I think I remember seeing this headline last week. Something about workers in an economically-troubled aluminum factory in the north of France holding their bosses hostage in a last-ditch effort to save plant workers' jobs. I'm not sure.

The reason I'm not sure if I remember it or not is that this sort of thing happens all the time here. Locking managerial staff up at the worksite is, in fact, a recognized negotiating tactic in the topsy-turvy world of French labor relations. When searching for the original story just now, I had to sift through dozens of similar cases to find the one I was looking for: an Internet search for cadres séquestrés ("sequestered bosses") turns up at least a dozen instances of this rather uncivil practice either currently underway or recently resolved. It's far from being front-page news.

What's interesting, however, about the hostage-taking at the Constellium aluminum window factory in Ham, a small village in the Somme department, is that the bosses not only escaped, but did so with police aid.

Boy, are the union people cheesed off. If you watch the first fifteen seconds or so of this video—in which a union representative shows us the tell-tale hole cut through a fence by the police—you don't have to know any French to understand that offense has been taken.

Even more clear are the words of union delegate Benoît Merelle, recorded in an interview with France Info: after describing in great detail how the police distracted strikers during the evasion ("we, who have always been willing to negotiate here..."), he goes on to explain that the union doesn't understand why the imprisoned men would do such a thing, that the union just wanted to advance the debate and see "concrete progress," etc., all this before accusing management of not "taking care of its responsibilities." When the interviewer asks him if he expected the managers to voluntarily return to the site of their incarceration, he says yes: "They want to make us out to be criminals. We're not criminals...it's not like we're going to burn down the factory or anything."

(Good point, I guess: sacking your factory is, in French labor violence hierarchy, acceptable practice but considerably more serious that sequestering your boss.)

Analysis

Beyond the initial "what the hell are these people thinking?!" reaction that most anglophones have to this sort of story—the effect dulls with time, but it never really goes away—what I'd really like to know is which of the imprisoned managers knows somebody really important in the local police hierarchy. There's no evidence that the hostages were being mistreated (they had food, water, toilet access, etc.) and, as already mentioned, this is going on at any number of factories in France on any given day. Why free these particular managers by force? The cops' official statement says something about "returning freedom to a group of people who no longer had it," and "finding a peaceful solution to an intractable problem." OK, fine, but again: why free these managerial hostages and not others? And wasn't the labor struggle already "intractable" before the bosses were taken hostage? I smell special treatment! __ I can't believe I'm going to write this, but I think I'm going to have to side with the union on this one. As medieval as the whole practice may be—another example of what I like to call the Housecat Revolutionary that lives on in modern French society—it is an accepted practice, a tool regularly employed by workers in the severe labor battles that rage incessantly across the country. If you take a management job in a production facility in France, you know that you run the risk of spending a few days locked up in your office at some point...especially if your fellow white-collar workers decide to close half of the factory and lay off 127 of your 200 workers, which is what happened in Ham. It's what disgruntled French workers do.__

In the big picture, French workers still have it better than just about any other workers on earth, and it does grow tiresome hearing them drone on incessantly about how unfairly they're being treated: I don't know the details of the severance packages of those 127 workers, for example, but I'd bet my cat that they're somewhere between 10 and 1000 times better than would receive their American equivalents. Beyond that, there is a sophisticated social safety net in place here to help workers in precarious situations pay the bills and transition into new jobs, something that most laid-off Americans can't even fathom.

Still, I buy the argument that it is like this precisely because the unions have been so dogged—not to mention annoying and occasionally ridiculous (I'd be happy to provide references)—in their defense of workers' rights, and you can hardly blame them for continuing to do so. When there are a set of "rules" in place—even when those rules seem to sponsor the temporary suspension of some basic personal freedoms that most people take for granted—the police cannot arbitrarily break those "rules" via selective recourse to the letter of the law. If the powers that be want to eliminate hostage-taking in the workplace, by all means do so! It's called law-making! The practice is comically barbaric and ought to go, but it has to be an all-or-nothing proposition...

...and whoever writes that law better be prepared to spend a few nights in his office.