French workers threaten to blow up factory Workers at a bankrupt French car parts factory have decided that the best way to get some redundancy cash is to threaten to blow up the factory. According to Autocar, the 366 belligerent ex-employees of New Fabris in Chatellerault have seized the premises and are ready and willing to detonate stockpiled gas bottles unless …
366 staff * 30,000 Euros = € 10 980 000
Cost of the stored stock, 2million the machine 2 million and lets be generous the building, 2 million for a total of 6 million.
And before you look at me with horrified shocked expressions you must admit that at least half of you did START/RUN calc and did the math as well.
Eventually foreign manufacturing entities will decide to import everything into France instead of building in country as a result of all this insanity. I for one welcome the idea. Now, if there were only a way to make the US unions and big business both get some common sense and a feeling of morale responsibility.
So before it was kidnap/imprisonment of your boss and demand money, now they are threatening to blow something up and demanding money..? Best case you could call it extortion but we have labeled people terrorists for less.
So when do we go back to the tradition of war with France? The travel costs for our armed forces will be less than they are now!
So if they pay, then they set the stage for other out of work frenchies to hold their place of former employment hostage. Sounds like terrorist tactics to me. I say, send in the french equivilent of SWAT and take em out. As for the value of the parts and the building and equipment, meh, thats what insurance is for.
And you be fairly sure that at least the 2M machine and the building are insured, and that any uninsured costs might reasonably be recouped via legal action. The only question is, have those threatening to blow the building up been arrested yet? I'm pretty certain that that would result in nighttime visit by armed police in this country. Are our friends over the Channel less likely to take that course of action for some reason?
@ The RAG needs to end the Pop-Up Ads - pop ups are needed due to all the pricks that use noscript and adblock etc. they are killing web designers.
its a very sad day when we look to france and think 'why cant we be more like them' in the uk the english nazipolice would have already shot them calling them terrorists.
I don't think the word "workers" was appropriate. Acturally, isn't the rest of it covered by "French"?
@Mike Bird 1
Also, if you're going for the "let it burn" plan you can also factor in the income from selling high res footage of a multi-million dollar facility exploding dramatically to Hollywood.
Burn Baby Burn!
"So if they pay, then they set the stage for other out of work frenchies to hold their place of former employment hostage. Sounds like terrorist tactics to me."
On the other hand, years of having not paid has encouraged workshy managerial types to terrorise everyone else:
(i) work for a pittance or starve;
(ii) do what we say or we'll take our business elsewhere.
"So when do we go back to the tradition of war with France?"
Dunno, but I'll be on the French side.
Mines the one with the DPM.
Hey, I can't see any pop up ads ? And IE8 isn't reporting blocked pop ups. I feel like I'm missing out here. How will I know what to buy if I'm not informed by adverts ?
Not sure I entirely agree with Citizen Kaned, much as I enjoyed the Scargill vs Thatcher saga when I was a lad. Breaking the law cos it suits your view of how the world should be is only going to end in guillotines and lycnhings you know. Or an India free from colonial rule. Anyway, it's one of the two.
Still, I'm happy to watch the French blow their factories up, as long as they don't spoil the family camping holiday on the Cote D'Azur in a fortnight by blockading Calais for no readily apparent reason.
"It's a very sad day when we look to france and think 'why cant we be more like them' in the uk the english nazipolice would have already shot them calling them terrorists."
That's because it is terrorism. What's the difference between them threatening to blow up a factory unless they get €10m and a terrorist threatening to blow up something unless they get money/prisoners out of jail/etc.?
You just have to remember that the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is whether or not you agree with the reason that they want to destroy and kill.
> noscript and adblock ... are killing web designers
Really? What are the mortality statistics? If we could deploy noscript and adblock against the Taliban would they experience the same death rate? Enquiring minds want to know. Please don't put Javascript in your answer, I won't be executing it. Executing, geddit?
It's not often that I catch myself wishing Pinochet could be reanimated by evil Nazi scientists sponsored by CIA for a bit of expeditious justice to move the "french entitlement" style of working back towards some necessary economic liberalism (yeah I know he wasn't exactly a liberal, but I'm easily angered)
Most of the above comments seem to be a bit sour grapes as the French workers still have rights, legal protection and actual industries to work in whilst the UK employees* just get fucked at every turn.
*I'd say workers, but with hardly any industry in the UK most people are just "employees", aren't they?
I believe what was actually said was, "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off."
I think they are getting a bit extreme this time around, but you have to admire the French for their past exploits, such as forcing the French government to keep fuel tax on diesel down to a reasonable level, whereas we apathetic Brits just allow ourselves to be shafted on taxes left, right and centre.
