Jobs in jeopardy at French tannery
03/10/2012
Employees of the Montbrun tannery in the small town of Pontacq travelled to the seat of local government in Pau on October 2 to complain about the cuts. Montbrun is a specialist supplier of leather covers for car steering-wheels, now in the hands of Bosnian automotive leather group Prevent.
Speaking to local media at the protest in Pau, one workers’ representative said that the company had been bringing in revenues of around EUR 800,000 per month in 2011, but that this had now fallen to EUR 200,000. The figure has fallen because Prevent has taken some of the production from Pontacq to its home territory, she said. She drew a contrast between the situation Montbrun was in in the 1990s, when it produced around 8,000 steering-wheel covers per day for a client list that included Renault, Volvo, PSA, Saab and Opel.
These days, all of the tannery’s output goes to Swedish firm Autoliv, a tier-one supplier of steering-wheels for automotive brands. Autoliv has a factory in Poitiers.
The workers’ spokesperson said Montbrun had been imposing shorter hours on its workforce since July and said that if things didn’t change in the next two weeks she feared for the future of the tannery.
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