The distributor Auchan is preparing to present a large-scale draft social plan to its employee representatives on Tuesday.
Nearly 2,300 jobs would be threatened in France at different levels of the company.
Union delegates from the Auchan group fear bad news on the employment front. While staff representatives from several entities of the northern group were summoned on Tuesday November 5 at 9 a.m. to CSEs in the Lille region for a “update on the company's situation and its projects”, the distributor is preparing to present a large-scale draft social plan, AFP learned this Monday from a source close to the matter, confirming information from The Letter.
According to this source, around 2,300 jobs could be threatened at different levels of the company, which employs around 54,000 employees in France. Some of the jobs would be threatened at the level of support functions within the various headquarters, another part at the store level. The management of the Auchan group, contacted by the press agency, did not wish to comment.
5th distributor in France
As a reminder, Auchan Retail had already announced in September 2020 the elimination of 1,475 positions in France, after a voluntary departure plan of more than 500 positions in January of the same year. Its holding company Elo reported in July a net loss of nearly a billion euros over the first six months of 2024. In 2023, the latter had published a net loss of 379 million euros and sales in decline of 1.7%, to 32.9 billion euros, while inflation had boosted the sales of most of its competitors.
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Auchan recently joined forces with its competitors Intermarché and Casino to pool purchases of foodstuffs then sold on the shelves of their stores, for an unusually long period of ten years. This pooling has aroused concern among trade union organizations, as has the announced objective of reducing the commercial surface area of around a third of Auchan hypermarkets. “in all its European countries”, or ultimately a “average reduction of 25% in sales areas”.
As a benchmark, in France, Auchan is the fifth distributor with a little over 9% of the market, far from the leading trio E.Leclerc (24.1%), Carrefour (21.4%) and Mousquetaires/Intermarché ( 17.4%) and behind Coopérative U (12.2%), according to the Kantar institute.