"pop ups"
What popups?
"are needed due to all the pricks that use noscript and adblock etc."
Can you show me the contract allowing you to place adverts on my screen? Wet-ink signature only need apply ... Until then, my computer, my rules. End of discussion.
"they are killing web designers."
Most so-called "web designers" are neither. Rather than killing them, I put them out of my misery using easy to find and install software. This is reality. Deal with it.
Back on topic: Arrest the factory workers & be done with it.
MP's barricade themselves in the House of Commons and threaten to blow the place up if they aren't allowed to fiddle expenses any more. Instantly 55 million people in the UK make a PayPal donation of a tenner each to ensure they carry out their promise.
And Paris because I'd like to make a donation.
I don't know about France, but it's been pretty standard for insurance in the UK not to cover Terrorism, skirmishes, civil disobediance etc. for some time now, I'm pretty sure that any half competend insurer could weasel out of the pay off on these grounds.
Having said that, if they blow the factory up they'll end up in either a) prison, b) hospital or c) the mortuary.
the "Global Economy" continues to grow. Let's face it, anything that we produce in Western or Northern Europe or North America can be produced more cheaply in Eastern Europe or Asia. Sure working conditions, wages, and standard of living are much lower than here. The 400 or 500 million people populating Western and Northern Europe, and North America cannot afford, just not enough money here, to have all the manufacturing jobs and tech jobs that can be done remotely moved to other countries. For that matter, even having jobs like these centralized in a country can have devastating effects in the regions which the jobs have moved from. In fact, in some industries having high levels of centralization can have highly negative security implications.
I know you all know this but sometimes I have to vent. Thanks.
Stop icon because corporations need to be STOPPED from moving to less expensive areas and forced to produce where they sell.
And I'm easily angered by arseholes who call for economic liberalism. At least the French still have protection for their standard of living while the rest of us watch jobs disappear to wherever the workers can be paid the least, as mandated by the processes of economic fucking liberalism.
France is so great even if the communist workers are a bit thick, similar to ours working really, at BMW/Mini for an agency for 10 years - so NO redundancy money - Durr !
Wished they'd blown the factory, I could have made a million in Hollywood and be outta here !
Communists never were creative thinkers.
The building can be refurbed and let out to crazy English tourists visiting during August, when everything there is shut for their holidays. It's closer to the Cote d' Azur than Brighton and close by the Central Massif, good for walking, pets, good beer (duck!), etc.
The machinery can produce fake Renault gear for floggin' on MyBay.co.uk, and again I have my escape package !
Need I go on ?
ALF
@ jake:
so, what do you do for a living? you are coming to a free site and blocking the site's way of making money.... you think this is acceptable? im an in-house developer so its no skin of my nose if you use adblock/noscript but remember that noscript will seriously hamper many web apps (you know the clever stuff people do on the web with ajax etc) and adblock will stop people creating free sites, meaning all of us will be forced to pay to use sites due to scroungers like you. remember some people make their living from adverts... you are stealing from them. personally i would look for adblock and noscript and block access to the site. remember, you are stealing from el reg.
@"Web designers should get real jobs...", wow another brave anonymous eh? well tell you what, if web designers dont do a proper job fuck off and stop using the internet then eh? and can i ask what you do for a living?
"And I'm easily angered by arseholes who call for economic liberalism."
I'm sure you never go buying products made or developed by those evil capitalists either. Best stay off The Reg in future then, I've heard that the owners set up the site to make a *DUN DUN DUN.. PROFIT* and the writers are in it to get paid as well.
Of course company owners don't deserve to make money, after all they've only risked everything to bring $PRODUCT to the market.
The world owes YOU a living after all.
Calm down dear, it's only an advert...
Stealing, eh? Let me just get this big bag of bits that I have here (they were megabits but I broke them up so you can have more of them) and put them in an email to you. There, my conscience is salved.
Personally I find Adblock (and occasionally NoScript) particularly useful for switching off those nauseatingly CPU-consuming JSON heavy Flash widgets (sometimes described as adverts) which nail my CPU to the floor and render my PC all but useless. Maybe, just maybe, if the people who wrote them (who I believe are called "programmers", but often refer to themselves as "web designers" because it sounds less dull) got the bloody code right more often and didn't screw the pooch in terms of browser performance then they wouldn't be as damned intrusive.
Do you describe people who ignore adverts in paper magazines, or fast-forward (or use autoskip) the ones on recorded TV, as thieves also?
