VIDEO. Toulouse: “The management of Thalès Alenia Space is jeopardizing the company’s sustainability”, denounce the unions who fear more than 1,000 job cuts

According to the management of the Franco-Italian joint venture Thalès Alenia Space (TAS), whose Toulouse site (avenue Jean-François Champollion) celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year, the “adaptation plan” does not provide for “layoffs but a redeployment” for the 1,237 positions in Europe, including nearly 1,000 in France and two thirds in Toulouse.

For the international satellite manufacturer, which recorded a turnover of 2.2 billion euros in 2023 and employs 8,600 people in its seventeen sites around the world, times are tough on the telecommunications market. It is indeed difficult to fight against the wave of satellites from Elon Musk’s company Space X, but TAS management assures that this “adaptation plan will allow the company to regain its competitiveness”. The 1,237 employees will not be made redundant but redeployed to the group’s sites, management says.

“Against this redeployment”

“Lie,” shouted the CGC-CFE, CGT, CFDT and FO unions in unison, who organized a rally in front of the company on Tuesday, September 17, to inform the 650 Toulouse employees of a more than uncertain future in the field of geostationary satellites. “This is the active management of job number 2 – we have already had a GAE in 2023 – and we are against this redeployment, assures Pierre Tommasi (CGT). The management figures or the outlook for the global satellite market clearly show that it is not legitimate. Redeploying jobs would harm the feasibility of the programs still to be undertaken.”

Competition in the global satellite market

The drop in productivity put forward by TAS management (only seven reprogrammable digital satellites in three years) is not, according to the unions, an admissible argument. “This is a lie by omission. Our workload plan is sustainable until 2026 and the space market is absolutely not collapsing, even for large satellites, it is in fact growing constantly”, adds the union representative who believes that the “redeployment only has a stock market objective”. An opinion shared by the inter-union, as Yves Cognieux (CFDT) reminded us yesterday on the microphone.

A “message from management to the Stock Exchange”

“At the end of 2023, management announced a reduction in costs with a plan to cut around 300 jobs and it was the unions who asked management to formalise the action plan so that it would be done properly, that people would be supported, without there being any layoffs of course, he explains. Above all, that we retain the skills needed to fulfil the order book which is still very large today, at least for the next three years of satellite manufacturing. Four months later, in a message from management mainly addressed to the stock market – sent at 7am, outside the listing of Thales shares – it announced not 300 job cuts in France but 1,300 in Europe, including 1,000 in France. It was a big shock.”

“A plan that has no justification”

In an attempt to understand the motivations of the management of Thalès Alenia Space, the unions commissioned two expert reports, “the results of which are distressing,” confides Yves Cognieux: “the plan has no industrial basis. The workload plan is supported for at least the next three years and the management is determined to cut 1,000 jobs in less than fifteen months, i.e. by the end of 2025. There is no industrial justification.”