the CFDT sues the group and denounces a “social underprivileged”

Over the last few years, 344 stores have been leased or entrusted to franchisees, with, according to the CFDT, significant social consequences for the 27,000 employees concerned. Carrefour disputes this and asserts that this solution allows it to avoid the closure of its stores.

“Carrefour wishes you a happy new year and above all good luck”quips the CFDT, for which the alert level has been reached. The union is calling for an end to rental management or the transition to franchising of Carrefour hypermarkets and supermarkets. The CFDT will take the mass distribution giant to court after the announcement on Friday January 10 of the group’s management to cede the management of 39 new stores, including 15 hypermarkets, or 344 in total over the past seven years, according to the union calculations.

For the CFDT, rental management or franchising clearly represent a model of “lower social bidder”. Because even if the Labor Code provides that the employees concerned retain for 15 months all the benefits they enjoyed until then, things tend to deteriorate after this period. “The agreements that have been negotiated for years at Carrefour represent 4,000 pages of company collective agreements, so these agreements are ultimately denounced when switching to rental managementsays Sylvain Macé, national secretary at the CFDT federation of Services, responsible for the food trade. In addition, what we see is that there is no longer any sharing of value, which represents on average for an employee between two and two and a half months less salary.”

These accusations are contested by Carrefour management. Not only, according to the company, do employees keep all of their remuneration, including the 13th month, but the group also guarantees them in the event of a transfer the maintenance of mutual and welfare plans, meal vouchers and even the 10% discount on their purchases at Carrefour. On the other hand, there is no longer any payment of participation bonus or profit-sharing by the group. A participation bonus which had reached 1,162 euros gross on average per employee in 2024, according to the CFDT.

To justify handing over the management of so many stores to managers or franchisees since 2017, the main argument put forward by Carrefour is that the stores in question are in difficulty, with annual deficits of several million euros. This avoids outright closures, management points out. A financial argument, however, denounced by the CFDT, while the Carrefour group has at the same time bought in 2024 for around one billion euros the 60 Cora hypermarkets and 115 Match supermarkets owned in France by the Belgian group Louis Delhaize.

Carrefour actually seems to be moving closer to the models of several other large retail giants, including Leclerc and Intermarché, that is to say groups of independents and not so-called integrated groups. Today they are on the rise with increasing market shares which now exceed 50%. But this goes hand in hand with lower average staff numbers, working conditions and remuneration, deplore the unions.