2023-12-17 10:01:21
They are hoping for a giant demonstration. While the Casino group’s piecemeal sale has begun, the unions (FO, CGT, CFDT, Unsa, CFE-CGC) are calling this Sunday for “general mobilization of the group’s employees throughout France, extended to suppliers and under -contractors, to the players and supporters of ASSE and more broadly to the population attached to the brand” to “firmly oppose the dismantling of the group through the disappearance of the Casino brand.” The gathering is scheduled for 10 a.m. in front of the company’s headquarters in Saint-Étienne (Loire).
It is a mobilization “against social breakdown” and “against finance which is disconnected from reality”, indicated Jean Pastor, CGT union delegate of the Casino group and spokesperson for the inter-union, at the microphone of RMC this Sunday morning. “Behind this financial affair, there are families, human faces,” he recalled.
The call to demonstrate was not only launched to employees but also to residents of the Saint-Etienne area and to customers, “to all those who are attached to Casino”, insisted Jean Pastor, since the company makes “families work for 125 years. The group, founded in 1898 by Geoffroy Guichard, still employed 50,000 people in France at the end of 2022, including 2,000 in Saint-Étienne alone.
Cession XXL
The distribution juggernaut is in a very perilous financial situation. In July he signed an agreement providing for the restructuring of an unsustainable debt, with a change in shareholding with, by March-April 2024, a takeover by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, the Frenchman Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière and the British Attestor fund. But in the meantime, commercial performance has not improved and the group, still led for a few months by Jean-Charles Naouri, has had to lower its financial ambitions several times, before saying it is ready to sell stores. if competitors were interested.
In particular, it provides for the sale of the group’s remaining 67 hypermarkets and 441 supermarkets. According to the unions, “firm and definitive offers” for the takeover of stores by other brands in the sector will be presented to them on December 19 during a meeting in Saint-Étienne. The Intermarché-Auchan tandem has already made it known that it is interested in all of the stores, Lidl would also be interested in some, or even others.
A large sale would have serious consequences for employment in the group’s headquarters and its logistics network. In addition, working conditions can be very different from one large retail company to another.
A “massive” mobilization
On Wednesday, the inter-union met with the CIRI (Interministerial Committee for Industrial Restructuring), in the presence of Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy and Finance. The latter reiterated that he was closely monitoring the situation and, in the face of concerns, that employees did not have to pay for “the strategic errors made over several years” by Casino management. He said he was “there to defend the interests of employees and guarantee respect for economic public order”. He intends to weigh in to “ensure that with the rest of French mass distribution” possibly candidates for store buyouts, “all employees can find a solution”.
It is therefore on the eve of a decisive day that the inter-union wanted to organize a mobilization. And it should be “massive”, according to Jean Pastor. Alongside employees and residents of the region could be elected officials. The mayor of Saint-Étienne Gaël Perdriau (ex-LR), according to his office, invited his municipal council on Wednesday to support “all employees” of Casino by being present on Sunday morning in front of the Saint-Etienne headquarters.
During the previous mobilization, on December 5, more than a thousand people gathered to try to save the Saint-Etienne company.
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