REPORTAGE
The scene is one of the highlights of the past presidential campaign: in the afternoon of Wednesday, April 26, 2017, three days after the first round, Emmanuel Macron goes to the parking lot of the Whirlpool plant in Amiens, a few hours after a surprise visit from his opponent Marine Le Pen. Two and a half years later, his meeting with the former employees of Whirlpool will be the highlight of the presidential visit to Amiens.
After having supported in 2018 the plan to take over the industrialist Nicolas Decayeux Picard who planned to rehire 277 employees, almost the entire workforce, the case turned into a fiasco: WN, the company Decayeux, has was liquidated, his plans for electric cars and refrigerated lockers never came to fruition. Today, only 44 employees were taken over by a manufacturer of furniture for businesses, while the others were dismissed. Whirlpool's former employees have acquired the certainty (documentary evidence) that Decayeux's project was sand-based and they intend to say so in front of Emmanuel Macron.
>> ON DECRYPT - Why the takeover of the former Whirlpool plant in Amiens did not work
"We were dangled some things, we could say that it was going to work, but nothing, it was worth nothing.", Plague at the microphone of Europe 1 Fabrice, a former employee of Whirpool. "We did not see anything born in this company, it was only a masquerade, and we believed it." A failure that the former employee imputes in part to the Head of State: "Another government enough naive to lend so much money to this entrepreneur (4 million euros), I do not understand," coward-t- he.
"Nicolas Decayeux is full of pockets"
"Emmanuel Macron has a big responsibility," adds Tonio, a former CGT delegate who intends to ask Emmanuel Macron why the state has allowed Nicolas Decayeux, to pay for a symbolic euro of 155,000 m² of the site in exchange for the commitment to keep 162 employees. "A president can not condone such things, today he [Nicolas Decayeux] is holed up in a hole, he does not want to talk to anyone anymore, but he has filled his pockets and has left with the taxpayer's money, "says the unionist.
"He has to give back all this money to the workers, who are now almost all unemployed," he adds. Most of the former Whirlpools are still engaged in legal proceedings to denounce their conditions of dismissal, but also to denounce a project of recovery which, according to them, was only factitious.
For his part, the president has already delivered the content of the speech he will hold to former Whirlpool employees in an interview Wednesday evening at Courrier Picard : "It was I who asked to see them because I came in the countryside at a time when they were afraid for their future, I spoke to them in a language of truth (...) And like them I believed in it ... Like them I was disappointed, "admits the president. "It's a failure, I have to listen to the employees and relaunch the file [...] on the 280 employees of Whirlpool, 163 have no job today.That does not suit me, [...] they have to be helped to find a job, "he says.