The announcement of the closure of the factory was greeted “with great silence”. Regardless of the words chosen by the director of the Michelin factory in Vannes (Morbihan), the reaction of the 299 employees at this site of the French tire giant would undoubtedly have been the same. Stunned, the sacrificed employees initially did not know what to say in the face of this announcement that they feared. “Everyone blames it,” testified Eric Boisgard, employee since 2004 and former CGT union delegate. In Cholet, where the factory employs nearly a thousand people, the atmosphere was more electric. “They put the 900 employees in a room like cows to the slaughterhouse and announced that it was over,” described Morgane Royer, an employee for “almost ten years” at Michelin and South union representative.
In Morbihan as in Maine-et-Loire, the closure of factories and the 1,200 jobs sacrificed are not happening. In Cholet, the strike was voted on Tuesday and tires were burned in front of the Bibendum site. Here, we manufacture tires for light trucks. A sector which has collapsed according to the automotive supplier. “It is the collapse of activity that has caused this situation, and I want to tell all these employees that we will not leave anyone behind,” promised Michelin CEO Florent Menegaux. His company is going through a difficult year with the slowdown in the new vehicle market and Asian competition.
If the decision was “inevitable” according to management, it is clearly not digested by the employees, who are expected to lose their jobs before 2026. “Today, we are closing two sites and putting more than 1,200 employees out of work so that Michelin makes more profits and gives more dividends to its shareholders,” protested CGT central union delegate Romain Baciak. Michelin had already significantly reduced its footprint in France, its first country. With Poitiers, Toul, Joué-lès-Tours and La Roche-sur-Yon, it will have closed six factories in twenty years.
Where did the public money go?
Beyond just the employees concerned, it was also the politicians who reacted to these announcements and in particular Michel Barnier. In the National Assembly, the Prime Minister insisted on “knowing what we did in these groups with the public money we gave them”, referring to Michelin and Auchan. Michelin indicated that it received 42 million euros in research tax credit (CIR) in 2023, which allowed it to finance competitive researchers and consolidate its global R&D center in France.
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The president of the Brittany region Loïg Chesnais-Girard denounced a “brutal” decision. “I hope that the Michelin group assumes all its responsibilities,” he wrote. Morbihan MP Anne Le Henanff assured that “until the last minute we had hope that we could operate the factory” in Vannes. Hope is now extinguished. But not anger.
