Bouguenais (France) (AFP)

The managers of the airline company Hop! confirmed on Friday a voluntary departure plan providing for the elimination of nearly half of the company's 2,420 jobs during an extraordinary CSE described as "dialogue of the deaf" by employee representatives.

"We try to be proactive and we often have the impression that we have a wall in front, that the project is already tied up," lamented Étienne Rossignol, elected to the UNAC CSE (Union civil aviation airmen). He called the day's exchanges a "dialogue of the deaf".

Joël Rondel, secretary of the CSE and elected CGT, estimated that the meeting had "not gone very well". "We learned that our management had decided to communicate the project to employees when we had not yet finished studying the whole document," he said.

"We will go to court to see what we consider to be an obstacle to the functioning of the CSE," said Rossignol.

"The envisaged employment scheme is a Voluntary Departure Plan (PDV) -Plan to safeguard employment (PSE), in a context where the restructuring project generates the elimination of 1,007 positions (expressed in FTE, full-time equivalent) of which 404 Ground Staff positions, 286 Cabin Crew positions and 317 Flight Technical Staff positions ", indicated the management in an email to AFP, explaining that" negotiations with trade unions "were to continue" until October ".

The day before the CSE, pilots, hostesses, stewards, mechanics and other ground staff gathered at the company's headquarters in Bouguenais, near Nantes, for a demonstration that brought together nearly 300 people.

The objective of the management is "to find as many solutions as possible on a voluntary basis," the president of Hop! Pierre-Olivier Bandet, specifying: "if at the end of this process we remain in a situation of overstaffing, we do not exclude forced departures by 2023".

"We have no other solution if we want to try to keep a Hop! Company (...) which is viable", he added, recalling that it was planned to "refocus" the company on "Roissy" and Lyon ", to close the sites at Lille and Morlaix (Finistère) and to reduce the fleet to" 32 aircraft ".

"We have not yet finished studying all this, so we have to redo a CSE on August 12," said CSE secretary Joël Rondel on Friday.

Struck by the Covid-19 crisis, the Air France group intends to cut more than 7,500 jobs by the end of 2022, including around 6,500 within the French company and more than 1,000 within Hop !, its regional subsidiary.

© 2020 AFP