2009-04-30 Kidnap Your Boss
- when: 2009/04/30 (2009/04/30)
- author: Christopher Ketcham
- source: AlterNet
- topics: coordinated mass action France income disparity complacency
- URL: http://www.alternet.org/story/139052/enraged about corporate greed kidnap your boss/?page=entire
- title: Enraged About Corporate Greed? Kidnap Your Boss
- summary: «The French have taken to bossnapping – "sequestering" their bosses while keeping them comfortable and safe – to protest economic unfairness.»
Excerpt
In answer to their own economic crisis, the French have taken up "bossnapping."
Here's how it works: An executive of a company, perhaps the CEO, stands before a group of his employees, puts his hands together, sighs, and then, with regret as smooth as brie, explains the fact that downsizing is needed to meet the exigencies of economic crisis (read: the preservation of profits in downturn).
The employees get pissed off -- and bum-rush the boss. They trap him in his office, barricade the door, feed him espresso and baguette, and demand a fair deal.It's a sort of soft-touch storming of the Bastille.
And lo, it works. A few weeks back, this happened at the FM Logistics Co. in Woippy, France, as 125 workers charged into a meeting of five company managers and held the poor creatures hostage for a day. At least 475 workers at FM Logistics, which is owned by Hewlett-Packard Co., were facing the specter of "redundancy" as HP sought to move its printer packaging operations to the cheaper labor pool in Malaysia.
By midnight, the company had turned tail, promising "new proposals on redundancy talks," according to Reuters. The news service quoted one of the bossnappers: "We've had enough. We have been negotiating for a year, if you can call it negotiating, and we haven't managed to make ourselves heard."
This piece somehow makes no mention of Nine to Five, even in passing.
I have to wonder how well this would work in the US. Even in 2009, I'd think any such attempt would rapidly be branded "terrorism"; in 2026, all workers present would be detained without any justification.