GiFi in receivership: 6,000 jobs on the creditors' table

According to Le Monde, the Toulouse commercial court has placed the GiFi group into redressement judiciaire (receivership, a court-supervised restructuring procedure), at the company's own request. It orders an observation period of six months and sets a new hearing for 8 January, to "determine whether the company has sufficient financial capacity to continue trading and whether the observation period should be maintained". The paper cites 6,000 jobs under threat in France.

So much for the facts. The rest is our reading, and we should say at once what the dispatch does not tell us: we do not know the amount of the debts, the shape of the shareholding, the precise causes of the difficulties, or the restructuring options under consideration. It is therefore impossible to name individual culprits. We can, however, look at the machinery.

First point: the procedure. A receivership requested by the company itself is a management tool. It freezes liabilities, buys time to negotiate and prepares the sorting between what will be kept and what will be abandoned. In that sorting, the shop, the warehouse and the till appear on the balance sheet as lines of cost. The 6,000 people have negotiated nothing: they discover their future suspended until a January hearing. The risk is written in the same letters for everyone, but it does not weigh equally. The shareholder loses, at worst, his stake; the employee loses his income, and often his only source of social protection.

Second point: the classic pattern of crisis. Our reading sees in bankruptcies a moment when capital restructures and when the cost is pushed downward: closures, job cuts, pressure on those who remain. Whether GiFi is here a victim of overproduction, of fierce competition in discount retail, or of poor management, the dispatch does not say. But the logic of resolution is already visible: the question put to the court is that of "financial capacity", not the capacity of the employees, who nonetheless kept the stores running.

Third point: the vocabulary. We read that jobs are "threatened", as if by capricious weather. Jobs do not threaten themselves: they are cut, or kept, by decisions of management, of creditors, of a court. This turn of phrase, so commonplace, belongs to what we call the fetishism of the commodity: things (figures, the market, cash flow) are credited with what is in fact the outcome of human choices.

Finally, a detail for what follows: the more unemployment prowls, the more those who keep their posts hesitate to ask for anything. This reserve army does not need to be summoned; it forms of its own accord with every collective procedure.

See you on 8 January. Until then, the creditors will have their timetable. The employees, for their part, mostly have questions: who keeps what, and who pays?