union tactics

Earlier this year, there was a rash of "boss-nappings" by French workers: the seizure overnight, or for a couple of days, of executives in an attempt to improve redundancy terms. The incidents became so common that they ceased to command media attention.
Kidnapping bosses is no longer in vogue in France. The new publicity-seeking trend among redundancy-threatened workers is to threaten to blow up their own factory.

Almost 500 employees of the insolvent Canadian-owned telecommunications company Nortel warned this week that they would detonate 12 large gas cylinders at their plant in Châteaufort, west of Paris, unless they each received €100,000 in redundancy pay.

366 employees of New Fabris, a bankrupt car parts plant at Chatellerault in central France, threatened to detonate gas cylinders in their factory unless they each received €30,000 in redundancy pay by the end of the month.

"We have got the media coverage we wanted. The gas cylinders were a symbolic act to show that we had been pushed to the limit," said Christian Berenbach, the local representative of the moderate trades union federation the CFTC. "We are not terrorists or bandits, just the victim of a... financial scandal."

SOYMB neither condemns nor endorses such trade union tactics. SOYMB would perhaps tend to sympathise with the words of Eugene Debs :-
"I can have no respect for capitalist property laws, nor the least scruple about breaking them. I hold all such laws to have been enacted through chicanery, fraud and corruption, with the sole end in view, of dispossessing, robbing and enslaving the working class. But this does not imply that I propose making an individual lawbreaker of myself and butting my head against the stone wall of existing property laws. I am law-abiding under protest – not from scruple – and bide my time."