Kidnapped: Could it happen here?

This is the extraordinary story of a series of kidnappings of company bosses in France. Can industrial relations become so poisonous that workers feel justified in taking their boss hostage?

Serge Foucher, the head of Sony in France, was taken hostage on March 12th by factory workers seeking better severance terms. They shut him in a meeting room and barricaded the plant with huge tree trunks. In January 2008 the British boss of an ice-cream factory was held hostage overnight after announcing plans to fire over half of its workers. In February 2008 the head of a car-parts factory was seized after workers realised that he was planning to move the operation to Slovakia. Ten days later, workers at a tyre factory owned by Michelin locked in two senior executives in protest at plans to shut the plant. Business leaders in France are horrified. No one has been seriously hurt in any of these episodes. And the tactic seems to work: in many cases, the workers got their demands met, or came close in doing so.

Could this habit spread? The Economist quotes David Partner, a kidnap and ransom expert at Miller Insurance, an insurance broker affiliated with Lloyd’s of London. “Because of the state of the world economy, it would not surprise me if bosses were held hostage by workers more frequently.”

Risks and rewards!

Sit-ins are already becoming more common. In December workers occupied a window factory in Chicago for five days to secure severance pay that they were owed. In February workers from Waterford Wedgwood in Ireland marched on the offices of Deloitte, an accountancy firm, and refused to leave until they got a meeting with the company’s receiver. In America, workers are likely to become more militant, because of a sense of injustice over pay. “I could easily see executive hostage-taking happening here within a few months,” said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Massachusetts.