between shop stewards and company managers in 1970s Britain.
For a country which has as its official motto liberté, égalité, fraternité, France is surprisingly hierarchical. Big, strategic decisions are taken at the top of French companies with a lack of consensus-building which can shock foreigners. I saw this myself when working with Renault and Nissan in the years after they forged their strategic alliance in 1999. The Japanese, used to taking decisions after a lot of discussion among all those who would be required to implement them, found it hard to work with French managers who had already decided what needed to be done.
In fact, the cross-cultural training programme that my company was running (and still runs) for both companies came about because of the costly failure of the alliance between Renault and Volvo in the early 1990s. La hiérarchie was a major contributor to this failure. The Swedes appeared to showed little respect towards the senior Renault managers and used their better English as a weapon to beat the French in arguments. The French were frustrated by the long time it took for the Swedes to take even the simplest decision. The Swedes found the senior French managers to be arrogant and their subordinates to be too deferential. They thought the French top-down decision making process to be very strange and mistrusted it. They couldn’t believe that the leader of the French side could agree to anything important without seeking the views of others not in the room. They expected negotiations to be protracted, with many breaks in between meetings so that others in the two companies could be consulted. The French viewed this as deliberate time-wasting, designed to put pressure on them.
La hiérarchie is encouraged by the grandes écoles , the higher education institutions attended by nearly all of France’s business and political leaders. Their graduates are taught to lead from the front. They are trained to think strategically and to use their position and education to make important decisions without the need for consensus.
French employees expect a lot of hierarchy in the workplace. They know that the word of the PDG (CEO) or patron is often final, even if they strongly disagree with the decision. However, they, or more probably their representatives, will not accept it quietly. There is another French tradition, just as strong as la hiérarchie: the need to debate and argue, often fiercely, sometimes violently.
One of the signs held up by marchers protesting against the arrest of the Air France employees read: “Gagey Dégage. Considère le Négociation comme un Diktat.” Frédéric Gagey is the CEO of Air France. He was being told to resign. Why? Because he saw negotiation as simply a means of enforcing a decision that had already been made.
I mentioned in a previous article that I had been present a few years ago at a meeting between my company and managers from Air France and KLM at Schiphol airport. Air France had just taken over KLM. This was a meeting between the Human Resources teams of both airlines and ourselves to hammer out the final details of a teambuilding programme we were going to run for them at various airports around the world. At one point I asked how we could be sure that all the key people from both airlines would attend our 2-day sessions. There was a short silence before the Air France HR boss said: “It’s simple. We shall tell them to attend.” One of the Dutch team looked a little surprised and said: “Oh no, we’ll ask our people to come.”
One of the two Air France executives who had his shirt torn to pieces by colleagues last month was their Human Resources Director.
