With two days to go before the annual general meeting of shareholders, economic actors, local elected officials and employees are worried about the turn that the largest private employer in the Loire could take, already fearing the disappearance of the local anchorage of the Casino.
After numerous asset disposals aimed at financing its debt, the distribution group still has 208,000 employees worldwide, including between 4,000 and 5,000 employees in the Loire. Of these, about 2,000 work at the Saint-Etienne headquarters.
Geoffroy Guichard
For those and especially for the older ones who had already demonstrated against a hostile takeover attempt by Promodès in 1997, only one certainty: a new page is about to be written in the rich history of the company founded in 1898 by Geoffroy Guichard and the fruit of a simple grocery store: Geoffroy Guichard, who gave his name to the AS Saint-Etienne stadium.
This richness is illustrated by the “exceptional deposit in recent years of 200 linear meters of documents classified as historical archives by the Ministry of Culture,” Pierre-Régis Dupuy, director of the Saint-Etienne Municipal Archives, told AFP.
Like the economic players or local elected officials interviewed, the staff representatives show no preference among the different candidates offered to come to Casino’s rescue. Whether it’s Teract, controlled by the cooperative group InVivo, the Intermarché group or even the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky.
job preservation
His concern: “the preservation of employment”, underlines Estelle Silbermann, assistant to the supply management of the headquarters and general secretary CFDT Commerce and Services of the Loire and Haute-Loire. On this point, “we have no certainty despite all these actors who come from everywhere”, she adds, underlining “the feeling of belonging of the employees” to the cartel.
For his part, the mayor of Saint-Etienne Gaël Perdriau told AFP that “I wish, in all cases, that any change in capital be made for the benefit of the activity, development and dynamism of the company and its employees. “. The mayor asked to meet with Jean-Charles Naouri, president of the group.
Already headquarter staff have been reduced, services have been moved to the Paris region and assets have been sold. Another bad surprise: the abandonment at the beginning of the year of a project to operate a new warehouse of more than 60,000 square meters built in Forez (center of the Loire) for its subsidiary Cdiscount.
However, Casino represents for the Saint-Etienne region “an important group of executives”, some of whom later create their own business, underlines Jean-Pierre Berger, the city’s first deputy, who worked there for 36 years. And “Casino is Saint-Etienne, so if the brand name were to disappear (…), it would be a real loss for our territory,” he adds.
Concerns about the sustainability of jobs
Entered “the Casino”, as we said, “to unload trucks there”, the septuagenarian ended his career as human resources director there and insists on his role as a social elevator. However, the paternalism embodied by Antoine Guichard, the last leader of the dynasty until 2003, has since given way to much colder, even tense, relations between management and workers’ representatives.
Thus, Guillaume Touminet and Estelle Silbermann trust that they were “called to interviews prior to dismissal” after having alerted the Loire parliamentarians and the press in 2019 about the risks linked to the group’s very high indebtedness. The representative of the central union of the CGT, Ali Eloued, announces for his part to AFP “a rally in Paris on Wednesday during the general meeting of shareholders to express (the) concerns (of employees) about the sustainability of jobs work and the revaluation of wages”.
Source: BFM TV
