Colomiers (AFP)

"We are afraid of losing everything": on Tuesday a few dozen employees in the aeronautics sector gathered in front of the various sites of the subcontractor AAA, which intends to cut more than 45% of its workforce in France in the context of 'a PSE.

The appeal launched by the CFDT, AAA's second union, comes on the last day of negotiation of the restructuring plan announced in July in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis which affects the entire aeronautics sector.

For AAA, some 700 jobs are threatened out of 1,500 in France.

"There has been no progress, nothing has changed since July, it is a sham of negotiations", deplores Arnaud Robin on the AAA site in Colomiers, near Toulouse, the most affected.

According to this CFDT union official, the AAA company (Assistance Aéronautique et Aérospatiale) specializing in on-site services for customers such as Airbus or Safran, "will ensure that people leave with the legal minimum and derisory compensation" .

He believes that "the subcontractors have been greatly sacrificed" and today calls "at least" for the establishment of the new long-term partial activity mechanism "APLD".

"AAA, No Assured Future" read on a banner attached to the entrance gate.

In recent months, almost all of Airbus' subcontractors - AAA, Derichebourg Aeronautics, Latécoère, Liebherr Aerospace or Sogeclair - have announced social plans or measures aimed at reducing their workforce.

The subcontractors are also sacrificed "compared to the large boxes of the CAC 40", more aided by the State, according to Thierry Pingaud, aeronautical mechanic at AAA for eight years and CFDT union representative.

Without much hope for a retraining, he believes that there will be "no plan B for the dismissed employees".

"I will go to the job center, like everyone else," he said.

In Montoir-de-Bretagne (Loire-Atlantique), Quentin, 31, has been a quality controller for AAA for seven years.

Father of two young children, with a loan on his house, he also wonders how he will get by.

"Few companies are recruiting yet, we already know that we will spend a lot of time unemployed. It's quite complicated to say overnight that I must retrain," he said.

The company, which has some 3,500 employees worldwide, is based in Paris but has several intervention platforms in France, in particular in Saint-Nazaire, Bordeaux or Tarbes.

© 2020 AFP