Paris (AFP)

Employees of two Carrefour in the Paris region walked out on Saturday to protest against the switch to lease-management of their store, whose management will be outsourced and entrusted to a manager against payment of a fee to the group, we have learned from union sources.

With the transition to lease management, the shortfall represents between one and a half and two and a half months of annual compensation for employees, according to various union estimates.

No longer being integrated into the group means the end of collective profit-sharing and participation, but also a change of mutual, assures AFP Ghania, CGT union representative and part-time cashier paid 700 euros per month at Market in the rue de Tolbiac in Paris, where she has worked for "22 years". A walkout takes place there on Saturday.

Carrefour, for its part, assures AFP that this transformation is taking place "within the framework of exemplary social support".

"All contracts are taken over by the manager and the employees benefit from the maintenance of their gross annual remuneration over the last twelve months", with the effective exception of profit-sharing and profit-sharing, according to the brand.

Employees at the end of their career who so wish can benefit from an early departure.

Another walkout took place in Etiolles, in Essonne.

As in Tolbiac, about twenty employees gathered there to distribute leaflets and have a support petition signed, without blocking access to commerce, according to the CGT.

The unions fear that the move to lease management will serve to "circumvent the right of redundancy".

According to them, Carrefour has indeed given no guarantee on the financing of a possible social plan in the stores concerned.

"We made the choice not to close or sell any store", argues the management of the group, "and lease management allows stores in decline but with the potential to start again on growth".

In the Tolbiac Market, the workforce has already grown in a few months from 47 employees to 31, with the departure of all fixed-term contracts, employees assure us.

“When you get to 55 or 56, you start to fear that you will be asked to leave,” one of them said.

Employees highlight Carrefour's excellent results in 2020, with a 7.8% increase in sales in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2020, 64 stores went into rental management.

This year, 47 must in turn adopt this statute.

© 2021 AFP