Chanting “Hersant (Philippe Hersant, their main shareholder, editor’s note), go away!” and “Nice-Matin will live”, the demonstrators marched yesterday, under an icy rain, from the group’s headquarters to the prefecture, gathered behind a giant fake front page of the newspaper where one could read: “There’s a fire, Hersant is not playing fair.”
The demonstrators, mostly printing workers, then burned an effigy of Philippe Hersant, while an inter-union delegation was received by the prefecture’s secretary-general.
Gérard Pitocchi, CGT delegate (the majority among the printing workers), explained the surprise strikes on Wednesday and Thursday by stating that “the employees cannot stand that after a month and a half of negotiations, there is still escalation,” specifically demanding “even more layoffs than what was discussed.”
“We expect the State to push our two shareholders,” Philippe Hersant and businessman Bernard Tapie, “to honor the commitments (to ensure the group’s cash flow, editor’s note) they made before the Ciri (Interministerial Committee on Industrial Restructuring) a year ago.”
For his part, the group’s CEO Dominique Bernard indicated Thursday in an email to the group’s employees that the recent strikes, “totally irresponsible,” had called into question “the negotiation process initiated in a spirit of loyalty, trust, and transparency, as the parties were committed to when we opened the negotiations.”
However, during a meeting held in the afternoon between management and unions, it was finally agreed to resume negotiations on Friday, according to Mr. Pitocchi.
Sixteen rounds of negotiations have already taken place over the past month and a half. So far, the unions have expressed their willingness to accept a plan for 133 voluntary departures over three years, accompanied by savings of 2.5 to 3 million euros.
In an email sent to staff on Wednesday evening, the group’s HR director, Gérard Cussac, stated that Philippe Hersant was now mentioning 160 layoffs—a number confirmed Thursday by management to the unions, according to Mr. Pitocchi.
The Nice-Matin group, which includes the daily newspapers Nice-Matin, Var-Matin, Corse-Matin, and Monaco-Matin, employs a thousand employees.
