Goodyear executives released after being held hostage by French workers

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/goodyear-executives-released-hostage-french-workers

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Workers at a doomed Goodyear tyre factory in northern France released the two executives they were holding hostage on Tuesday afternoon.

The men had been detained by up to 200 employees who blocked their escape with a tractor tyre as they arrived at a meeting with union leaders on Monday.

As they walked free from the plant in northern France after being "imprisoned" for 30 hours, angry staff shouted: "We're not the hooligans."

Immediately after the men left, officials from the factory's CGT union announced they would occupy the site.

Goodyear announced it was closing the plant, throwing 1,173 employees out of work, after several years of turbulent relations between management and unions.

The CGT is demanding a voluntary redundancy scheme with large payoffs for departing workers.

"When you lose your job you defend what you can defend, that's to say, the money. We will go to the very end, even if we are breaking the law," Franck Jurek, a CGT representative at the plant said.

Meanwhile, US tycoon Maurice "The Grizz" Taylor Jnr, who had offered to buy the site but with "zero employee", on Tuesday described the workers as "pirates".

Having already dismissed them as lazy, Taylor, head of Titan International who had been invited to take over Goodyear, described the desperate staff as crazy.

On learning of the hostage-taking, Taylor said:"That's really stupid … in the US that's kidnapping and they'd go to prison. Why don't they get masks and hold up a series of French banks? Then they'd could buy Goodyear," he told RTL radio.

"They're crazy. I mean, come on! Get real. There's no reason to do that. They're not the big bosses. They can't do anything. My God, they're nuts."

Taylor added: "The police should go in and arrest these pirates but they won't … that's how it is in France."

Taylor, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, sparked an international spat in February last year after he was invited by French minister for industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, to take over the plant.

The American responded: "Do you think we're stupid?", saying workers only laboured for three hours a day. In November he offered to buy the factory but said he wanted it empty of workers.

Union leaders responded in kind. "It's out of the question for us to agree that the government helps a kind of mental idiot from the United State come and close our factory when the group [Goodyear] made 51% profit in the last quarter. It's simply scandalous … I guarantee that Taylor will have his factory, but in ashes," one told French journalists.

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