And remember, there is rather more to The Internet than The World Wide Web.
Before you ask, I'm a specialist in Internet infrastructure. You know, the sort of stuff that moves drivel, sorry, content, from place to place. The sort of kit you really, really rely on.
Now, before you post another diatribe, please go and polish that last JSON call you wrote and make it really efficient, rather than preloading mountains of content into my browser just so I don't have to wait 10 more milliseconds for a div to display, there's a good lad.
Mine's the one with "Juniper" across the back. Yes, the one next to the Cisco bodywarmer.
PS I happen to think that the workers referred to ITFA are on a hiding to nothing - blow up factory, lose jobs, no money. Don't blow up factory, lose jobs, no money. Not a prticularly tasty choice, is it?
"so, what do you do for a living?"
What I do for a living has nothing to do with it ... But since you ask, I'm owner/operator of a largish horse ranch in the Sonoma Valley, in California. I bought it about three years ago with the money I made over the prior 30+ years in the IT industry. We hope to turn a profit next year ... at that point, I hope to turn my back on computers & networking permanently. A third of a century in any field is too long.
"you are coming to a free site and blocking the site's way of making money.... you think this is acceptable?"
My screen, my rules. Make it profitable for me to see adverts, and I'll allow you to use my pixels, my CPU, my memory, my disk and my electricity.
"im an in-house developer so its no skin of my nose if you use adblock/noscript but remember that noscript will seriously hamper many web apps (you know the clever stuff people do on the web with ajax etc)"
Are you serious? You can't be serious! NONE of that crap is truly useful ... the only useful thing to be found online is text, and the occasional picture. The rest is fluff for TheGreatUnwashed[tm].
"and adblock will stop people creating free sites, meaning all of us will be forced to pay to use sites due to scroungers like you."
I'd rather pay for decent content than be forced to waste bandwidth on fluff. I'm not sure if ElReg (which I view as entertainment) is fluff or content ...
"remember some people make their living from adverts... you are stealing from them."
Remember, some people make a living burgling. Locking your doors & windows is stealing from them.
"personally i would look for adblock and noscript and block access to the site."
Feel free. There is plenty of entertainment out there :-)
"remember, you are stealing from el reg."
Nope. I pay for my end of the link, and they pay for their end of the link. That's the way the Internet works. That's the way it has always worked. It's a shared bandwidth thingie.
"@"Web designers should get real jobs...", wow another brave anonymous eh?"
I'm not anon, but I'll bite anyway ...
"well tell you what, if web designers dont do a proper job fuck off and stop using the internet then eh?"
There is a lot more to the Internet than the web. The web is just the pointy-clicky thingie that allows people like my dear old mum to send email easily. It's a simple and simplistic shell on top of a much greater whole. Most so-called "web designers" have absolutely zero clue as to the complexity of the tools that they are using. I know, I get called in to bail 'em out on a regular basis when they completely cock things up, usually because they don't have a proper grasp of spleling, syntax, capitalization & puctuation.
"and can i ask what you do for a living?"
Why do you have a fixation on what other people do for a living?
"im an in-house developer so its no skin of my nose if you use adblock/noscript but remember that noscript will seriously hamper many web apps (you know the clever stuff people do on the web with ajax etc)"
If you turn JavaScript off and the clever stuff stops working then it isn't very clever, is it?
"remember, you are stealing from el reg."
No they aren't. It's actually quite possible to serve adverts without resorting to pop-ups and Flashturbation, but whether and how The Register serves adverts is purely a calculated business decision taken according to how the audience behaves and how much money they need to pull in.
Such talk of "stealing" is intellectually inadequate propaganda, inaccurate for the topic under discussion and reminiscent of the "crying wolf" strategy employed by the entertainment industry to justify their intimidation of the general Internet-using public through legal and legislative instruments.
Next, you'll be claiming that people with impaired sight using accessible browsers (which don't show pop-ups or Flashturbation) are ruining the Internet for everyone, or some other nonsense.
in France, threatening to blow things up or simply blowing them up while foregoing the threats part is a time-honoured and traditional way of expressing bother. I have seen this same approach used by local and regional councils against the central government, and occasionally by the central government itself (cue Rainbow Warrior.)
Who knows, maybe it's all that rebuilding bombed out places that makes France one of the most productive countries in the world (while at the same time working just over four days in a typical week and enjoying some quality of life)
So in short, it's just one of those cultural things: when people in France get upset they go on strike, blow things up, etc., much in the same vein as their cross-channel counterparts bend over and take it in, when they're not busy having their details entered into some government database or other. :-)
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