The automotive group PSA backed down on Saturday under pressure from the government over its decision to bring several hundred Polish workers to France to reinforce the teams at its factory in Hordain, in the North, to the detriment of French temporary workers .
“I understand the emotion it may have aroused (…). But it is a complex subject, because it is a subject of European solidarity”, said Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the president of the Mouvement des entreprises from France (Medef) interviewed on the program Le Grand Jury.
“These employees are underemployed in Poland and the risk is that there will be a redundancy plan in Poland,” he explained. “If everyone withdraws into their national selfishness, we will not get there,” he said, stressing that the PSA project planned to pay Polish workers at French wages, therefore without social dumping.
“We would be in France, there would be a factory inactive in Montbéliard and a factory inactive in Hordain, we would move people for three months, that would not be a problem. There, it is because there has borders between the two … “, he said. “Having European solidarity, (…) the question must arise because we are trying to make a Europe which is both united and also harmonized on the fiscal and social levels”, he added.
Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux also argued in favor of a European minimum wage. “The idea of the European minimum wage, which would be a minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage, is an idea that must be considered,” said the president of the employers’ organization.