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In January 2003, the court-ordered liquidation was announced of the French subsidiary of the troubled Korean multinational, Daewoo. This followed several months of industrial action, which was often radical in nature. Company employees and the government are currently looking at the possibility of developing other types of business activity on the company's premises.
The court-ordered liquidation of Daewoo-Orion, the French subsidiary of the Korean engineering multinational Daewoo, was announced on 27 January 2003, signalling the end of many hopes. The arrival of the firm in the Lorraine region in the 1980s had at the time appeared to be a harbinger of the region’s successful reconversion to the electronics industry. Daewoo was seen as embodying the vitality of the up-and-coming 'Asian tiger' economies and, in 1998, the then Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, had even envisaged handing over the state-owned Thomson Multimedia to Daewoo for the symbolic sum of one Franc. However, the subsequent economic crisis revealed that Daewoo – Korea’s second largest conglomerate - was in a shaky position. Indeed, the company’s expansion had been built on a mountain of rather doubtful debts. The conglomerate’s head, Kim Woo-Chong, was indicted and took flight, hotly pursued across the world by his former employees, who have yet to locate him.
Part of the Daewoo conglomerate is to be bought out by the US-based General Motors, on the condition that the electronics subsidiary be scrapped. This entity owned the French subsidiary, which has gradually announced the closure of its various plants in the Lorraine region, including Villers-la-Montagne (microwave ovens), Fameck (televisions) and Mont-Saint-Martin (cathode-ray tubes). Several industrial disputes have broken out over the past few years at these three plants (FR0205101N). Recently, the 550-strong workforce at the Mont-Saint-Martin plant put together the most spectacular resistance plan. They grabbed the headlines when they threatened to release chemicals (hydrofluoric acid, lead and carbon) into the adjacent Chiers river if their redundancy demands were not met. This type of hard-line action is based on a similar threat by Cellatex employees during a now infamous dispute in 2000 (FR0008186F). However, this type of plan was not unanimously supported since the local organisation of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (Confédération française démocratique du travail, CFDT) disassociated itself from it. Nevertheless, this approach reflects the anger and indignation of employees at a decision they find hard to grasp, given the company’s healthy order book, buoyed especially by central and eastern European customers.
An underlying reason for employees adopting such a radical approach, according to the General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail, CGT), is that since Daewoo set up in Lorraine in 1987, it has been awarded significant amounts of state assistance (EUR 46 million) and has been racking up debts, including EUR 20 million owed to Société Générale and over EUR 3 million to the social security contribution collection agency, URSSAF. Therefore, the Daewoo company-level inter-union coordination body - bringing together CGT, the French Christian Workers' Confederation (Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens, CFTC) and the General Confederation of Labour-Force ouvrière (Confédération générale du travail-Force ouvrière, CGT-FO) - believes that it would be appropriate for the government to give assurances on compensating and redeploying employees.
This pressure led to an agreement with the company’s management being signed on 10 January 2003, resulting in the lifting of the employees' ultimatum. The day after the agreement was signed, the Briey Business Court put the Mont-Saint-Martin plant into receivership, with an 'observation period' extending until 6 February 2003. Three days later, CFDT organised a referendum on returning to work. Only a third of employees turned out, the majority of whom voted to return to work. On 18 January 2003, a meeting was held at the Prime Minister’s office, without the trade unions, to hammer out an emergency plan for the entire Longwy region.
Then, on the evening of 23 January, a major fire broke out at the Mont Saint-Martin plant. Although the blaze did not affect chemical-product stockpiles, it did destroy warehoused goods worth EUR 1.2 million, mainly cathode-ray tubes, which had been the employees’ 'war chest'. Emotions were further inflamed by the fact that investigators did not rule out the possibility of arson. It then came to light that the company had not been insured since 31 December 2002 and that the fire-prevention system had been deactivated on 3 January 2003. In any event, the blaze moved the fate of the plant forward to a new stage, to the extent that restarting the plant now seemed out of the question. At the behest of the official receiver, the Briey Business Court held an extraordinary hearing on 27 January and announced the official liquidation of the company. At this point, the subsidiary’s employees decided to turn to the local authorities and the government, while both the regional authorities and the département of Meurthe-et-Moselle decided to consider the possibility of purchasing the buildings at the plant in the hope of giving them a new lease of life.