SFR: the strikers pay for the break-up, not the shareholders

According to Le Monde, many employees of Patrick Drahi's group went on strike again on Tuesday 3 November. They are deeply worried about their jobs as part of the collective takeover of SFR by Bouygues Telecom, Orange and Free. The paper describes a dispute that is still going on over the social side of the deal.

What the wire report does not say: how many jobs are at risk, what guarantees are being demanded, or how the three buyers have responded. We will not invent it.

What can be read there is still our reading, not an established fact. Three rivals carving up the carcass of a fourth is called a "consolidation" in the press releases. The word is clean, almost hygienic. Yet it describes an operation in which assets, customers and frequencies are divided up with ease, while the employees are asked to wait until someone tells them whether they are part of the haul. Customers and masts get transferred. People are more complicated: they have rent to pay.

The strike here is not a calendar whim. It is the only means staff have to exert pressure in a negotiation where everything else is decided without them. The Gazette's conceptual notes remind us that unions fight over the price of labour, its hours and its conditions, and that debates on the right to strike are debates about how much room for manoeuvre workers are left. Yet when the employer changes hands, that room for manoeuvre is exactly what is at stake: who keeps their post, on what terms, under which collective agreement.

We know the mechanism. When a restructuring is announced, the argument about economies of scale always arrives before the social bill. Synergies are a gain for shareholders and buyers; on a payslip, they often take the form of a deleted position. The same notes describe the relationship: redundancies after a good quarter, or productivity gains that never reach wages, make the gap between value captured and value shared visible. We do not say this is the case here, for want of figures. We say it is the question to ask, and that the strikers are asking it in their own way.

The Republic likes to remind us that everyone has a right to work; it is in the preamble of 1946. It is less talkative when it comes to saying who, in a three-way takeover, must guarantee that right. The buyers, who can afford to acquire an operator, can no doubt also afford written commitments on jobs. If staff have to strike to obtain them, it is because nobody offered them voluntarily.

What follows will show whether the social section becomes a real chapter of the contract or a courtesy annex. In the meantime, let us note that in this affair capital is reorganising on a grand scale, and that those who keep the network running are once again the only ones who must take to the streets to be counted.