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No, first because it’s not a ‘social plan’. There will be no forced redundancies and no voluntary redundancies either. But anyone retiring will no longer be replaced and there will be some early retirements.

7,500 jobs suppressions at Renault, it’s a lot: more than 15% of the staff at the second largest manufacturer in France. But it’s less than what smaller firms in the sector are losing. "In a way, it’s the tree hiding the forest," Denis Ferrand explained. "It’s often job losses in the smaller firms that drive up numbers at the job centre," the general manager of COE-Rexecode told us.
The transport materials manufacturing sector (automobile, aeronautics, rail, maritime) lost almost 50,000 jobs between 2007 and 2012, which is more than 11% of the workforce (including part-timers). However, it’s proportionally more in the forest of SMEs that act as sub-contractors than at the leading manufacturers.
"France messed up its industrial policy. Our industries haven’t had it right for a very long time" (Noël Amenc)


Other industrial sectors have lost out even more. The French wood processing industry, for instance, has lost 20% of its workforce in the last five years. Generally, it’s very discrete, a few lay-offs here, a few there.
Between 2009 and 2011 alone, French industry lost 100,000 jobs and closed 900 factories: "France made a mess of its industrial policy," researcher, Noël Amenc, explained. "Our industries haven’t had it right for a very long time," he went on. "We missed out on the electronics revolution for the general public, and especially the new IT and communication technologies market. The industrial sector policies have often simply been a way of concentrating subsidies in the leading groups, to the detriment of the SMEs. What’s missing in France is what they’ve got in Germany: 500 medium-sized companies that are leaders in sectors where quality and innovation count more than price," Noël Amenc, professor of finance at EDHEC, concluded.

Badly positioned, and for many years now, French industry suffers from a double whammyin terms of competition, in other words, the rival offer from countries like Germany, and price competition from low-cost countries. As a result, the added value potential of our businesses is very weak, whatever the activity sector, which means they can’t redistribute what they don’t manage to create.

Source: France Inter - 17 January 2013 - by Yves Jallais