REPORTAGE
Do not leave a single youngster by the side of the road ... and come back as close as possible to the field. These are the promises of the government of Jean Castex. The successor of Edouard Philippe, who has only the word "territory" in his mouth to trace the "new path" promised by Emmanuel Macron (he said it more than 20 times during his general policy statement at the Assembly, July 15), was chosen precisely for this. But the ambition of the executive comes up against a difficult reality: the territories are sometimes suffering. Report in Montrichard, a town of 4,000 inhabitants damaged by restructuring and savings plans.
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Here, in Berry, two restructuring plans have dealt a severe blow to the economic fabric. That of the Boiron laboratories, first, which employs 80 people on site but face the delisting of homeopathy. In the town next door, it is the aeronautical equipment supplier Daher, 350 employees, who is wiping the plaster of the crisis experienced by Airbus. In some families, like Richard's, it's double the penalty. He works for Daher, his partner in the Boiron factory. "The news, we received it a bit violently," he confesses. "We manage two. It's hard to live with, so we use our elbows."
"The coronavirus is a good excuse"
In both cases, the feeling of waste dominates. At Boiron, we do not understand the desire to close a profitable factory. At Daher, we thought we were safe thanks to a unique know-how. But the aeronautical equipment manufacturer wants to concentrate its production on the Nantes and Tarbes factories. "The feeling is disgust", blows Benoît, also an employee at Daher, who has the impression of being "let go" by his employer.
"It gives us the excuse of having to reduce its structural costs in order, in fact, to then reinvest in other production sites. The coronavirus is a good excuse to get rid of the Saint-Julien site. Of course, it is in a region which is not the most attractive from an industrial point of view, but where you can find know-how and people who put their hearts into work. " This competition between sites and territories, unbearable in his eyes, will force him, like other employees, to make a difficult choice: that of leaving or not his region for work.
"What are we doing? Cemetery managers?"
The shock wave of these closures and restructurings is felt throughout the territory. "This will cause human tragedies", fears Michel Leplard, the mayor of Saint-Julien de Chédon, where the Daher factory is located. "We're going to have to deal with the misery here now." The city council expects a terrible domino effect if employees were to leave the city. "This will affect traders. Imagine a small town like ours, if people leave, that means that we will have to close schools. What becomes of us, simple elected officials, here? Cemetery managers? "
All local elected officials therefore call on the government to act quickly. The deputy of the constituency, Stéphane Baudu, demands in particular that public aid be conditional on the maintenance of employment in the territory.