Conti Workers Protest Clairoix Plant Closure in Paris

Hundreds of France based Continental employees took to the streets of Paris on March 25 to protest the planned closure of the company’s Clairoix factory. The demonstrators burnt tyres and chanted slogans as they made their way to the Elysée Palace, official residence of the French president. Employee representatives from the facility also met with president Nicolas Sarkozy’s counsellor for social affairs, Raymond Soubie.

The protest coincided with talks between Continental CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann and board member Nikolai Setzer and French economy minister Christine Lagarde. Conti reports that the two men met Lagarde to assure her the decision to close the site was related to dropping tyre sales, and that the company hoped the public authorities could help in creating new jobs in the Compiegne region where the factory is located. A French government spokesman states the government is eager for the closure “to be as late as possible” and for Continental “to stick to the commitments it has made.” In reply, Continental says the company has respected all the commitments it made in an earlier agreement on working time, however the agreement contained no guarantees for jobs or the site itself.

The plant’s closure, to be completed by 2010, was slated after being identified by Continental as being one of the company’s two highest-cost tyre production facilities. Closure of the northern France facility will reduce Conti’s annual passenger car and light truck tyre production capacity by eight million pieces, a reduction the company says it needs to make in light of a declining passenger car tyre original equipment business; sales in this segment dropped 20 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008 and more than 30 per cent during the first two months of this year. Continental predicts an overproduction of 15 million tyres this year and total production of only 100 million, down from 110 million in 2008.

France’s government has already questioned the legality of the announcement of the Clairoix site’s closure, as the company’s central works council was not notified. Continental refutes this point.