Paris (AFP)

The Amaury group, owner of L'Equipe in the grip of social tensions, has just announced the appointments of Aurore Amaury and Jean-Etienne Amaury to the general management, making them the third generation to take over the reins of the family group .

Aurore Amaury is also president of the L'Équipe group and Amaury Média, the advertising agency, while Jean-Etienne Amaury is president of ASO, the organizer of the Tour de France. Marie-Odile Amaury will continue to chair, the statement said.

These appointments come as the unions of L'Equipe sounded the alarm this weekend, deploring that management wants to "impose a significant drop in wages, the 13th month and days of RTT in exchange for a maintenance employment until December 31, 2024 ".

"To force your representatives to accept these brutal measures, it requires an agreement to be concluded as a matter of urgency by the end of June, and threatens in scandalous blackmail: either that or the abolition of a hundred jobs at the start of the school year ", denounced in a press release the intersyndicale SNJ, SNJ-CGT, UFICT-CGT, SGLCE-CGT.

Struck by the cessation of sports competitions with the coronavirus crisis, the newspaper resorted to short-time working, had to reduce its pagination and its price. Its circulation plunged (-14.64%, to 199,407 copies in March, according to the ACPM / OJD).

The intersyndicale points however to the fact that the group "has not submitted any request for a loan guaranteed by the State (PGE)" and that "the first assessments of the impact of the health crisis provided by the management do not seem to have jeopardize the bustling cash flow of the Amaury group, far from it. "

"In other words, while the government has recommended to companies not to take advantage of the health crisis to trigger painful restructuring, management intends to take advantage of a cyclical crisis to impose an unprecedented attack on its employees", denounce the unions.

The group publishes the newspaper L'Equipe, L'Equipe Magazine, Vélo Magazine, France Football, Sport & Style but also the television channel L'Equipe, and employs around 700 people.

Employees had gone on strike in early 2018 to protest the abolition of 25 positions.

"Once again, for lack of a strategic and editorial project for a flagship of the sports press, the only solution found by management is to use employees as an adjustment variable, in a short-term vision of cost reduction" , deplores the intersyndicale.

© 2020 AFP