Puzzled

[idun]

Just watching TV5 and at the Fonderie de Poitou they want to reduce the salaries by 20%. Only from the sound of it, if these workers are on the SMIC, how can they do that?

 

Can anyone explain please.

[NormanH]

A legal expert on the France 2 news tonight explained that  it illegal for management to reduce salaries unilaterally except (the get-out clause) if the survival of the business was threatened.

They tnen gave example where this had been done, but the businesses had gone bust anyway (Continental) or drastically reduced the workforce a couple of years later (Bosch).

I don't see how they could pay less than the Smic though, so perhaps the workers are above that?

[idun]

I do understand that some places have reduced salaries when it is 'a job' or closing the place down, but that has been an agreement with the workers.

 I'm sure that there are workers in Poitou who are not on the SMIC, but some were certainly saying they were, and the fonderie appears to be doing OK.

I don't get it, I still don't get it.

[Will]

I have heard of cases where salaried employees have been, in effect, sacked and re-employed as contractors on the autoentrepreneur scheme at the equivalent of well below the SMIC. It sounds highly illegal to me.

I am also married to somebody who worked for several years on the SMIC and had to cover her own car, fuel and phone expenses in a part-time job that demanded high levels of use of both of those things. OK, they were, at least in theory, tax deductible, but she effectively received a negative wage on some days.

[idun]

I remember all the times you have told of  how your wife was paid Will. What I do not understand is how estate agents charge so much and then pay their employees so little. It really is scandelous.

[Will]

To be fair, their costs, like most businesses in France, are very high. The crunch is that in comparison with England, there are relatively fewer sales concluded through agencies, so the costs have to be shared out among fewer transactions. I am sure that few agencies in France have been profitable over the last two or three years and are existing on the large sums made during the good times (when the profits were certainly not passed on to salaried employees).