The agreement signed on 31 May between Solvay and the union bodies, CFDT and CFE-CGC (the CGT did not sign) contains seventy pages but can be distilled into two major themes. Firstly, more efficient employee representation that is more in line with how the new group is configured, and secondly, a desire to encourage employees take up representative roles. “The fact that the existing relevant agreements terminated in February was the prerequisite for us going back to the drawing board,” indicated Jean-Christophe Sciberras, HR head France, to Planet Labor.
One central structure. In its press statement the company underlines that “the agreement intends that from June 2016 all representative bodies will exercise their duties and roles in a unified framework: an Economic and Social Unit (ESU) that will cover all of Solvay’s French twenty entities, comprising fourteen industrial sites, the Research and Innovation centers, and well as services centers, which employ 6,000 workers.”